Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Murray, James Augustus Henry
MURRAY, Sir JAMES AUGUSTUS HENRY (1837–1915), lexicographer, the eldest son of Thomas Murray, clothier, of Hawick, Roxburghshire, by his wife, Mary, fifth daughter of Charles Scott, linen manufacturer, of Hawick, was born at Denholm, near Hawick, 7 February 1837. His baptismal name was James. He was educated at Cavers school, the parish school of his native village, and then at Minto school, where he learned Latin, French, and Greek. At an early age his studious bent singled him out from his fellows. ‘James Murray’, they said, ‘will never make a farmer; he has always a book in his pocket.’ At the age of seventeen he became assistant master at Hawick grammar school and at the age of twenty head master of the Subscription Academy in the same town. This period of his life was marked by great activity in the acquirement of languages, in the pursuit of various branches of natural science, and in the study of local antiquities; to his interest in these subjects many articles in the Proceedings of the Hawick Archaeological Society bear witness. During the tenure of the head mastership he married, in 1862, Maggie Isabella Sarah Scott, of Belfast. Owing to the state of his wife's health, which required a change of climate, he migrated south and took a situation in the London office of the Chartered Bank of India. In 1864 his wife died after the death of their child, and in 1867 he married Ada Agnes, eldest daughter of George Ruthven, of Kendal, by whom he had six sons and five daughters. Three years later, after the reopening of Mill Hill School under Richard Francis Weymouth [q.v.], he joined the staff as a master. He graduated B.A. of London University in 1873. He remained at Mill Hill School until 1885, when he removed to Oxford in order to devote himself exclusively to the editing of the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, of which he had been appointed editor in 1879 and which he had hitherto carried on in conjunction with his teaching.
Murray's appointment as editor was the outcome of proposals, editorial plans, and negotiations which took their first rise from the suggestion made in 1857 by Richard Chenevix Trench [q.v.], afterwards archbishop of Dublin, that the London Philological Society should prepare a supplement to existing dictionaries of the English language. This suggestion had resulted in the adoption of a scheme for the compilation of a comprehensive historical dictionary. In 1861, at the very time that Murray, in consequence of his philological interests and of his residence in and near London, became associated with the Society and its leaders—Alexander John Ellis, Frederick James Furnivall, Richard Morris, Walter William Skeat, Henry Sweet—the enterprise was threatened with extinction through the death of the editor designate, Herbert Coleridge [q.v.]. That scholar had devoted himself to collecting and arranging the material which voluntary workers enlisted by the Society had amassed. It was largely due to Murray's activity that the project was revived. Having been approached by publishers who desired to bring out a rival to Webster's dictionary, he had prepared a specimen. This was shown to members of the Philological Society and received with approval; but no publisher could be induced to undertake the risk involved in Murray's scheme, until in 1878 contact was established with the delegates of the Clarendon Press at Oxford. In March 1879 an agreement was entered into by which Murray, with the help of a staff, undertook to produce a dictionary of the English language extending to 6,000–7,000 pages. It had been agreed in previous discussion that the work should be completed in ten years. Thereafter Murray's philological interests were focussed on this great task; and in the ‘Scriptorium’ built at Mill Hill—which served as a model for the corrugated-iron building erected later in his garden at Sunnyside, Banbury Road, Oxford—he, with a few assistants, began to erect the fabric of the greatest lexicographical achievement of the present age.
His absorption in the Dictionary imposed the most stringent limits upon Murray's time and opportunities for independent work, which virtually came to an end with his article on the English language written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1878. The quality of this piece of work and of his earlier original contributions to philological learning is a sure indication of the possibilities that were within Murray's reach, had his genius been left free to develop untrammelled by the necessity of supplying the printers with a regular quota of Dictionary copy. The editions of three Scottish texts, brought out between 1871 and 1875, Sir David Lyndesay's Works, part v, The Complaynte of Scotlande, and The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, are excellent examples of his talent in this kind; while his Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland (1873) is remarkable not only for the accuracy of its information and for its author's grasp of the technicalities of phonetic science (then still in its infancy), but also for the rigour of its philological method, the principles of which were at that time appreciated by but few scholars in this country; it remains to this day in many respects a pattern of method for investigations in similar fields. Among Murray's many contributions to the Athenæum during these years was a review of Skeat's edition of the Anglo-Saxon gospels, in which he put forward his ingenious discovery of the relations between the glosses of the Lindisfarne and Rushworth MSS.
