The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity

by Simon Winchester

  For thirty years the law in such cases had been guided by what were known as the McNaughton rules—named for the man who, in 1843, shot dead Sir Robert Peel’s secretary, and who was acquitted on the grounds that he was so mad he could not tell right from wrong. The rules, which judged criminal responsibility rather than guilt, were to be applied in this case, he told the jury. If they were convinced that the prisoner was “of unsound mind” and had killed George Merrett while under some delusion of the kind that they had just heard about, then they must do as juries were wont to do in this extraordinarily lenient time in British justice: They were to find William Chester Minor not guilty, on grounds of insanity, and leave the judge to apply such custodial sanction as he felt prudent and necessary.

  And that is what the jury did, without deliberation, late on the afternoon of April 6, 1872. They found Doctor Minor legally innocent of a murder that all—including him—knew that he had committed. The lord chief justice then applied the only sentence that was available to him—a sentence still passed occasionally today, and that has a beguiling charm to its language, despite the swingeing awfulness of its connotations.

  “You will be detained in safe custody, Dr. Minor,” said the judge, “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.” It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.

  The Home Department took brief note of the sentence and made the further decision that Doctor Minor’s detention—which, considering the severity of his illness, was likely to occupy the rest of his natural life—would have to be suffered in the newly built showpiece of the British penal system, a sprawling set of red-brick buildings located behind high walls and spiked fences in the village of Crowthorne, in the Royal County of Berkshire. Doctor Minor was to be transported as soon as was convenient from his temporary prison in Surrey to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor.

  Dr. William C. Minor, surgeon-captain, U.S. Army, a forlornly proud figure from one of the oldest and best-regarded families of New England, was henceforward to be formally designated in Britain by Broadmoor File Number 742, and to be held in permanent custody as a “certified criminal lunatic.”

  2

  THE MAN WHO TAUGHT LATIN TO CATTLE

  Polymath (), sb. (a.) Also 7 polumathe. [ad. Gr. having learnt much, f. much + , stem of to learn. So F. polymathe.] A person of much or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of study.

  1621 BURTON Anat. Mel. Democr. to Rdr. (1676) 4/2 To be thought and held Polumathes and Polyhistors. a 1840 MOORE Devil among Schol. 7 The Polymaths and Polyhistors, Polyglots and all their sisters. 1855 M. PATTISON Ess. I. 290 He belongs to the class which German writers…have denominated ‘Polymaths’. 1897 O. Smeaton Smollett ii. 30 One of the last of the mighty Scots polymaths.

  Philology (). [In Chaucer, ad. L. philologia; in 17th c. prob. a. F. philologie, ad. L. philologia, a. Gr. , abstr. sb. from fond of speech, talkative; fond of discussion or argument; studious of words; fond of learning and literature, literary; f. PHILO- + word, speech, etc.]

  1. Love of learning and literature; the study of literature, in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc.; literary or classical scholarship; polite learning.

  It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstonesize volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary. This heroic, royally dedicated literary masterpiece—which was first called the New English Dictionary, but eventually became the Oxford ditto, and thenceforward was known familiarly by its initials as the OED—was completed in 1928; over the following years there were five supplements and then, half a century later, a second edition that integrated the first and all the subsequent supplementary volumes into one new twenty-volume whole. The book remains in all senses a truly monumental work—and with very little serious argument is still regarded as a paragon, the most definitive of all guides to the language that, for good or ill, has become the lingua franca of the civilized modern world.

  Just as English is a very large and complex language, so the OED is a very large and complex book. It defines well over half a million words. It contains scores of millions of characters, and, at least in its early versions, many miles of hand-set type. Its enormous—and enormously heavy—volumes are bound in dark blue cloth: Printers and designers and bookbinders worldwide see it as an apotheosis of their art, a handsome and elegant creation that looks and feels more than amply suited to its lexical thoroughness and accuracy.

  The OED’s guiding principle, the one that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language. The reason behind this unusual and tremendously labor-intensive style of editing and compiling was both bold and simple: By gathering and publishing selected quotations, the dictionary could demonstrate the full range of characteristics of each and every word with a very great degree of precision. Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries; how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation; and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly when each word slipped into the language in the first place. No other means of dictionary compilation could do such a thing: Only by finding and showing examples could the full range of a word’s past possibilities be explored.

