Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary

"She was one of his granddaughters, and Caught in the Web of Words is a biography of James Murray. But because his life was so bound up with the Oxford English Dictionary , it’s both a biography of James Murray and the story of the OED in so far as he was involved with it. It’s been called one of the best biographies of the 20th century, and I think that’s fair enough. It’s brilliantly done. He was just a most amazing man, really. When I started doing research into the history of the dictionary, this was one of the great texts that I knew I could draw on. It portrays him as this most prodigious man with extraordinary abilities. He never went to university, but he spoke a large number of languages. He was capable of incredible hard work. I slightly thought when I started work on the history, ‘Am I going to find that he’s not as heroic as his granddaughter—who’s going to be loyal to him—has cracked him up to be?’ And I’ve come to the conclusion that he really is. He doesn’t have feet of clay, he is amazing. Just the passionate sense of vocation, the sense that God had placed him on this earth to do this job, and that all of the skills that he had, had been developed for this specific job. He would work late into the night, late into his 70s. You come across evidence that he’s actually at work at 11 o’clock at night in the middle of winter, day after day. That was the job of all the people who worked on the dictionary. One of the things I really try to get across in my book is just how much of a collective process it is. I mentioned all the people sending in examples of words. Literally thousands of people worked on the dictionary in that way. Working alongside the editor, there was a whole team of assistants and consultants, and James Murray was always at pains to say, ‘It’s not just my work.’ By the time James Murray was taken on board as editor, the idea of the dictionary was already well developed. He didn’t have the idea. But it rapidly became apparent that he was the best possible person for the job. His name was on the first title page, but, eventually, there was more than one editor. As he and his staff worked through the dictionary, it wasn’t getting done fast enough. So Oxford University Press appointed a second editor to work on a different part of the dictionary. That was Henry Bradley, and then he was followed by a third one and a fourth one. That’s right. I suppose it goes back to this idea that specific academic training isn’t going to be the way to make a lexicographer. So the second editor of the OED, who worked alongside James Murray for many years, is a man called Henry Bradley. He likewise didn’t go to university. One of the things I always like to mention is that he learned to read upside down. His father read to the family from the Bible on his knees, and young Henry seems to have worked out how to read, and when he was first given a book to read for himself, he held it upside down. He came from a fairly humble background, worked in a Sheffield cutlery firm for many years and then came to London. He wrote a review of the very first part of the dictionary when the first instalment came out which was so able and insightful that people thought, ‘We ought to have him come and work for us.’ He worked on the dictionary first as an assistant, and then as an editor responsible for the letter ‘E.’ He had separate responsibility for a different part of the alphabet, and he had his own team. James Murray was always the chief editor and a big character in so many ways that Henry Bradley tends to get overshadowed, but he’s pretty impressive. He liked to say that James Murray set up the plan, and he carried on the work after Murray died."