The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  There were no obituaries: just two lines in the Deaths columns of the New Haven Register. He was taken down to his old hometown and buried in the Evergreen Cemetery on the afternoon of the following Monday, in the family plot that had been established by his missionary father, Eastman Strong Minor. The gravestone is small and undistinguished, made of reddish sandstone, and bears only his name. An angel stands on a plinth near by, gazing skywards, with the engraved motto, My faith looks up to Thee.

  Around the Evergreen Cemetery a high chain-link fence keeps out an angry part of New Haven, well away from the stern elegance of Yale. The simple existence of the fence underlines a sad and ironic reality: Dr William Chester Minor, who was among the greatest of contributors to the finest dictionary in all the English language, died forgotten in obscurity, and is buried near a slum.

  The New English Dictionary itself took another eight years to finish, the announcement of its completion made on New Year’s Eve, 1927. The New York Times put the fact on the front page next New Year’s morning, a Sunday – that with the inclusion of the old Kentish word zyxt – the second singular indicative present tense, in local argot, of the verb to see – the work was done, the alphabet exhausted, and the full text now wholly in the printers’ hands. The making of the great book, declared the newspaper roundly and generously, was ‘one of the great romances of English literature’.

  The Americans did indeed love the story of its making. H. L. Mencken – no mean lexicographer himself – wrote that he fully expected Oxford to celebrate the culmination of the seventy-year project with ‘military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling matches between the different Colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts’. Considering that the final editor of the book had held professorships at both Oxford and Chicago, there was more than good reason for Americans to take a keen interest in a creation that was now, at least partly, of their own making.

  The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at last its great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

  The total length of type – all handset, for the books were done by letterpress, still discernible in the delicately impressed feel of the inked-on paper – is 178 miles, the distance between London and the outskirts of Manchester. Discounting every punctuation mark and every space – which any printer knows occupies just as much time to set as does a single letter – there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

  Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

  One word – and only one word – was ever actually lost: bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s Dictionary, was actually mislaid by Murray and found, a stray without a home, long after the fascicle Battentlie – Bozzom had been published. It, and tens of thousands of words that had evolved or appeared during the forty-four years spent assembling the fascicles and their parent volumes, appeared in a supplement, which came out in 1933. Four further supplements appeared between 1972 and 1986. In 1989, using the new abilities of the computer, Oxford University Press issued its fully integrated second edition, incorporating all the changes and additions of the supplements in twenty rather more slender volumes. Then came a CD-ROM, and not long afterwards the great work was further adapted for use on-line. A third edition, with a vast budget, is in hand.

  There is some occasional carping that the work reflects an elitist, male, British and Victorian tone. Yet even in the admission that, like so many achievements of the era, it did reflect a series of attitudes that are not wholly harmonic with those at the end of the twentieth century, none seems to suggest that any other dictionary has ever come close, or will ever come close, to the achievement that it offers. It was the heroic creation of a host of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, as does the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.

  Chapter Twelve

  Postscript

  memorial (mI’mɔərIəl), a. and sb. [a. OF. memorial (mod.F. mémorial) = Sp., Pg. memorial, It. memoriale, ad. L. memoriālis adj. (neut. memoriāle, used in late Latin as sb.), f. memoria MEMORY.] A. adj.

  1. Preserving the memory of a person or thing…

  3. Something by which the memory of a person, thing, or event is preserved, as a monumental erection…

  This has been the story of an American soldier whose involvement in the making of the world’s greatest dictionary was singular, astonishing, memorable and laudable – and yet at the same time wretchedly sad. And in the telling, it is tempting to forget that the circumstances that placed William Chester Minor in the position from where he was able to contribute all his time and energy to the making of the OED began with his horrible and unforgivable commission of a murder.

  George Merrett, who was his victim, was an ordinary, innocent working-class farmer’s son from Wiltshire, who came up to London to make his living, but who was shot dead, leaving a pregnant wife, Eliza, and six young children. The family were already living in the direst poverty, trying to maintain some semblance of their farm-country dignity among the squalor of one of the roughest and most unforgiving parts of the Victorian city. Matters now took a terrible turn for the worse.

  All London was shocked and horrified by the killing, and funds were raised and money collected to help the widow and her brood. Americans in particular, stunned at the outrage committed by one of their own, were asked by their Consul-General to contribute to a diplomatic fund; the vicars in Lambeth banded together to make collections, ecumenically; a series of amateur entertainments – including one ‘of an unusually high-class character’ with readings of Longfellow and of a selection from Othello, and held at the Hercules Club – was staged across town to raise money; and the funeral itself was a splendid affair, as impressive as that of any grandee.