  The aims of those who began the project, back in the 1850s, were bold and laudable, but there were distinct commercial disadvantages to their methods: It took an immense amount of time to construct a dictionary on this basis, it was too time-consuming to keep up with the evolution of the language it sought to catalog, the work that finally resulted was uncommonly vast and needed to be kept updated with almost equally vast additions, and it remains to this day for all of these reasons a hugely expensive book both to produce and to buy.

  But withal it is widely accepted that the OED has a value far beyond its price; it remains in print, and it still sells well. It is the unrivaled cornerstone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection. And it is still cited as a matter of course—“the OED says”—in parliaments, courtrooms, schools, and lecture halls in every corner of the English-speaking world, and probably in countless others beyond.

  It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone. Some call the language of the dictionary old-fashioned, high-flown, even arrogant. Note well, they say by way of example, how infuriatingly prissy the compilers remain when dealing with even so modest an oath as “bloody”: Though the modern editors place the original NED definition between quotation marks—it is a word “now constantly in the mouths of the lowest classes, but by respectable people considered ‘a horrid word’, on a par with obscene or profane language, and usually printed in the newspapers (in police reports, etc.) ‘b——y’”—even the modern definition is too lamely self-regarding for most: “There is no ground for the notion,” the entry reassures us, “that ‘bloody’, offensive as from associations it now is to ears polite, contains any profane allusion….”

  It is those with “ears polite,” one supposes, who see in the dictionary something quite different: They worship it as a last bastion of cultured Englishness, a final echo of value from the greatest of all modern empires.

  But even they will admit of a number of amusing eccentricities about the book, both in its selections and in the editors’ choice of spellings; a small but veritable academic industry has recently developed in which modern scholars grumble about what they see as the sexism and racism of the work, its fussily and outdated imperial attitude. (And to Oxford’s undying shame there is even one word—though only one—that all admit was actually lost during the
seven decades of the OED’s preparation—though the word was added in a supplement, five years after the first edition appeared.)

  There are many such critics, and with the book being such a large and immobile target there will no doubt be many more. And yet most of those who come to use it, no matter how doctrinally critical they may be of its shortcomings, seem duly and inevitably, in the end, to admire it as a work of literature, as well as to marvel at its lexicographical scholarship. It is a book that inspires real and lasting affection: It is an awe-inspiring work, the most important reference book ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be.

  The story that follows can fairly be said to have two protagonists. One of them is Doctor Minor, the murdering soldier from the United States, and there is one other. To say that a story has two protagonists, or three, or ten, is a perfectly acceptable, unremarkable modern from of speech. It happens, however, that a furious lexicographical controversy once raged over the use of the word—a dispute that helps illustrate the singular and peculiar way in which the Oxford English Dictionary has been constructed and how, when it flexes its muscles, it has a witheringly intimidating authority.

  The word protagonist itself—when used in its general sense of meaning the leading figure in the plot of a story, or in a competition, or as the champion of some cause—is common enough. It is, as might be expected of a familiar word, defined fully and properly in the dictionary’s first edition of 1928.

  The entry begins with the customary headings that show its spelling, its pronunciation, and its etymology (it comes from the Greek meaning “first” and meaning “actor” or, literally, the leading character to appear in a drama). Following this comes the distinguishing additional feature of the OED—the editors’ selection of a string of six supporting quotations—which is about the average number for any one OED word, though some merit many more. The editors have divided the quotations under two headings.

  The first heading, with three sources quoted, shows how the word has been used to mean, literally, “the chief personage in a drama”; the next three quotations demonstrate a subtle difference, in which the word means “the leading personage in any contest,” or “a prominent supporter…of any cause.” By general consent this second meaning is the more modern; the first is the older and now somewhat archaic version.

  The oldest quotation used to illustrate the first of these two meanings was that tracked down by the dictionary’s lexical detectives from the writings of John Dryden in 1671. “’Tis charg’d upon me,” the quotation reads, “that I make debauch’d Persons…my protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama.”

  This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the OED offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at finding quotations that antedate those in the OED: At last count the Germans alone had found thirty-five thousand instances in which the OED quotation was not the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)

  This single quotation for protagonist is peculiarly neat, moreover, in that Dryden explicitly states the newly minted word’s meaning within the sentence. So from the dictionary editors’ point of view there is a double benefit, of having the word’s origin dated and its meaning explained, and both by a single English author.

