To zyxst and back again

What the Great Eastern was to Brunel, the New English Dictionary was to James Murray (1837–1915) — an unequalled task that was his life, and eventually his death. What was later known as the Oxford English Dictionary should be a ‘sweep-net over the whole surface of English literature’, said Richard Chenevix Trench, one of its instigators in the 1850s, to be prepared ‘by reading all books’.

This stupendous aim would have guaranteed its failure had not that hard piece of Roxburghshire granite James Murray set up in his iron Scriptorium at 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, working, working, working, 90 hours a week for years, sifting with a mind full of languages through millions of quotations written on slips of paper in pen and ink by volunteers. Some came to him in bad condition: a sack full of words beginning in ‘S’ had a nest of live mice in it, and slips for words beginning ‘Pa’ had been used for rubbing down horses in Ireland.

Yet the biggest struggle was not with paper but with large human characters mobbing him, as zanies did the Duchess of Malfi. On one side was Frederick Furnivall, whose chief passions apart from words were boating and housemaids. Furnivall had a flawed knowledge of philology but unbounded energy which made him meddle tactlessly and endlessly. This mattered because for more than 50 years he was secretary of the Philological Society, which in theory sponsored the Dictionary.

On Murray’s other side were the delegates of the Oxford University Press, the publishers. They exhibited in its most florid form the defects of management by committee, forever scolding Murray for being too slow or too voluminous, while cheese-paring in a way that robbed him of efficiency.