“Ordinarily, it would not be possible for you to become a reader, Esme. You are neither a scholar nor a student. But it is my intention to convince Mr. Nicholson that the Dictionary will be realised far sooner if you are permitted to come here and check quotations on our behalf.”

“We can’t just borrow the books, Dr. Murray?”

He turned and looked at me above his spectacles. “Not even the Queen is permitted to borrow from the Bodleian. Now, come.”

Mr. Nicholson was not immediately convinced. I sat on a bench watching students pass and heard Dr. Murray’s voice begin to rise.

“No, she is not a student, surely that is obvious,” he said.

Mr. Nicholson peered at me, then quietly presented another argument to Dr. Murray.

The Editor’s response was louder again. “Neither her sex nor her age disqualifies her, Mr. Nicholson. As long as she is employed in scholarship—and I assure you, she is—she has grounds for becoming a reader.”

Dr. Murray called me over. Mr. Nicholson passed me a card.

“Recite this,” said Mr. Nicholson, with obvious reluctance.

I looked at the card. Then I looked around at all the young men in their short gowns and the older men in their long gowns. The words would scarcely come.

“Louder, please.”

A woman walked past: a student in a short gown. She slowed and smiled and nodded. I straightened up, looked Mr. Nicholson in the eye and recited.

“I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, or to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document, or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all the rules of the Library.”

A few days later there was a note on top of the pile of books waiting to be returned to scholars and college libraries.

You would be doing me a service if you could visit the Bodleian and check the date for this quotation for flounder. It is in a poem by Thomas Hood, published in the Literary Souvenir:

“Or are you where the flounders keep,

Some dozen briny fathoms deep.”

Thomas Hood, Stanzas to Tom Woodgate, 18__

J.M.

My mood did improve by degrees. As the number of tasks and errands increased, I began to visit the Scriptorium earlier and earlier in the afternoon. By the end of the summer of 1899 I was a regular visitor to many of the college libraries as well as to a number of scholars who were happy to make their collections available to the Dictionary project. Then Dr. Murray started asking me to deliver notes to the Oxford University Press in Walton Street.