Johnson, for example, was a great collector of printed ephemera: there is a Johnson Room in the Bodleian Library today which houses a million items rescued from the waste-paper baskets of the last 300 years. The DNB hints at the scale: early seventeenthcentury book proposals and prospectuses, title pages, specimen pages, material illustrating the history of printing, including copyright, spelling, and design, specialized collections of banknotes, postage stamps, political pamphlets, Christmas cards, valentines, and cigarette cards. There are tourist brochures from Albania to Zanzibar, directions for making cocoa, advertisements for corselettes—in short, `the richest collection of jobbing printing in existence'.
John Johnson calculated the costs and, come April 1928, he advertised the price—once the Delegates and Publisher Milford had agreed upon it. The work, emblazoned with the names of the editors—Sir James A. H. Murray, Henry Bradley, W. A. Craigie, C. T. Onions—was now available, according to a special flyer, at the price of `50 guineas for 10 volumes bound as 12 [for as 10 two would have been too bulky] in half-morocco; 50 guineas for 20 half-volumes in quarter persian; and 55 guineas for 20 halfvolumes in half-morocco'. 9 Then follows the odd phrase `OF ALL BOOKSELLERS'—which suggests a prepositional error, though heaven forfend that John deMonins Johnson could ever perpetrate such a thing. 10 The phrase appears in much later flyers too, suggesting unusual style rather than careless mistake.
Praise for the book was, in the months after first publication, well-nigh universal, perhaps taking itself to a point that, since this story is not supposed to be overtly hagiographical, becomes almost tedious to relate. To my mind two quotations sum up, deftly and rather more lightly than most, the delight in the admixture of excellence and the pride that dominated the weeks and months in the aftermath of the appearance of the completed work.
The first, by now well known, came from the acerbic Baltimore wit and sometime lexicographer H. L. Mencken. He wrote in his newspaper column that `his spies had told him' that the appearance of the finished Dictionary would be celebrated in Oxford with `military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling contests between the different Colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts'.
The second harks back to the man who started it all, Richard ChenevixTrench, who, it will be remembered, made his caustic speech of November 1857 attacking the deficiencies of the English dictionaries of the day. What had now been created, all its makers hoped, was a monument that would turn out to be quite wanting in deficiencies of any kind. To illustrate the point, Craigie—newly made Sir William Craigie at the Derby Day dinner, and given an Honorary LL D by Oxford the day before—quoted an obviously deficient but nonetheless memorable definition that he winkled out of Falconer's not widely known Dictionary of Marine.
It was the definition of the simple word retreat. As Falconer has it: `Retreat is the order in which a French fleet retires before an enemy. As it is not properly a term of the British marine, any fuller account would be out of place.'
Incorrect, and facetious. Very Johnsonian, one might say. Moderately witty of course, if in an unspeakably chauvinistic and these days politically incorrect way. But its existence, however shocking to the lexicographic purist, made a point. It was important for everyone to know, declaimed Professor Sir William Craigie, LL D, D.Litt, the fifth editor: no such definition—in fact nothing of the kind—would ever be allowed to occur, except inadvertently, within the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary.
No sir! In this dictionary there would be no oats to feed those Scottish peasants. No definition would list unreadable complications involving decussated and reticulated networks. No guesses would be made of gymnastically unattainable positions for the mating of elephants. And there would be no sly cross-Channel sniping suggesting that only Frenchmen knew properly how to retreat. The work that he had made, the magisterial creation of all his distinguished forefathers that he was now so proud to offer, was, as near as could be made, the perfect dictionary, and so it would ever remain.
[5] The Delegates studied the figures very closely, a legacy of Gell's era. In October 1903 they noted with a mixture of approval and asperity that Murray had composed 18 2/3 pages, Bradley 7 2/3 and Craigie 8 2/3. One reason for Bradley's apparent tardiness was his extraordinary prolixity: while not wishing to revisit the Webster ratio crisis, it is noteworthy that while Craigie was keeping his well down, to 4.7: 1, Bradley was preparing material that was more than 18 times as large as Webster. Murray had not managed to keep below his promised 8. In October 1903 his number was 10.7:1. Back
[10] There are, however, oddities in the Dictionary itself, which look like errors. James Murray favoured such spelling as ax, Shakspere, tire (of motor cars), and rime— eccentricities abound, both in the book and in its advertisements. But in the book the alternative spellings are included as well, which is not true of the ad. There are discovered errors, too: the word syllabus, for example, is a ghost-word, coming from a mistransliteration by Cicero, who wrote the word instead of what he wanted, sittybas (which means a label), by mistake. The word syllabus should by rights not be in the English language at all.Back
Epilogue:
And Always Beginning Again
A work of such magnificent proportions may perhaps not find access to many private houses except those of the rich; but it should be the most coveted possession of all public libraries in the United Kingdom, in the Colonies, and at least at the headquarters of every District in India and at her principal Colleges.
(Asiatic Quarterly Review, 1898)
But of course, it wasn't really finished. It never could be, it never would be, and it never will be. One of the infuriating marvels of the slippery fluidity of the English language is that for all of its 1,500 years of history it has been changing, enlarging, evolving: it would continue to do so long after the 1928 publication date, even as Herbert Coleridge had anticipated it would, when he undertook the beginnings of the task back in 1860.
What was essentially finished, though, was the new Dictionary's structure. In creating it, James Murray had made something that was so good in all its essentials that, no matter how many editions and evolutions the OED would subsequently undergo, Murray's basic plan remained intact. Sir William Craigie, when he came to be Senior Editor on the death of Henry Bradley, remarked, generously, that Murray's form and methods and design `proved to be adequate to the end, standing the test of fifty years without requiring any essential modification'.
The Murray methods would still be firmly entrenched when the first Supplement emerged, five years later, in 1933. There was no doubt but that a Supplement would be made. Those who had bought the complete edition in 1928 were told of it, and advised it would be supplied to them gratis, so long as they had already paid in full. Someone in the Press—possibly it was Craigie, though that is doubtful, since the editors themselves tended to adopt in public a rather modest pose—made a suitably Grandisonian announcement:
The superiority of the Dictionary to all other English Dictionaries, in accuracy and completeness, is everywhere admitted. The Oxford Dictionary is the supreme authority, and without a rival. I t is perhaps less generally appreciated that what makes the Dictionary unique is its historical method; it is a Dictionary not of our English, but of all English; the English of Chaucer, of the Bible, of Shakespeare is unfolded in it with the same wealth of illustration as is devoted to the most modern authors. When considered in this light, the fact that the first part of the Dictionary was published in 1884 is seen to be relatively unimportant; 44 years is a small period in the life of a language. I t is, however, obviously desirable that aeroplane and appendicitis should receive due recognition. A supplement is accordingly in preparation, the main object of which will be to include words which were born too late for inclusion. Copies of the Supplement will be offered free to all holders of the complete Dictionary. 1