There were, however, two conditions applied to the seeming generosity of the Press. First of all, Murray had to agree that, were he to find himself falling short of producing 704 pages a year—two fully finished fascicles of 352 pages each—he would be obliged to hire a second senior editor, someone who would, in the pecking order, enjoy essentially the same standing and authority as himself. Murray agreed—hoping, if matters did demand it, that his new-found friend Henry Bradley would become available. And secondly, said Oxford—if the new funds were to be forthcoming, then James Murray would have to give up his schoolteaching in Mill Hill, and he would have to move himself and the entire dictionary operation to the city of Oxford, where logic and expediency had long suggested it should be shifted. The New English Dictionary, and all of its staff, together with its shelves of reference books, its hierarchy of desks and tables, its suites of pigeon-holes, and, most important, its ever-growing tonnage of quotation slips, should be removed in short order to a new location 56 miles to the west, to Oxford.
James Murray had been expecting this requirement for some time, and he was barely troubled by it. His response—or, at least, a response that coincided with the request—came with his inclusion of a quotation in the next part of the Dictionary that was as celebratory as it was entirely invented.
He was working on the word arrival, in the sense of `one that arrives or has arrived'. His new (and ninth) daughter, Rosfrith Ada Nina Ruthven Murray, happened to be born on 5 February 1884, just a week after the birth of Part I, and as he was dealing with arrival, he inserted into the proofs of the Dictionary the sentence the new arrival is a little daughter. He had done this once before, when Elsie Mayflower was born in May 1882, when he was working on A: he inserted into the list of illustrative quotations as fine a child as you will see.
In time Elsie Mayflower began to work on the Dictionary (and when she was eighteen, so did Rosfrith Ada Nina—despite her left-handedness, which made for some early difficulties). Elsie worked for her father for most of the rest of his life. The quotation announcing her birth survives in the OED to this day.
6
So Heavily Goes the Chariot
Only those who have made the experiment know the bewilderment with which the editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above … among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on the floor where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development. Sometimes the quest seems hopeless; recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days; something had to be done with it; something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type … those who think that such work can be hurried, or that anything can accelerate it, except more brain power to bear on it, had better try.
(James Murray,
Presidential Address to the Philological Society, 1884)
It was Benjamin Jowett of Balliol who first formally suggested that James Murray should move full-time up to Oxford. Yes, Jowett, the infuriating, arrogant, self-regarding, and yet quite unspeakably brilliant martinet whose interference in the early stages of the Dictionary's planning very nearly caused Murray to resign. By now, however, the two men had more or less settled their differences—Henry Hucks Gibbs had seen to that—and were, despite all early appearances to the contrary, fast becoming the very best of friends. And Murray, despite his self-evident fondness for Mill Hill School and the increasingly well-oiled machinery of his little Scriptorium, accepted that it was mightily inconvenient for him to live so far away from where his Dictionary was being typeset, printed, and published.
However fast the ice might be melting between Murray and Jowett, the fact is that the mills of Oxford themselves grind exceeding slow, and it took some months of negotiation and argumentation about money—and reams of correspondence with the always annoying Frederick Furnivall, who was not at all keen to see Murray taken away from him and his own headquarters in Primrose Hill—before everything was agreed. Jowett had made his first suggestion of the move in the autumn of 1883; Murray was not to shift until the summer of 1885.
Mill Hill School bade him a heartfelt farewell at a ceremony in that year's Foundation Day. The little iron hut that had served as the first Scriptorium was presented by Murray as his valedictory gift, and after the Old Boys raised the necessary cash, it was moved from the Murrays' garden to the grounds of the main school itself. It was to be a reading room for the boys, Murray said, a memento of his mastership among them, 1 and a place where, especially on the Sabbath he still held dear, they could enjoy peace and time for reflection. And as a pleasing coda for the departing family, Harold Murray, the oldest son, who was a senior pupil at the school, distinguished himself in appropriate fashion by carrying off most of that year's academic prizes.
In short order Murray managed to find a house, an ideal house in fact, for Ada and himself and his (thus far nine) children in Oxford. It was a substantial and newly built structure in brick and Cotswold stone, set on the east side of the Banbury Road at the very edge of town (Oxford City's old boundary stone can still be seen in the front garden wall). There were open fields to the north, the University Press half a mile away by foot (a little longer on Murray's infamous Humber tricycle, which he pedalled furiously all around town) to the west, the Bodleian Library and the colleges (the house was built on St John's College land) a short step to the south. It was in most ways ideal—with plenty of room for the family's children, books, and lumber, and with a garden of a size that was perfect for recreation, relaxation, and privacy.
He named it `Sunnyside'—both after his first home back down in Mill Hill and also because, at least once noon had passed, it had been built on the sunny side of the north-bound street. It still stands, at No. 78—home now to an eminent anthropologist who has taken the greatest of care to memorialize the three astonishingly productive decades that James Murray spent there, 2 not least by placing an extremely rare first edition of the Dictionary in what was once Murray's dining room, purely as `a sentimental gesture'.
`Sunnyside'. The house on Banbury Road, Oxford, where Murray worked on the OED, an endeavour now memorialized by a blue plaque beside the famous pillar-box that was erected—to the gratitude both of Murray and of Sunnyside's current owner—by the city's Post Office.
James went first, along with the older children, the bulk of the furniture, and the family's collection of pet doves. Ada remained for a while with the younger children and the family cat, and supervised the assistants in their dismantling of the Scriptorium, collecting all the papers and books into 40 tea-chests. She grumbled in a letter to James about the hardness, the coldness, and the loneliness of the marital bed, though, and by mid-June she had joined her husband in Oxford, to begin what was to turn out a long and generally contented life in the comfortable penumbra of academe.