One might have supposed Murray would have been exultant to see the second part complete. He wrote his Preface at the Oxford Scriptorium 5 in September. `This part completes the letter A, and extends nearly to the end of Ba-,' he reported, sounding, if not smug, then at least moderately well satisfied. Of the 9,135 words that the soft-bound book contained—words that brought the total in the Dictionary's first two parts to well over 15,000, more than a third of the number of words in the whole of Johnson's dictionary of a century before—some were exceptionally difficult. The prefix anti-, for example, occupied 42 columns of the completed book, back spread over 24 columns, and words such as as, at, art, ask, bail, band, bank, and bar proved complicated because of their `multitudinous ramifications of meaning': the task of determining their mutual relationships had `hardly been more intricate than that of exhibiting the results'. In addition, words that begin with Ba- turned out to have fearfully difficult etymologies—`among the most obscure in the language'—and that slowed them down as well.
But he was sanguine in his forecast. `I hope that the result of my removal to Oxford, and of the labours of the much larger staff of assistants with which the liberality of the Delegates of the Clarendon Press has furnished me, will be to make it possible to produce the following parts of the Dictionary at much shorter intervals, and that we may reach the end of Part III, finishing B, early in 1886.'
It was either very tactful or very cunning of Murray to mention in his Preface what he liked to call the generous liberality of the Press. The Press saw it rather differently: it was only a most reluctant liberality, and a liberality of which, in the lofty judgement of the official History of the University of Oxford written a century later, the Dictionary was during the 1880s the most chronically needy recipient. `What makes our chariot go so heavily is the fact that it is always carrying the dead weights of scores and scores of matters which no-one will nerve themselves to finish,' wrote the Delegates' Secretary. It must have been crystal clear to Murray as he wrote those words—gratefully, or with tongue in cheek—that his project must have seemed a dead weight, and that there was not the slightest chance he would ever make his deadline.
Nor did he. Part III, which inched the alphabet forward only as far as bozzom—and so did not `finish B', not by a long chalk— was due to appear in April 1886. In March, however, it was found that only a paltry 56 pages of its contracted-for 352 had been sent from final proof stages and into the hands of the printers. In the end the part was not to be published in the spring of 1886, nor anywhere near: it was a full year later, in March 1887, when it did appear; and the Part IV that did indeed complete B—and thus the first 1,240-page actual volume of the book, A-Byzen—was finished as late as June 1888.
Murray blamed much on the enormous difficulties involved in dealing with specific words—such as the `terrible' word black, and its scores of derivatives, which took his best assistant, the Revd C. B. Mount, fully three months of non-stop work. 6 As if the lexicographic trials were not enough, there was always the `intolerable trouble about assistants'. Murray said that he kept trying to recruit suitable people, but found in almost every case, after each had worked no more than a week, that he or she (usually he) was completely useless. One of them, despite having an Oxford MA, was found to be, in Murray's uncharacteristically dyspeptic report, `an utter numb-skull … a most lack-a-daisical, graspless fellow, born to stare at existence'.
But few were persuaded to listen to this litany of gripes. Many critics were coming to regard Murray's complaints as a querulous whining; and a considerable number of subscribers, those who had paid ready money to get their hands regularly on the Dictionary parts as they tumbled hot off the presses, were getting restless, their disappointment palpable, their annoyance recorded in evermore angry correspondence. Bookshops who had placed regular orders stopped placing more, and cancelled those already in place. The Athenaeum, a journal which had always been supportive, wondered if the endless wait for the first parts of the work suggested that it might not be finished in the lifetime of most readers, if ever. Certainly it supported the desire for perfection—but if the risk was then `the unattainability of zyc,' 7 might it not be sensible to cut corners, just a little? Delegates recorded their `great anxiety' at the situation. It was indeed a truly dreadful time for Murray, and for the Dictionary.
Each one of the early ages of the Dictionary has its mascot of a villain—there was Frederick Furnivall making mayhem and scandal during the first decade, and then Benjamin Jowett, interfering and pettifogging, when the first part was about to appear. Now, once Murray had moved up to Oxford, there came a new problem in the shape of the Secretary to the Delegates who had been appointed in 1884 as successor to Bartholomew Price: he was a Balliol man whose appointment had been engineered by the meddlesome Jowett, and he was named Philip Lyttelton Gell. Not one history of this man, who in essence ran the Press for the thirteen years up until 1897, is kindly: he was widely seen as an unpleasant, idle, incompetent, and quarrelsome, and was nearuniversally loathed.
He was also an outsider, something the English of the time generally did not care for. He had not read Greats—which was then, and remains, the University's heavily loaded by-name for the study of classics—but history, and though he had achieved a First, in the view of the Press scholars even this was clearly not credential enough. He had come from a London-based publishing firm, Cassell, and had no experience of the curious ways of publishing in Oxford. Moreover, his election had been rushed through, sneakily, during the summer holidays by a Jowett who was determined to get his way, to put his own man to run the Delegates, and thus allow Jowett to have a discreet hold on the Press, for what he arrogantly considered would be the good of all.
Gell chivvied Murray endlessly and at times most cruelly. He disagreed totally with Murray's approach, and could not fathom why, despite the increased money being paid to the project, despite the additional assistants who had been hired, and despite the move to Oxford, progress was so glacially slow. In his view Murray was to blame, and Murray alone. He began to harass him, yapping and snapping at his heels like a sheepdog, badgering him to produce more, finish more, send more completed pages down for printing.
In 1886 Gell insisted that Henry Bradley be brought in to help with the letter B—a move that initially flummoxed Murray, who had no experience in delegating work, and would brook no rival to his own authority. Yet Bradley's inclusion in the project made no discernible difference at first—perhaps because he was still based in London, and was initially given work by Murray which an ordinary assistant could do just as well. In the first six months after his appointment progress actually slowed—only fifteen pages were completed, less than five per cent of what had been targeted and outlined in the contract of 1879.
The intractability of Bwas a nightmare in more ways that one. Gell had wrongly assumed that Bwould be no more difficult than A—that it would, like all consonants, produce a slew of words that would be lexically and etymologically far simpler than any words headed by a vowel. Everyone expected that Q, for example, would be a simple letter, and that S would be formidably difficult. But B—surely it should be easier than A, at the very least. Yet this turned out not to be the case: Bhad many more words of far greater complexity and age than anyone had ever dared to imagine: it was just desperately unfortunate that at the very time the Press was beginning to complain at the slowing of the project, the very letter on which the editor was working turned out, unanticipatedly, to be among the most difficult of all to fathom.