  George Merrett had been a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters – one of the many so-called Friendly Societies that were once popular across Britain as a means, in the absence of any government or privately funded schemes, of providing cooperative pensions and other financial help for the working classes. On the night that he died Merrett had been relieving a shift-worker who was a brother Forester: this act of small benevolence made the Order doubly obliged to offer their late member a handsome farewell.

  The cortège was half a mile long: the Foresters’ Band playing the ‘Funeral March’ from Saul came first, then scores of emblem-wearing members, then the horse-drawn hearse and four black mourning-coaches to carry the bereaved. Eliza Merrett rode in the leading carriage, holding her youngest baby in her arms, and sobbing. Hundreds of brewery workers followed, and then thousands of ordinary members of the public, all wearing black crêpe bands around their arms or hats.

  The procession wound for the entire afternoon from Lambeth, past the spot on Belvedere Road where the tragedy had occurred, past the Bedlam Hospital and up to the vast cemetery at Tooting, where George Merrett was finally buried.

  His grave may have once been marked, but it lacks a marker now, and where the records say George Merrett lies there is no more than a patch of discoloured grass, a tiny patch of settled earth among a sea of more noble and newer monuments.

  In his lucid moments Minor was contrite, appalled by the consequences of his moment of mad delusion. But Eliza never really recovered from the shock of the murder: she took to drink, and when she died it was of liver failure. There is no grave.

  Two of her sons’ lives unravelled most curiously: George, the second eldest boy, took a gift of money from Minor’s stepmother to Monaco, won a considerable sum and remained there, styling himself the King of Monte Carlo, before dying i
n impoverished obscurity in the South of France. His younger brother Frederick shot himself dead in London, for reasons that have never been fully explained. The fact that two of Minor’s brothers also died by their own hand invests the entire story with more sadness than is bearable.

  But the principal tragic figure in this strange tale is the man who is the least well remembered, and who was gunned down on the damp and cold cobblestones of Lambeth on that Saturday night in February 1872.

  The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of greyish grass in a sprawling graveyard in south London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great Dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man.

  Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.

  Author’s Note

  || coda (’koda, ’kəʊdə). [Ital.:–L. cauda tail.]

  1. Mus. A passage of more or less independent character introduced after the completion of the essential parts of a movement, so as to form a more definite and satisfactory conclusion. Also transf. and fig.

  I first became intrigued by the central figure of this story, the Dictionary itself, back in the early 1980s, when I was living in Oxford. One summer’s day a friend who worked at the University Press invited me into a warehouse to look at a forgotten treasure. It was a jumbled pile of plates of metal, each one measuring a little over seven inches by ten, and – as I found when I picked one up – as heavy as the devil.

  They were discarded letterpress printing plates: the original lead-fronted, steel-and-antimony-backed plates, cast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from which all of the many printings of the OED – from the individual fascicles produced as the books were being edited, to the final twelve-volume masterpiece of 1928 – had been made.

  The Press, my friend explained, had recently adopted more modern methods, computer typesetting and photolithography and the like. The old ways of the letterpress men, with their slugs of lead and their typesticks, their em-quads and their brasses and coppers, their tympan paper and their platen brushes and their uncanny ability to read backwards and upside-down at speed, were at long last being abandoned. The plates, and all the job-cases of type for handsetting, were now being tossed away, melted down, carried off.

  Would I perhaps like one or two of the plates, he asked me – just to keep as souvenirs, of something that had once been rather marvellous?

  I chose three of them, reading the backwards type as best I could in the dim and dusty light. Two of them I later gave away. But I kept one: it was the complete page 452 of the great Dictionary’s Volume V: it encompassed the words humoral to humour, it had been edited in 1901 or so, and set in type in 1902.

  For years I took the strange, dirty-looking old plate around with me. It was a kind of talisman. I would squirrel it away in cupboards in the various flats and houses in the various cities and villages in which I came to live. I was rather proud of it – boringly so, I dare say – and every so often I would find it hidden behind other, more important things, and I would bring it out, blow off the dust and show it off to friends, a small and fascinating item of lexicographic history.

  I am sure at first they thought I was a little mad – though in truth I fancy they seemed after a while to understand my odd affection for the blackened and so heavy! little thing. I would watch as they would rub their fingers gently over its raised lead, and nod in mute agreement: the plate seemed to offer them some kind of tactile pleasure, as well as the simpler intellectual amusement.

  When I came to live in America in the mid-nineties I met a letterpress printer, a woman who lived in western Massachusetts. I told her about the plate, and she became visibly excited. She had a great enthusiasm for the story of the making of the Dictionary, she said, as well as a tremendous fondness for its design – for the elegant and clever mix of typography and font sizes that the stern old Victorian editors had employed. She asked to see my plate, and when I brought it for her, she asked if she might borrow it for a while.

