The Meaning of Everything

by Simon Winchester

  [3] Benjamin Jowett and Balliol College might have been close to Murray—the University, however, was not and never really would be. Oxford in Victorian times was a highly exclusive body, upper-class, rigorously classical in its intellectual bent, and unashamedly Church of England. James Murray was, on the other hand, the son of a provincial draper, had interests in European philology, and was an unabashed Congregationalist. He also had the terrier-like Frederick Furnivall constantly interfering on his behalf—anonymous letters to the local press his speciality—and annoying the grandees of the University by doing so. For all of these reasons, and despite his august position as editor of the greatest of all English-language dictionaries, he was never offered a University position, not even in an honorary capacity. He kept a dignified silence about having to endure the cold shoulder, other than to remark in passing, two years before his death, that he was `to a great extent only a sojourner' in Oxford, never truly a part of the fabric of the place.Back

  7

  The Hermit and the Murderer—and Hereward Thimbleby Price

  Thos. Austin, 165,000 quotations; Wm. Douglas, London, 136,000; Dr. H. R. Helwich, Vienna, 50,000; Dr. T. N. Brushfield, Salterton, 50,000; T. Henderson, MA, Bedford, 40,000; the Rev. J. Pierson, Ionia, Michigan, USA, 46,000; R. J. Whitwell, Kendal, 36,000; Dr. F. J. Furnivall, London, about 30,000; C. Gray, Wimbledon, 29,000; H. J. R. Murray, Oxford, 27,000; Miss J. Humphreys, Cricklewood, 18,700; the Rev. W. Lees, MA, Sidlow, Reigate, 18,500; the Rev. B. Talbot, Columbus, Ohio, USA, 16,600; the late S. D. Major, Bath, 16,000; Miss E. Thompson and Miss E. P. Thompson, Wavertree, Liverpool, 15,000; G. H. White, Torquay, 13,000; Dr. R. C. A. Prior, London, 11,700; Miss E. F. Burton, Carlisle, 11,400; G. Apperson, Wimbledon, 11,000; Miss A. Foxall, Edgbaston, Birmingham, 11,000.

  H. H. Gibbs, MA, London; Miss J. E. A. and Miss E. Brown, Cirencester; Dr. W. C. Minor, Crowthorne, Berkshire; the Rev. Kirby Trimmer, Norwich; the Rev. W. B. R. Wilson, Dollar.

  (Appendix to the Preface to Volume I, listing a small fraction of the volunteer readers, James Murray, The Scriptorium, Oxford, 1888)

  Just who were these people? This question invariably forms whenever a curious and distracted reader takes a good, close look at the details of the great completed Dictionary. It is more or less impossible not to wonder—impossible not to be curious whenever one takes from the shelves any one of the 47 paperbound parts; or whenever one finds, buried in the basement of one of the world's better libraries, some of the 128 slender paperbacked sections, with their inadvertently wonderful titles—Sweep to Szmikite, Onomastical to Outing, Invalid to Jew, or Gaincope to Germanizing—by which the Dictionary was originally offered to the world.

  Readers have to wonder because, on the opening pages of Volume I of the completed work, and at the front of every part and of almost every single section of the work in progress, there is an elegant and utterly absorbing introductory essay, explaining how this volume or this part or this section was actually put together. The essays are essential reading: they tell of fascinations— like how the word set was so much more difficult than is, how unexpectedly tricky marzipan was, or how fraternity turned out so much longer and monkey so much more ancient than anticipated, or that C was so much more complex than D, and how the compilation of Jturned into a lexicographic bloodbath and Q was (though the editors would never say such a thing) really an absolute dog.

  But the puzzled wonderment begins for a quite different reason: for in each of these essays, at a point usually towards their end and following the description of the cat-herding trials that were involved in gathering in all the words, there is a collection, usually in small print or in a different fount, of scores and scores of names.

  These are the collected names of everyone who was involved in the project and, more importantly, whose involvement was worthy of the editors' gratitude. Without regard to class or standing, qualification or creed, and certainly disregarding gender (which in Victorian times was unusual, to say the least) here are listed the names of, on the one hand, the paid helpers, the sorters of slips, and the expert advisers, and on the other the unpaid readers, the checkers of proofs, the suppliers of quotations, the bringers of sustenance, and the boosters of morale—the men and women without whom, quite literally, the immense project could not have been begun, let alone ever finished.

