Chapter 13 The End of Great Men
Old Frederick Furnivall was the first of the great dictionary- makers who died, a few weeks after the Minnetonka took Minor back to America.
He had known he was dying since the beginning of 1910. He remained full of fun and energy to the end, still enjoying his hobby of sailing and still working on the dictionary, as he had been for fifty years.
In letters to Murray he joked about his serious illness. He wrote that dictionary men ‘go gradually’, and that he would ‘disappear in six months’. More seriously he wrote that, ‘lt’s a great disappointment as I wanted to see the dictionary finished before I die.’ But he added that he knew now that the dictionary would be finished and ‘so that’s all right.’
He died, as his doctors knew he would, in July 1910, but not before he had accepted Murray’s invitation to look at the enormous entry for the word take. ‘Before it is too late,’ as Murray wrote.
Murray knew that he, too, would die soon. And he was only beginning the letter Tin the dictionary. That letter took him five years to complete, from 1908 until 1913. Then he made another optimistic guess about when the dictionary would be finished — on his eightieth birthday, ‘four years from now’.
But no. The dictionary was not completed in the next four years, and James Murray did not reach the age of eighty. He became ill in the spring of 1915; the treatment for his illness caused him pain, but he continued to work. In the summer of 1915 he completed the word turndown, and was continuing to help with difficult words.
He was photographed for the last time in the Oxford office on 10 July 1915. The editors and his daughters were around him, and behind him there were shelves of books. Murray looks calm in the photograph, but some of the other faces look tragic, perhaps knowing that it was the last photograph of him.
He died on 26 July 1915, and was buried in Oxford.