Murray’s work took longer to mature. He began publication in 1884, but it was 1928 and thirteen years after his own death before the project was complete. There was a substantial supplement published in 1972, and in 1989 a complete new edition with 5000 new words and a total of over 21,000 pages in twenty separate volumes was launched upon the world at the modest price of £1500.
The period since Murray began has to a remarkable extent coincided with two superficially contradicting developments. The first has been the decline of British power in the world. The second has been the advance of the English language.
In 1879 the Empire was approaching its zenith, Queen Victoria, to whom the first edition was dedicated, had recently been made an empress by Disraeli, on top of being a queen. Hardly another empire was proclaimed until Jean Bédel Bokassa rather overreached himself in the Central African Republic a hundred years later. The Zulu War, the epitome of an imperialist adventure, was also being fought in 1879 and Rorke’s Drift and Isandhlwana engraved themselves on the history of British bravery and incompetence. More significantly, Britain was still just ahead of Germany and the United States as an industrial power and the leading exporter in the world. Within a decade or so, however, the apogee was past, and it soon became downhill all the way for British imperial and industrial refulgence.
The language, on the other hand, supported by the Oxford English Dictionary, has gone from strength to strength. If the agents of the old imperialism sometimes advanced with a Bible in one hand and a bottle of whisky in the other, their descendants have replaced these insignia with the OED and a glass of British Council wine. Of course we have been lucky in this linguistic context in having the United States as an immensely powerful ally. Like Blücher at the battle of Waterloo, it may have arrived on the scene a little late in the day but its intervention has been even more decisive than was that of the Prussians in 1815.
The French were in both cases the victims of afternoon reinforcements, and I always felt a good deal of sympathy when I observed close up, and suffered some inconvenience from, their determined rearguard action to hold the European Community as the last international organization that was a Francophone bastion. With Britain alone they might at least have hoped to draw a linguistic war. But against Britain and North America, not to mention Australasia, most of Africa, and the curious influence of India - which is at once a great reservoir of English-speaking millions and the potential breeding ground of a new language that has some but by no means all of the characteristics of metropolitan English - the French, allied with the Québecois, the Maghreb, most of the Sahara, and hardly anybody else, are sadly outgunned.
How sullenly resentful the British would have been had it been the other way round: if Creole influence had crept up from New Orleans and that of New France down from Detroit and the heartland of the United States had become Francophone, and that as a result French became the twentieth-century international language of commerce and summits and airlines as well as the nineteenth-century language of diplomacy and gastronomy and sleeping cars.
This emphatically did not happen. An Air France pilot landing a Concorde at Charles de Gaulle airport is supposed to talk to ground control in English. And a former French Ambassador to the United Nations is alleged to have lost his place as chairman of the late 1980s-instituted weekly lunch of the five permanent Security Council members at least partly because he took his rules too much au pied de la lettre and tried to talk to his colleagues in French. The British Ambassador, who got the job in his place, did not mind, but the American, the Russian and the Chinese Ambassadors did.
But whatever had happened in America we would have had in the OED a priceless weapon of attack or defence. As Belloc wrote:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
which, modified to adjust to the new imperialism, I render (with some sacrifice of the not very poetic original rhythm) as:
For we have got
The OED, and they have not.
And as from 1989, moreover, we have got the OED Mark II, which modern weapon is not only formidable against our linguistic enemies, but more surprisingly is not rivalled by the intellectual armaments industry of our principal ally. The production of the Dictionary must be almost the only field of university endeavour (except for living amongst mediaeval and baroque buildings, which is not exactly a field of endeavour) where Oxford is not challenged by Harvard or any other of the great American universities.
The price paid is perhaps that when the name Oxford is mentioned throughout the educated English-speaking world it is the Dictionary that comes to mind at least as quickly as the University. If a poll were conducted from Seattle to Singapore and from Auckland to Accra as to which was the more indispensable cultural asset to the world, I would be a little uneasy during the compilation of the results. But, of course, the question would be even more meaningless than most opinion poll questions, for the Dictionary would not exist without the Oxford University Press, and the Press would not exist without the University.