  Above all, the unpaid, volunteer readers. It has to be remembered that this was a dictionary that relied, quite centrally and pivotally, on its amassment of readers, on the hundreds upon hundreds of readers who were cajoled into action by the public exhortations of the editors, and who then supplied the slips and presented the quotations that revealed the meanings that were ultimately to be defined in the thousand of pages of the Dictionary. Their names are all recorded in the prefaces and introductions and acknowledgements; there are lines upon lines, paragraphs upon paragraphs of names, lists of old-fashioned names that look likely to be sonorous if read out loud, like those of Beachcomber's `Huntingdonshire Cabmen', the famous Daily Express column, and fascinating to behold in print—and yet at the same moment in some strange way mysterious, tempting of speculation, and utterly intriguing.

  Who could not first be mesmerised and then intrigued by any list that included the names, for example, of Professors Johann Strom and S. Bugge of Christiania; Gudbrandr Vigfusson of Oxford; the Norroy King of Arms; Professor Julius Zupitza of Berlin; the Very Reverend the Dean of Canterbury; Eduard Sievers of Halle (formerly of Tübingen); the Hon. Whitley Stokes; and W. Sykes, Esq., MRCS, of Mexborough? What, for instance, of such as W. Beck, author of The Draper's Dictionary; of Professor Axel Kock, of Lund; of Prince Louis-Lucien Bonaparte; of R. H. Davies, Esq., of the Apothecaries Hall; of J. A. Kingdon, Esq., Late Master of the Grocers' Company: P. L. Sclater, Esq., FRS, Secretary of the Zoological Society; and of the frequently mentioned but little-known spinster, Miss Lucy Toulmin Smith?

  These were the grandees (a tiny fraction of them: the lists went on for columns), the fully established figures from whom Murray and Bradley and the other senior editors sought intellectual succour and enlightenment—and for most of them there are entries in directories and obituaries in newspapers which speak at length of their achievements and renown. But it is the less well-known, the more anonymous helpers who present an even more fascinating face—a raft of personalities whose collective portrait tells us something of the times when this book was assembled, and of the kind of men and women who were content to devote their lives and waking hours to helping with its assembly.

  So, to repeat the question—who exactly were these people? Where did they all come from? What did they do? How and why did they become involved, and how did they know so much that they felt able to make so memorable a contribution to so extraordinary a work?

  It is perhaps easiest to explain about the people in just the same way that the Dictionary explained about its words—by way of illustration. Two men in particular offer a portrait of the extremes with which Murray and his colleagues found they had to deal.

  One—perhaps the man who is today best known to those who are captivated both by the mechanics of lexicography and by the curious personalities of those who find its disciplines and details so attractive, and so who eagerly signed on as volunteer contributors for Murray's great work—is a man whose name sounds more like that of an institution than of a sentient being: Fitzedward Hall.

  He was an American, he was colourful, and he was by all accounts exceptionally difficult. He was also perhaps the most steadfast of all Murray's volunteer helpers, devoting at least four hours of every day for twenty years, mainly to examining and critically reading the Dictionary proof sheets. Murray praised him unceasingly for his `voluntary and gratuitous service to the English language'—and yet never once met him.

  It is the strangest story. Fitzedward Hall was born in Troy, New York, in 1825. Twenty-one years later, as he was about to begin studies at Harvard, his father demanded he instead board an eastbound clipper ship and sail from Boston to Calcutta, to
try to find his elder brother, who had absconded. The ship promptly foundered in a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal, and Hall was washed ashore. He made his way up the Hooghly River to the British Indian capital and, having no vessel on which to sail home (nor any brother—he never found him) decided to stay awhile, and learn languages. He became fluent in Hindustani, Bengali, Sanskrit, and Persian, and made a respectable income translating into these languages books written in English, as well as in French, Italian, and modern Greek, all of which he spoke fluently.

  After three years in Calcutta he moved to the holy city of Benares, on the Ganges—now Varanasi—and taught Sanskrit at the local government college, and then became an Inspector of Schools, a senior position in the Imperial government of the day. He got himself into all manner of scrapes—he narrowly avoided death when a dynamite ship blew up beside his house, and he was caught up in the Indian Mutiny of 1857, 1 and spent seven months besieged in a fort. But he survived, married well (the daughter of a colonel in the British Indian army), and came to live in England— taking up a post as Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Jurisprudence at King's College, London, taking a position at the India Office, and being awarded the degree of Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford. All seemed set fair for Dr Hall to pursue from now on a life of dignified and estimable scholarship.

