However pleasant a home for Murray and his family, Sunnyside turned out not to be an ideal headquarters for the making of the Dictionary. There was only enough room for the eleven Murrays, let alone for the assistants—eight of them, eventually—who were required for the project. So it was decided that a new Scriptorium had to be built—and this proved initially something of a trial. St John's College—acting wisely, since the Banbury Road was then and remains an exceptionally pleasantlooking thoroughfare—would not permit Murray to put up his monstrous-looking corrugated iron structure in the front garden. It had to go behind the house—so long as the next-door neighbour, the Vinerian Professor of English Law, Albert Dicey, did not object.
But Professor Dicey did object, and strenuously. In his short history of the University Press, Peter Sutcliffe writes that, to an astonished Murray, Albert Dicey was `a raving lunatic … the absent-minded professor incarnate [who] gibbered and stared at him across the garden wall'. The DNB is somewhat kinder, explaining that Dicey had `a lack of control over his muscles which hampered him in childhood and, indeed, throughout life'. He was far from mad, insists the author of the article, but rather had `a lovable simplicity of character and a lively wit', and once told his students that it was `better to be flippant than dull'. One can imagine that a flippant, witty man with poor muscle control might well seem something of a tall order for the punctilious and rather shy Scotsman to accept as his next-door neighbour.
The second Scriptorium, established the back garden of Murray's Oxford home soon after he moved in 1885, had a far more elaborate arrangement for filing slips.
A tidal wave of complaining letters promptly swamped the unsuspecting Murray, with Dicey insisting that the planned iron hut would ruin his view. And so modifications were made: the hut was sunk three feet below garden level, and the large pile of clayey debris from the excavation was turned into a hillock on which Ada Murray planted flowering shrubs (it still stands in the anthropologist's garden, though the Scriptorium has been replaced by a sunken garden and a limestone plaque on the garden wall). Murray had his own views as to why Dicey had insisted on his halfburying his building: it was so that `no trace of a place of real work shall be seen by fastidious and otiose Oxford'.
But though the Murrays and the Diceys later became firm friends, the legacy of the arguments remained: the Oxford Scriptorium, 50 feet long and fifteen wide, not only was deemed ugly (`like a toolhouse, a washhouse or a stable', said a passer-by, sniffily); because it had been built in a three-feet-deep trench, it was cold, damp, and positively unsanitary. On many a winter's day Murray and his colleagues were forced to sit with their feet in boxes filled with newspapers, to protect them from the chill and the draughts, and more than a few times Murray caught cold, and several times contracted pneumonia. He no longer sat, elevated, on a dais, as he had in Mill Hilclass="underline" his only sign of authority in Oxford was that his stool was a little taller than those supplied to his assistants. So he was afflicted by the piercing cold just like everybody else—a melancholy note which gave Furnivall more ammunition with which to attack the Oxford move: the `horrid corrugated den' that had been dug into the Sunnyside back garden was quite unsuitable, he said, for the nationally important work on which Murray and his assistants were engaged.
Despite Furnivall's carping, and despite Murray's own dejection at having to leave the teaching he loved and to reconcile himself to becoming, and probably for the rest of his days, a lexicographer—Samuel Johnson's `harmless drudge', he had cause to remember bitterly—there was one development that somewhat sweetened the pill. Benjamin Jowett directed the full force of his charm on the Murray family, and made sure that the Balliol College of which he was Master was always available as a comfortable sanctuary.
`Welcome to your own College,' Jowett proclaimed, grandiloquently, when James and Ada arrived to dine at his High Table on the first June Sunday of their residence. He later arranged for Murray to be granted an Honorary MA—rather less for any dignity it bestowed than for the right it conferred to make use of the Bodleian Library. The friendship that developed between the two men because of gestures like these turned out to be an enduring one—so much so that when a boy, the tenth Murray child, was born in 1886, he was given Jowett as his third Christian name, and with the names Arthur Hugh before it, in memory of two of Jowett's closest friends. 3
And as with Balliol, so with the Oxford Post Office, which, in a gesture it would be hard to imagine today, tried to make Murray's life a little easier. As soon as he was settled at Sunnyside, engineers came and erected a bright red pillar box on Banbury Road, right outside his front gate. It was recognized that the editor sent immense volumes of post each day, and the local postmaster wanted to make sure that it was as convenient as possible for him to do so. 4
Congeniality and collegiality and pillar boxes and the Christiannaming of children were one thing, all part of the consummate pleasantness of the move to so civilized a city as Oxford. The number 704 was quite something else, however, and was the principal reason that, despite his outwardly agreeable situation, James Murray was wretchedly miserable during the first few years of his time in the city.
The number 704 was engraved on his heart in those first years, it seems. For this, as mentioned, was the number of pages of completed dictionary that Murray was expected—contractually expected, the Press liked to remind him—to produce for them each and every year. If he managed that—if he managed to give Oxford enough material for them to publish two finished fascicles of 352 pages each year—it was calculated that there was an outside chance that the complete work might be finished before all who were presently working on it were safely in their graves.
But Murray was finding it ever more difficult to complete 704 pages a year, or anything like it. The job was simply far too complex—and his own quest for absolute perfection so timeconsuming and demanding—to undertake at the rate that he, and Oxford, in the heady early days of the project, had thought might be reasonable. True, now that he was free from the demands of schoolteaching, he could give an extra twenty or so hours each week to dictionary work. But even this was not enough—and the money made available by the Press would not allow him to employ more than a handful of assistants. So as the work became ever more complex, as the press of words became ever more intolerable, Murray began to fall short of his contracted targets by ever wider margins.
As if this were not enough, it was becoming abundantly clear that the sales of the Dictionary parts were not going nearly as well as had been expected. Part I had sold only about 4,000 copies— the sales estimate had suggested ten times as many—and when Part II, Anta-Battening, was published in November 1885, it sold only 3,600. However friendly Henry Bradley's review in the Academy might have been, his words were not exactly persuading legions of readers to rush out and slap down twelve shillings and sixpence for a fascicle. This sombre fact was now exercising those in the Press who took the increasingly fashionable view—first adumbrated by Jowett—that its first business was not so much to publish fine books, but to make money, and to survive commercially.