In the summer of 1882, returning from Spain to America, I spent a month in London. I told Lowell one day that I was one of the “round-the-world” correspondents of the Murray Dictionary, and that I wanted to call on Dr. Murray. He said he had been trying to do the same thing, and proposed to take me,—an invitation which, of course, I accepted.
The reader ought to know that the Oxford Dictionary, now nearly half finished, was undertaken forty-one years ago,—as early as 1857. The first suggestion was made by Dean Trench, and, at the vote of the Philological Society, several hundred readers agreed to contribute notes made in their reading of English books, for the materials of such a dictionary. After twenty-one years some specimen pages were prepared from the notes collected by such readers, and submitted by Dr. Murray to the Clarendon Press in Oxford. Dr. Murray is now known through the English-speaking world for his charge of this magnificent work, which, I think, men will always call “Murray’s Dictionary.”
The directors of the Clarendon Press agreed to assume the immense cost and charge of publication, and in 1888 the first volume of the great series, now as far forward as H and I, appeared. The contributors’ names make a very valuable list of people interested in good English. And the volumes thus far published are the treasury to which all other dictionary-makers rush as their great storehouse of materials.
For the purpose of systematic coöperation, each reader was prepared with formal printed blanks. Each of these was to have, as far as his special reading showed, the history of one word. That word in large letters was the head of the completed blank. The reader is not necessarily an authority in language. He is a scout or truffle-dog who brings the result of his explorations to the authorities for comparison with other results.
Mill Hill, where the dictionary was then—shall I say manufactured?—is about ten miles, more or less, from the house which Lowell lived in. As we entered the cab which was to take us, he said that he should bid the cabby carry us through the back of the Park, a region which I had never seen. I have been amused since to see how many traveling Americans can say the same thing. Lowell evidently knew its turns and corners and bosks and deserts well. Ragged, barefoot boys were playing cricket in their improvised way with the most primitive of tools, such as they had constructed from the spoils of the streets. No policeman bade them leave the place, no sign intimated that they were to keep off the grass; an admirable loafers’ paradise for the real children of the public, such as there is not in our tidy Common in Boston, and such as I never saw in the Central Park of New York. It was pleasant to see how thoroughly at home Lowell was there. To such retreats in London he alludes again and again in his letters: “I have only to walk a hundred yards from my door to be in Hyde Park, where, and in Kensington Gardens, I can tread on green turf and hear the thrushes sing all winter.... As for the climate, it suits me better than any I have ever lived in.”
Spare a moment, dear reader, to find what greeted us at the Dictionary House. I doubt if they have yet invented any such name as Apotheka, or Powerhouse, or Granary. As why should they, seeing this is the only such house in the world? A circular house of corrugated iron, originally built for a church, I believe, perhaps fifty feet in diameter, perhaps twenty-five feet high, lighted from the top. It reminded me, at the instant, of the great reading-room of the British Museum, though not so large. Here was Dr. Murray, the distinguished director, at work with his staff of gentlemen and ladies. Of course he was delighted to see Lowell on the spot, and in the simplest and kindest way he showed us the method of the work.
Every day’s mail brought to this curious temple of language its new tribute to the history of the English tongue. The slips which I have tried to describe come from Cranberry Centre and Big Lick, from Edinburgh and from Hongkong. Once a month each of the thousand or more readers mails his budgets, so there would be every day a new parcel to be assorted; and we were ready for them at Mill Hill. Here were twenty or thirty thousand pamphlet-boxes into which these slips were at once sorted. The boxes were arranged in alphabetical order, beginning with that which held the slips of the title word A, and only ending, say, with box 33,333, with the box of ZYX—if there be so convenient a word in the English language.
All which I describe in this detail, because I should be glad if the reader will imagine the gay, bright, wise, and instructive talk which followed—oh, for an hour, perhaps hours—between Dr. Murray, the first authority as to English words, and Lowell, the authority most to be relied on as to the language of New England. It was not far from the time when Lowell told the Oxford gentlemen at a public dinner that they spoke English almost as well as their cousins in America. No, I do not remember what were the words these gentlemen discussed. But each was as eager as the other. Was it “doddered” or “daddock”? I do not know. “Miss Mary, will you have the goodness to bring us ‘dodder’?” And Miss Mary puts up a light ladder to her D O shelf and returns with the pasteboard box which has five and twenty uses of “dodder” between the days of Wiclif and Besant, and the two scholars dissect and discuss. You would think that Lowell had never thought of anything else. And yet it is the same Lowell who in a quiet corner of Mrs. Leo Hunter’s to-night will be discussing with Lord Granville the amount and quality of the theology which the Great Powers shall permit in the secondary schools of Bulgaria!
I must not try to give any account in detail of the company of literary men and women whom Lowell found in London. Two careful and interesting papers by Mr. Bowker, published in “Harper’s” in 1888 and 1889, are well worth the reader’s attention. From these papers I have made some lists of people, almost any one of whom you would be glad to have met, who worked their pens in London, or printed their books there, in those years. Mr. Bowker himself, as the English representative of “Harper’s,” was living there, and his personal notes of these people are valuable as they are entertaining. Of novelists alone he gives a list in which are these names:—
Wilkie Collins, Richard Doddridge Blackmore, Miss Braddon (Mrs. Maxwell), Dinah M. Craik, Thomas Hardy, Walter Besant, James Payn, David Christie Murray, Henry Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, Clark Russell.