OED: 75 years and more (continued)

1878 (125 years ago)

By 1878 the Philological Society's project, which over the preceding two decades had gradually ground to a halt, was undergoing something of a revival. There had been an abortive proposal in 1876 from Harper and Brothers, the American publishers, to publish a dictionary drawing on the Philological Society's materials, with James Murray as the proposed Editor; in April 1877 a fresh proposal along similar lines was put to the Clarendon Press at Oxford. Negotiations between the Press, the Philological Society, and Murray were tortuous and protracted - contracts were eventually signed on 1 March 1879 - but it was in March 1878 that Murray agreed in principle to take on the task of Editor. At the time he was a schoolmaster at Mill Hill School, near London; on 26 April 1878 he met with the Delegates of the Press at Christ Church to discuss his plans for the Dictionary. Before the end of the year he had already begun to contemplate the construction of a suitable workplace in which the several million quotation slips which had already been collected could be stored and worked on. The resulting iron shed, erected in three weeks and fitted out with pigeon-holes by Murray's brother-in-law Herbert Ruthven, became known as the Scriptorium.

Herbert Ruthven also went on to become Murray's second Assistant; he is probably one of the men shown in the photograph (alongside Murray and one of his children, probably Harold). The other man is likely to be Murray's Chief Assistant, a protégé of Furnivall's called Sidney Herrtage, who was already being considered for the post in June 1878. Herrtage's place in the history of the Dictionary is however not a distinguished one: in 1882 Murray had to dismiss him for stealing. (He went on to do much of the lexicographical work on the seven-volume Encyclopædic Dictionary published by Cassells (1879-88) under the editorship of Robert Hunter.)