Price, trying in his own way to modernize the Press against the resistance of its own historical inertia, had become overworked and by 1883 was so exhausted as to want to retire. Benjamin Jowett had become vice chancellor of the university in 1882. Impatient of the endless committees that would no doubt attend the appointment of a successor to Price, Jowett extracted what could be interpreted as permission from the delegates and headhunted Philip Lyttelton Gell, a former student acolyte of his, to be the next secretary to the delegates. Gell was making a name for himself at the publishing firm of Cassell, Petter and Galpin, a firm regarded as scandalously commercial by the delegates. Gell himself was a patrician who was unhappy with his work, where he saw himself as catering to the taste of "one class: the lower middle", and he grasped at the chance of working with the kind of texts and readerships OUP attracted.