Oxford is presented as the working centre of James Murray’s Dictionary career and as the place from which his long connection with William Chester Minor extended outward. The city housed the negotiations and production that made the Dictionary possible, while Murray’s Oxford Scriptorium turned a vast stream of volunteer quotations into an edited work. Yet Oxford was not where Murray first met Minor: the story of that encounter belongs to Crowthorne and Broadmoor, not to the city that organized their scholarly collaboration.

The city behind the Dictionary

On 26 April 1878, Murray travelled to Oxford for his first meeting with the University’s Delegates. He expected an intimidating reception, while they expected to be unimpressed by him; instead, both sides found the meeting unexpectedly congenial. The Delegates decided to proceed with the project. After another year of contract discussions, an agreement dated 1 March 1879 appointed Murray to edit the New English Dictionary on Historical Principles on behalf of the Philological Society. Its proposed scale—about 7,000 quarto pages in four volumes, completed in ten years—would prove a severe underestimate, but the work had at last acquired an institutional home and a settled editor.

Murray’s connection with Oxford was practical as well as administrative. In 1884 he and his team moved there from Mill Hill, and he gave up his comfortable teaching post to devote himself full-time to lexicography. The move came amid difficult working conditions: the pace was slow, the hours were punishing, and Murray was often frustrated by what he saw as interference and parsimony from the publishers. The first Dictionary fascicle, published on 29 January 1884, offered a measure of encouragement just as the work was entering its Oxford phase.

Home, family, and the Oxford Scriptorium

Murray’s family settled at Sunnyside, 78 Banbury Road, a large house on what were then the northern outskirts of Oxford. The family included nine children at the time. A red pillar-box outside the house took in the exceptional volume of outgoing letters, a small but telling feature of a project whose progress depended on correspondence as well as scholarship. The city was not merely an address for Murray: its domestic setting was closely joined to the daily administration of the Dictionary.

The Oxford University Press Scriptorium stood in the back garden. It was a corrugated-iron building, fifteen feet wide and fifty feet long, twenty feet longer than the earlier Scriptorium at Mill Hill. To reduce its impact on a neighbour’s view, Murray had it sunk into a trench three feet deep; the adjustment left the building damp and cold, and the excavated earth caused further neighbourly displeasure. Its uncomfortable construction makes a striking counterpoint to the orderly intellectual system it housed.

That system had to accommodate more than a thousand incoming quotation slips each day. The room began with 1,029 pigeon-holes, far more than the fifty-four used by Herbert Coleridge, and later gained shelves as the accumulated paper grew too bulky to manage. Long mahogany tables held the quotations being considered; lecterns supported the dictionaries and reference books consulted by Murray and his assistants. Murray worked from a slightly taller stool on a level floor, overseeing the process without the raised dais he had used at Mill Hill.

The work moved through a sequence of hands. Incoming bundles were checked for completeness and spelling, sorted alphabetically, separated by parts of speech, and arranged chronologically. Assistants then distinguished a word’s shades of meaning and drafted definitions. Murray reviewed and subdivided the resulting groups, added pronunciation and etymology, and chose representative quotations, ideally including examples from each century in which the word had been used. He then wrote the final definition and sent the completed columns to the Press; galley proofs returned to the Scriptorium before the pages went to the printing works on Walton Street. Oxford thus connected the stages of the Dictionary, from incoming paper to finished type.

Minor’s work reaches Oxford

Murray’s first contact with Minor came soon after the Dictionary work began, probably in 1880 or 1881. At first, Murray understood him simply as an able reader, probably a retired medical man with time to spare. Their correspondence concerned the Dictionary and its materials, and Murray was grateful for Minor’s help and struck by the rare books to which he had access. When Minor began sending quotation slips from Broadmoor in 1885, the Oxford team was already established there: the packets were addressed not to Mill Hill but to Murray’s new centre of work.

Minor’s contributions became a sustained presence in Oxford’s editorial routine. Slips in his neat handwriting first began to leave the Broadmoor post-room in spring 1885; by late summer they were arriving in increasingly frequent packets, eventually every week. The distance between Broadmoor and Oxford was bridged by the postal service and by a shared attention to words. The city’s significance in this relationship therefore lay less in hosting its beginning than in providing the place where Minor’s evidence could be processed and incorporated into the Dictionary.

Oxford and the meeting legend

The popular account of Murray’s first visit to Minor placed the visit in 1896 and made Oxford the point of departure for a dramatic revelation at Broadmoor. In that version, Murray travelled from Oxford to meet a mysterious contributor and discovered that Minor was an inmate of the asylum. The book identifies the celebrated account as a romantic fiction first published by Hayden Church in 1915; Henry Bradley later objected publicly to its romantic features and factual misstatements.

Murray’s letter to Francis Brown gives a different chronology. It says that he learned by chance that Minor’s address, Broadmoor, Crowthorne, belonged to a large asylum, and that he had assumed Minor might be its medical officer. Murray’s first personal meeting with Minor took place in January 1891, six years earlier than the legend’s preferred date. He had requested permission from Dr Nicholson, and the encounter began a friendship that lasted for almost twenty years. Oxford remains central to the account, but as the home of Murray’s editorial labour and the destination of Minor’s contributions—not as the site of their first meeting. The correction shifts attention from a single sensational journey to the more durable connection built through years of letters, visits, and shared work on the Dictionary.