It is no wonder that Murray looked back upon his fifteen years at Mill Hill as his golden age, for on his removal to Oxford in 1885 began the intense pressure which was to be maintained to the end of his life, taxing to the full the resources of his strong frame and constitution. To his heavy editorial task was added the burden of a perpetual struggle against time, since at an early stage it was discovered that a serious miscalculation had been made of the years necessary for the completion of the work. Henceforward the hard life of the Dictionary—long working hours and short holidays—left him scant opportunity for the leisurely reading in which a scholar delights, and indeed barely permitted him to keep abreast of philological discovery in the many fields which he was bound to explore. In the early days of the work, moreover, financial difficulties were superadded. It appears that during the Mill Hill period Murray had disbursed considerable sums in providing books and other materials, and in 1885 he took the London Philological Society into his confidence with regard to this. The outcome was the raising of a special fund indemnifying Murray liberally for his expenditure. There were compensations, however, in the course of the succeeding years, not only in the ever-increasing recognition of his eminence as a lexicographer but also in the friendship and support of such Oxford men as Jowett, Robinson Ellis, and Ingram Bywater, as well as in the happiness of his home life, which was enhanced by the academic and other successes of the members of his large family. He had the satisfaction of receiving honorary degrees from nine universities, Cambridge and Oxford being added to the list in 1913 and 1914; he was elected member, honoris causa, of several learned societies, and was three times president of the London Philological Society; he was Romanes lecturer at Oxford in 1900, and an original fellow of the British Academy. He was knighted in 1908.
At the ‘Dictionary dinner’ held in Queen's College, Oxford, in 1897, Henry Bradley declared that it would have been ‘a national calamity’ if any other than Murray had been chosen to edit the Oxford Dictionary. It was his brain that conceived the plan of the work and settled its scope, the lines of which are laid down in the masterly preface of the first volume. The once current name ‘Murray’ as a title for the whole work is therefore justified in so far as he was its chief creator, although his editorial responsibility actually covers only one half of it (A–D, H–K, O, P, T). The first Dictionary copy was sent to the printers 19 April 1882, and the first section of 352 pages, comprising A–Ant, was published 1 February 1884. This, notwithstanding some immaturities inevitable in a piece of pioneer work on so grand a scale, marked an immense advance upon all previous lexicography, and this superiority was maintained to the full in the sections which followed. Murray's colleagues and successors owed much to the example of method, organization, and executive power which he set before them. The characteristic excellences of his work were indeed supplemented by equally characteristic merits of another kind in those who subsequently became his fellow-editors; but the framework designed by him was proved, as the Dictionary progressed, to be sufficient to stand the test of the expansion of philological knowledge and of the evolution of lexicographical experience. It is this achievement that gives Murray enduring rank among the great dictionary-makers.
Like the majority of philologists of his generation, Murray was in early years an advocate of English spelling reform, and even imposed an unfortunate example upon the Dictionary itself in the spelling ax for axe; but in later life his views on this subject were modified, and he withdrew from active support of the movement. He was a lifelong advocate of total abstinence and, following the tradition of his ancestors, who belonged to the Independent body in Scotland, he staunchly adhered to the principles of Congregationalism; he was deacon for fifteen years of the George Street Congregational chapel in Oxford. As a liberal in politics he took his place in the local activities of his party. He was a keen gardener and stamp-collector, and he bicycled regularly when past his seventieth year. His tall figure, accentuated by an erect and rigid bearing and an ample beard whitened at an early age, betokened endurance and aggressive perseverance, and rendered him conspicuous in any surroundings. With a formal exterior corresponded a formality of manner which rarely permitted him to mention a personal name without its appropriate prefix. Those, however, who knew him best were aware of his capacity for quiet humour and the amenities of friendly intercourse. He did not stint his appreciation of conscientious work, but could not tolerate the irregular or fitful worker, and expected from his staff a devotion equal to that which he exacted from himself.
Murray's long-cherished hope that he would live to finish the Dictionary was not fulfilled. His death was immediately preceded by twelve months' illness, which began with an attack of pleurisy against which he fought desperately, rallying sufficiently to carry on his work, though in circumstances of great physical distress. He died at Oxford 26 July 1915, and was buried in Wolvercote cemetery, near Oxford. There is a portrait, by an old pupil, at Mill Hill School, and another in the possession of his family.
[Memoir by Henry Bradley in Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. viii, 1917–1918; private information; personal knowledge.]