  That while turned into two years, during which time she took on as much other work as a hand-printer gets these days. She embarked on a series of broadsides for John Updike, made chapbooks for a couple of other New England poets, published a collection or two of short stories and plays, all of which she had printed on handmade paper. She was very much the craftswoman, all her work meticulous, slow, perfect. And she kept my dictionary plate standing on a windowsill all the while, wondering what best to do with it.

  Finally she decided. She knew that I had a great liking for China, and had lived there for many years; and that I was also more fond of Oxford than of any other English city. So she took down the plate, washed it carefully in a range of solvents to purge it of its accumulated dust and grease and ink, she mounted it on her Vandercook proof printer, and carefully pressed, on the finest hand-wove paper, two editions of the page – one inked in Oxford Blue, the other in China Red.

  She then mounted the three items side by side – the metal plate in the middle, one red page to the left, the other blue page to the right – and set them inside a slender gold frame, behind non-reflecting glass. She left the completed picture, with wire and bracket for hanging it on the wall, in a small café in her hometown, and then wrote a postcard telling me to pick it up whenever I could, and at the same time to take care to enjoy the café-owner’s strawberry and rhubarb pie, and her cappuccino. There was no bill; and I have never seen the printer since.

  But the plate and its proof sheets hang on my wall still, above a small lamp that illuminates an open volume of the great Dictionary on the desk below. It is Volume V, and I keep it open to the same page that was once printed from the actual piece of metal that hangs suspended just above it. It is what Victorians would have called a Grand Conjunction, and it serves as a small shrine to the pleasures of book-making and printing, and to the joy of words.

  Once my mother noticed that the dominant entry on the plate and the sheets and in the book below is the word humorist. It reminded her of a nicely droll coincidence, another Conjunction, though one rather less Grand. Humorist had been the name of a horse that ran in the Derby on 1 June 1921, the day that my mother was born. Her father, so pleased at the news of the birth of a baby girl, had put ten guineas on the animal, rank outsider though she was. But she won, and a grandfather whom I never met made a thousand guineas, and all because of a word that briefly took his fancy.

  Acknowledgements

  acknowledgment (æk’nɒlId3mənt). Also acknowledgement (a spelling more in accordance with Eng. values of letters). [f. ACKNOWLEDGE v. + -MENT. An early instance of -ment added to an orig. Eng. vb.]

  1. The act of acknowledging, confessing, admitting, or owning; confession, avowal…

  5. The owning of a gift or benefit received, or of a message; grateful, courteous, or due recognition…

  6. Hence, The sensible sign, whereby anything received is acknowledged; something given or done in return for a favour or message, or a formal communication that we have received it.

  1739 T. SHERIDAN Persius Ded. 3. I dedicate to you this Edition and Translation of Persius, as an Acknowledgment for the great Pleasure you gave me. 1802 M. EDGEWORTH Moral T. (1816) I. xvi. 133 To offer him some acknowledgment for his obliging conduct. 1881 Daily Tel. Dec. 27 The painter had to appear and bow his acknowledgments. Mod. Take this as a small acknowledgement of my
gratitude.

  When I first came upon this story, which was mentioned all too briefly, just as an aside, in a rather sober book about the dictionary-making craft, it struck me immediately as a tale that was worth investigating, and perhaps telling in full. But for several months I was alone in thinking so. I had in the works a truly massive project about an altogether different subject, and the advice from virtually all sides was that I should press on with that, and leave this amusing little tale well alone.

  But four people did find the story just as fascinating as I did – and saw too that by telling the poignant and human tale of William Minor, I could perhaps create some kind of prism through which to view the greater and even more fascinating story of the history of English lexicography. These four people were Bill Hamilton, my long-time friend and London agent; Anya Waddington, my editor at Viking, also in London; Larry Ashmead, the Executive Editor of HarperCollins in New York; and Marisa Milanese, then an editorial assistant in the offices of Condé Nast Traveler magazine, also in New York. Their faith in this otherwise unregarded project was total and unremitting, and I thank them for it unreservedly.

  Marisa, who remains a paragon of ceaseless enthusiasm, dogged initiative and untiring zeal, then went on to assist me with the American end of the research; together with my close friend of a quarter-century, Juliet Walker in London, they helped me spin my basic ideas into a complex web of facts and figures, which I have since attempted to settle into some kind of coherent order. The extent to which I have succeeded or failed in this I cannot yet judge; but I should say here that these two women presented me with a bottomless well of information, and if I have misinterpreted, misread, misheard or miswritten any of it, then those mistakes are my responsibility, and mine alone.