That the sad result will be
That you're taking to dabble and dawdle and doze,
To dolour and dumps, and—worse than those—
To danger and drink,
And—shocking to think—
To words that begin with D-.
D duly came and went, successfully—and the letter E, on which Bradley had been cutting his teeth, was incorporated into the same volume, so that both men shared the honours of the title page. When they counted, there were found to be 13,478 main words beginning with D, but only 9,249 that started with E. (S is by far the largest letter of the alphabet, by which it is meant that words beginning with S are the most numerous in the lexicon, occupying two full volumes of the Dictionary. C is the second largest letter, with almost as many words as are begun by A and Bcombined. The smallest letter sections are—in order—X, Z, Y, Q, K, J, N, U, and V. E is a moderate letter, sitting at around the middle of the league table.)
Murray was never happy with the way the Dictionary initially covered E. It is perhaps not that he regarded himself as in anything but good-humoured competition with Henry Bradley—he was almost equally unhappy with the way that he himself had managed A. 8 He wrote to Walter Skeat, his trusted confidant, that E was so poor because
the Delegates were in such a hurry to get Mr. Bradley on, to show that he could (as they thought) work twice as fast as I, that he had neither the practice, the knowledge of the weakness of the Philological Society slips, nor the resources of the Scriptorium to help him … I have always said that the letter ought to be done again. A is not quite so unsatisfactory because I had been working provisionally for a year when I began to print it, and had learned how much had to be done to supplement the slips … It was a pity to start Bradley so.
If there was a certain waspishness about the last remark, it rarely showed itself more outwardly than this. Murray and Bradley invariably got on well. It was Murray and Gell who were so frequently at daggers drawn.
And the daggers continued to be flashed from time to time, as slowly, imperceptibly slowly, the Dictionary got onto its feet. New schemes were implemented—bonuses to encourage the staff, smaller-sized fascicles published more often to keep the subscribers and booksellers on side, and a firm agreement on how much more comprehensive the new Dictionary was going to be than was Webster, which up to this point was regarded, if somewhat disdainfully by the Oxford men, as the high-water mark of the lexicographers' art.
The row over the `Webster ratio' consumed much time and energy during the 1890s. Everyone agreed that the new Dictionary (with the words Oxford English Dictionary now appearing, as they did first on the loose paper cover of a fascicle in 1894, and then on the title page of all volumes after Volume III) was superior in all ways to Webster—not least in the number of quotations offered and the number of senses and meanings that were discerned from them. But more comprehensive meant much bigger—and the question that bothered Gell and his commercially minded colleagues was essentially: how much bigger?
There was little anyone could do about the additional number of headwords that Murray and Bradley were determined to include: between A and Age, for example, Murray identified almost twice as many headwords as were to be found in Webster. There was simply no possibility that a dictionary like the OED could possibly economize by dropping words altogether—and to be fair, not even the most philistine critic of the OED ever thought this should happen.
But economy could be won by limiting the number of quotations, by simplifying the explanations of etymology, and by curbing prolixity in definitions. Murray tried this, and while he was working on A, managed to keep a ratio of six of his pages to one of Webster's, which most thought manageable. But gradually, as his enthusiasm for the project increased, so did his page ratio. By the letter Bhe was running at seven to one; by C, eight to one; and a number of delegates began to accuse him and Bradley— particularly Bradley, who seemed to be especially undisciplined in this regard—of `systematically neglecting' the limits which had been informally imposed on him, of keeping to about six to one, and certainly no more than seven. The Delegates who warned the editors of their profligacy did, however, agree to an increase in the overall size of the OED: it could, they said, be published at 12,900 pages total, which was more than half as many pages again as had been agreed back in 1884.
Throughout all these rows and dramas, James Murray kept threatening his resignation; Oxford kept implying that it would suspend publication; Bradley was told he would be fired unless he contained himself; whole years went by without volumes appearing; and the project—though it had begun to sputter into life in the early 1890s—seemed mired once again, or to be running out of fuel, or on fumes, or into brick walls. The metaphors for the imagined fate of the OED in those years are many and various.
But, as before, it never did die. It kept itself alive, just—and then two things happened in quick succession. First, the news of the rows and the threats spilled out into the daily papers; second, in a perhaps not unconnected development, Philip Lyttelton Gell was summarily dismissed, and everything, suddenly, became a very great deal better.
The press—the Saturday Review, specifically, was most detailed in its commentary—got hold of the story in April 1896. Oxford, the papers said, was planning to suspend publication of the Dictionary, because of money troubles, because of the indisciplined fractiousness of its senior editors, because of the unexpectedly vast complexity of the language that the immense book was seeking to catalogue and to fix.
The Review immediately professed its stunned astonishment: to close down the OED would be nothing less than `a national calamity … an indelible disgrace to the University'. The Press was vilified, accused of philistinism and greed. Murray, by contrast, was transformed overnight into a noble and lonely hero, a man battered by the parsimony of a ragged army of crabbed, shortsighted, and money-obsessed zealots. And in consequence letters poured in to the Scriptorium—a building from which, on Gell's specific orders, members of the public had lately been excluded— all of them supporting Murray and Bradley in what was perceived to be their indomitably honourable quest.
Such was the outburst of public feeling that Gell had to reverse his decisions. All of them were suddenly remade, whether they were the most trivial of his instructions—passers-by were from henceforward most welcome once again to drop in to see how Murray was working, though `Hush, please!' if the old man had a furrowed brow—to the most serious—the Webster ratio could from henceforward be more or less what the editors decided it should be. Seven to one, eight and three-quarters to one—whatever it took was, all of a sudden, just fine. It was up to the editors to run their Dictionary; Oxford just had to accept that in the short term, it probably never would make money. Thus far it had cost £50,000; and thus far it had sold enough to bring in £15,000. It would take more than a change in the Webster ratio and a ramping-up of the production schedule to close a gap such as this.
No—it was the long term that counted, and the reputation of the University. Once that philosophical hurdle was cleared, once this extraordinary sea change was effected, a new sense of purpose, direction, and energy could and did begin to infuse the project.
And as symbol of the new ideals, Gell was indeed dismissed. The Dictionary parts that appeared in his final year of employment—Distrustfully-Doom, Doom-Dziggetai 9 —sounded peculiarly ominous. The fascicles were made in smaller parts now, appearing more frequently, not necessarily in alphabetical order, but in the order of their completion. There was an ordered disorder to the making of the Dictionary in these newly exuberant days, and slowly, everyone began to allow a sense of sunny optimism to prevail, a sense much missed for far too long.