  Finding and publishing quotations of usage is an imperfect way of making pronouncements about origins and meanings, of course—but to nineteenth-century lexicographers it was the best method that had yet been devised—and it has not yet been bettered. From time to time experts succeed in challenging specific findings like this, and on occasions the dictionary is forced to recant, is obliged to accept a new and earlier quotation and give to a particular word a longer history than the Oxford editors first allowed. Happily protagonist itself has not so far been successfully challenged on chronological grounds. So far as the OED is concerned, 1671 still stands: The word has for three hundred odd years been a member of that giant corpus known as the English vocabulary.

  The word appears again, and with a new supporting quotation, in the 1933 Supplement—a volume that had to be added because of the sheer weight of new words and new evidence of new meanings that had accumulated during the decades when the original dictionary was being compiled. By now another shade of meaning had been found for it—that of “a leading player in some game or sport.” A sentence supporting this, from a 1908 issue of The Complete Lawn Tennis Player, is produced in evidence.

  But then comes the controversy. The other great book on the English language, Henry Fowler’s hugely popular Modern English Usage, which was first published in 1926, insisted—contrary to what Dryden had been quoted as saying in the OED—that protagonist is a word that can only ever be used in the singular.

  Any use suggesting the contrary would be grammatically utterly wrong. And not just wrong, Fowler declares, but absurd. It would be nonsense to suggest that there could ever be two characters in a play, both of whom could be described as the most important. One either is the most important person, or one is not.

  It took more than half a century before the OED decided to settle the matter. The 1981 Supplement, in the classically magisterial way of the dictionary, tries to counter the excitable (and now, as it happens, late, Mr. Fowler). It offers a new quotation, reinforcing the view that the word can be used plurally or singularly as the need arises. George Bernard Shaw, it says, wrote in 1950: “Living actors have to learn that they too must be invisible while the protagonists are conversing, and therefore must not move a muscle nor change their expression.” Perhaps Fowler’s great linguistic authority was technically correct but, the dictionary explains in an expanded version of its 1928 definition, perhaps only in the specific terms of classical Greek theater for which the word was first devised.

  In the commonsense world of modern English—the world that, after all, the great dictionary was designed to reify and define—to fix, in dictionary-speak—it is surely quite reasonable to have two or more leading players in any story. Many dramas have room for more than one hero, and both or all may be equally heroic. If the ancient Greeks were one-hero dramatists, then so be it. In the rest of the world, there could be as many as the dramatists cared to write parts for.

  Now there is a twenty-volume second edition of the dictionary, with all the material from the supplements fully integrated with the original work, and new words and forms that have emerged in the years since inserted as needs be. In that edition protagonist appears in what is currently considered to be its true fixity: with three main meanings and nineteen supporting quotations. Dryden’s remains unaltered, the first appearance of the word, and in the plural; and to give even greater weight to the notion that the plural is a perfectly acceptable form, both The Times and the thriller writer and medievalist Dorothy L. Sayers are quoted in addition to Shaw. The word is thus now properly lexically set for all time, and is stated by the almost unchallengeable authority of the OED to be available for use in either the singular or the multiple.

  Which happens to be just as well, considering—and to reiterate the point—the existence of two protagonists in this story.

  The first one, as is already clear, is Dr. William Chester Minor, the admitted and insane American murderer. The other is a man whose lifetime was more or less coincident with Minor’s, but who was different in almost all its other respects: He was named James Augustus Henry Murray. The lives of the two men were over the years to become inextricably and most curiously entwined.

  And, moreover, both were to be entwined with the Oxford English Dictionary, since the second of the two men, James Murray, was to be
come for the last forty years of his life its greatest and most justly famous editor.

  James Murray was born in February 1837, the eldest son of a tailor and linen draper in Hawick, a pretty little market town in the valley of the Teviot River, in the Scottish Borders. And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. “I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.”

  But it has long since proved impossible to ignore him, as he was to become a towering figure in British scholarship. Honors were showered on him during his lifetime, and he has achieved the standing of a mythic hero since his death. Murray’s childhood alone, which was uncovered twenty years ago by his granddaughter Elisabeth, who opened his trunk of papers, hints temptingly that he was destined—despite his unpromising, unmoneyed, unsophisticated beginnings—for extraordinary things.

  He was a precocious, very serious little boy; he turned steadily into an astonishingly learned teenager, tall, well built, with long hair and an early, bright red beard that added to his grave and forbidding appearance. “Knowledge is power,” he declared on the flyleaf of his school exercise book, and added—for as well as having a working knowledge by the time he was fifteen of French, Italian, German, and Greek, he, like all educated children then, knew Latin—“Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima” (Nothing is better than a most diligent life).