And even the life of poor Philip Lyttelton Gell was made marginally more easy. He was dismissed after he had fallen ill and while he was convalescing in the south of France—he was simply told not to come back to work. A friend (one of a precious few, by all accounts) tried to cheer him up by suggesting that there was no fate so enviable `as to be unjustly ªsackedº in a civilized country'; and Gell himself expressed some relief that he was no longer bound up with all the rows that had attended his time at the Press. When he had joined, he recalled, the Press was
in a medieval muddle, with no telephones, no speaking tubes, no typewriters … Do you recall the monotony of the old Press type, and the traditional Clarendon Press page, and all the efforts you made to equip the Press with the variety of Type which has lifted up its Typography up to its present level? … that `dead-lift' required to modernize the Press would not have to be faced twice … It took a good deal out of all concerned.
Gell left behind him a legacy of distemper and dismay such that all connected with the Press sought actively to erase him from Oxford's collective memory. When he died in 1926 he was not even given the dignity of an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography—he was not even short-listed, so venomous was the feeling towards him by almost all of those he touched. All that Gell could do from the Derbyshire stately home to which he retired was to point to the `enormous stride' which separated the condition of the Press when he left it from its state when he had joined it back in 1883—the year when Benjamin Jowett, as he said of his sponsor, `first stirred the fire and set us all running'.
He could point to that, and if he chose, he could point to the Dictionary, a work that was now on the very brink of being accepted as a lustrous achievement and as a permanent monument to scholarship—or, in words that were written just as Gell was shamefacedly making his exit, was likely to be revered for being `not the least of the glories of the University of Oxford'. At this remove, the hapless Philip Lyttelton Gell seems deserving of at least some small credit, a muted acknowledgement that his time at Oxford was not entirely misspent.
Notes
[2] Murray's already-mentioned childhood friendship with Alexander Graham Bell—Bell had been best man at Murray's wedding to Ada—continued to flourish when Murray lived in Oxford, with the consequence that after Bell had invented the first working telephone he presented it to Murray in gratitude for teaching him about acoustics and electricity back in their younger Edinburgh days. Murray found the wood-and-bakelite arrangement somewhat uninspiring, and consigned it to an attic. In the 1980s the present occupant of 78 Banbury Road found himself at the AT&T Museum in New Jersey, where the curator was bemoaning the fact that Telephone Number One had never been found. A search of the Oxford attic turned up nothing; but the elderly gentleman who had bought the house from Murray's widow was found, and reported that during the Second World War soldiers had been billeted at the house and, during one exceptionally frigid winter, had used all available bits of rubbish they could find in the attic as firewood. If this story is to be believed, the world's first telephone appears to have gone up in smoke, to keep a party of ice-cold infantrymen from freezing. Back
[3] Benjamin Jowett and Balliol College might have been close to Murray—the University, however, was not and never really would be. Oxford in Victorian times was a highly exclusive body, upper-class, rigorously classical in its intellectual bent, and unashamedly Church of England. James Murray was, on the other hand, the son of a provincial draper, had interests in European philology, and was an unabashed Congregationalist. He also had the terrier-like Frederick Furnivall constantly interfering on his behalf—anonymous letters to the local press his speciality—and annoying the grandees of the University by doing so. For all of these reasons, and despite his august position as editor of the greatest of all English-language dictionaries, he was never offered a University position, not even in an honorary capacity. He kept a dignified silence about having to endure the cold shoulder, other than to remark in passing, two years before his death, that he was `to a great extent only a sojourner' in Oxford, never truly a part of the fabric of the place.Back
7
The Hermit and the Murderer—and Hereward Thimbleby Price
Thos. Austin, 165,000 quotations; Wm. Douglas, London, 136,000; Dr. H. R. Helwich, Vienna, 50,000; Dr. T. N. Brushfield, Salterton, 50,000; T. Henderson, MA, Bedford, 40,000; the Rev. J. Pierson, Ionia, Michigan, USA, 46,000; R. J. Whitwell, Kendal, 36,000; Dr. F. J. Furnivall, London, about 30,000; C. Gray, Wimbledon, 29,000; H. J. R. Murray, Oxford, 27,000; Miss J. Humphreys, Cricklewood, 18,700; the Rev. W. Lees, MA, Sidlow, Reigate, 18,500; the Rev. B. Talbot, Columbus, Ohio, USA, 16,600; the late S. D. Major, Bath, 16,000; Miss E. Thompson and Miss E. P. Thompson, Wavertree, Liverpool, 15,000; G. H. White, Torquay, 13,000; Dr. R. C. A. Prior, London, 11,700; Miss E. F. Burton, Carlisle, 11,400; G. Apperson, Wimbledon, 11,000; Miss A. Foxall, Edgbaston, Birmingham, 11,000.
H. H. Gibbs, MA, London; Miss J. E. A. and Miss E. Brown, Cirencester; Dr. W. C. Minor, Crowthorne, Berkshire; the Rev. Kirby Trimmer, Norwich; the Rev. W. B. R. Wilson, Dollar.
(Appendix to the Preface to Volume I, listing a small fraction of the volunteer readers, James Murray, The Scriptorium, Oxford, 1888)
Just who were these people? This question invariably forms whenever a curious and distracted reader takes a good, close look at the details of the great completed Dictionary. It is more or less impossible not to wonder—impossible not to be curious whenever one takes from the shelves any one of the 47 paperbound parts; or whenever one finds, buried in the basement of one of the world's better libraries, some of the 128 slender paperbacked sections, with their inadvertently wonderful titles—Sweep to Szmikite, Onomastical to Outing, Invalid to Jew, or Gaincope to Germanizing—by which the Dictionary was originally offered to the world.
Readers have to wonder because, on the opening pages of Volume I of the completed work, and at the front of every part and of almost every single section of the work in progress, there is an elegant and utterly absorbing introductory essay, explaining how this volume or this part or this section was actually put together. The essays are essential reading: they tell of fascinations— like how the word set was so much more difficult than is, how unexpectedly tricky marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated, or that C was so much more complex than D, and how the compilation of Jturned into a lexicographic bloodbath and Q was (though the editors would never say such a thing) really an absolute dog.
But the puzzled wonderment begins for a quite different reason: for in each of these essays, at a point usually towards their end and following the description of the cat-herding trials that were involved in gathering in all the words, there is a collection, usually in small print or in a different fount, of scores and scores of names.
These are the collected names of everyone who was involved in the project and, more importantly, whose involvement was worthy of the editors' gratitude. Without regard to class or standing, qualification or creed, and certainly disregarding gender (which in Victorian times was unusual, to say the least) here are listed the names of, on the one hand, the paid helpers, the sorters of slips, and the expert advisers, and on the other the unpaid readers, the checkers of proofs, the suppliers of quotations, the bringers of sustenance, and the boosters of morale—the men and women without whom, quite literally, the immense project could not have been begun, let alone ever finished.