  Except that then, in 1869, when in quite another circle the Dictionary was just bestirring itself, he became embroiled in an almighty row. We do not know the specifics, other than that it involved another philologist well known to Murray and his colleagues, Theodor Goldstücker, who taught Sanskrit at University College. The upshot was disastrous for Hall: he was dismissed or suspended from his various posts, thrown out of the Philological Society, and accused (unfairly, as it happens) of being a drunkard and a foreign spy, morally unsound, and an academic charlatan. The viciousness of disputes in the rarefied world of academia can on occasion be legendary, and irreversible, and this dispute evidently was one of those. Hall fled with his family to a remote cottage in the village of Wickham Market, in East Anglia; a year later his own family left him, and he remained for the rest of his life a hermit, rarely emerging from his cottage for the better part of the next 32 years. He discovered the potential for work with the Dictionary, and the unquestioningly sympathetic attitude of Murray—who minded little of the personal trials or failings of a helper, so long as he helped—in 1881, just two years after Murray's appointment. From that moment onward he wrote every single day, with quotations, clippings, suggestions—and then with sheet after sheet of proofs, corrected, changed, closely read and carefully parsed, just as Murray wanted. On those few occasions Hall fell ill, Murray was frantic:

  The everyday wish which I have from visitors to the Scriptorium, or correspondents on the subject ofthe Dictionary, is `May you live to see Zymotic'; that wish, I most heartily transfer to you, for I really dread to think of the falling-off in our work, which the failure of your help would mean. It is true that you have spoken of leaving materials at my disposal, but alas! how little worth are the best materials without the master-mind that knows how to use them, and make them useful.

  And so Hall recovered, and went on helping—`I have to record with deepest gratitude', Murray wrote at the end of D, `our obligations to you for your superb help, which has so enriched the 3 volumes now finished, and to express with trembling the earnest desire that you will be able to give us your help for a long time to come.'

  He did just as everyone hoped. Letters record the specific assistance he gave—over words like develop (which caused the editors no end of difficulty), over Devanagari (the script in which Hindi, among others, is written), over diagram, diaskeuast, 2 handsome, and the pronoun He (he provided quotations for he being used as a word for mountains and rivers, for the redundant or pleonastic he being used in phrases such as the noble Murray he, of the combinations he that and he who or the slightly different he who, in the sense of anyone who, and of he combined in a prepositional phrase like he of Oxford or Henry VIII, he ofthe six wives). Reading the Hall letters, and the Hall books that were recovered from his little cottage after his death, reminds one forcefully of the richness and complexity of the work that all were engaged upon.

  When he died, on 1 February 1901, the Scriptorium staff were stunned. `It is with the profoundest regret that we have to record his death,' Murray wrote in his Preface to Volume VI. Fitzedward Hall, for all his troubles, had `rendered invaluable help in all the portions hitherto published of the Dictionary'. The section in which Murray wrote these words concludes with definitions of the noun lap—`a liquid food for dogs, that part of a railway track used in common by more than one train, the front portion of the body from the waist to the knees of a person seated' … to all of which lexical complications this remarkable, unforgettable, and deeply troubled volunteer had devoted his time.

  The other most celebrated of the volunteers—though as a reader of books and provider of quotations, and not as a critical student of the proofs—was an American also. He was a troubled man too— William Chester Minor, a former surgeon-soldier in the United States Army, a survivor of the Civil War who in the autumn of 1871 had been sent by his family in Connecticut across to London, to convalesce after falling desperately ill at home. Some weeks before he had been dismissed from the army because of his strange and erratic behaviour. Since he was well born and well connected, he was, however, allowed to keep his pension; and since he was a talented painter and flautist, and a collector of rare books, it was expected that he would improve.

  The calming airs and cultured society of London did not improve his condition, though. He became even more ill, and in February 1872, during an attack of what now looks to have been paranoid schizophrenia, he shot and murdered an innocent working man on a night-time street in Lambeth. He gave himself up to the police, and was tried—found innocent of wilful murder by virtue of what by now was his very evident insanity. He was still sentenced to be put away, for the public good: he was ordered to spend the remainder of his life—or at Her Majesty's pleasure, as the court's archaic language had it—in one of Britain's then most up-to-date asylums for criminal lunatics, Broadmoor, in the Berkshire village of Crowthorne.

  The story of Fitzedward Hall might seem one of anger, bitterness and yet an obsessive devotion to duty; that of W. C. Minor, by contrast, is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption—redemption in which his work for the Dictionary became in time his therapy, a labour that he needed to perform in order to remain halfway sane. If the outward parallels between the two men—both Americans, both learned, both with Eastern connections, 3 both troubled in the mind—are intriguing, the different ways in which the two made their separate contributions to the Dictionary—and the ways in which the Dictionary in turn made improvements to their lives—seem even more so.

  Minor discovered the Dictionary in 1881, or thereabouts—we cannot be entirely certain, but at almost the same time as Hall wrote his first letter to the editor. The way in which Minor made the connection is uncertain, too—he may well have seen a mention of the project in the Athenaeum, to which it is known he subscribed from his cell, and which urged Americans to help. The story I prefer to believe is that the widow of the man he murdered, Mrs Eliza Merrett, who (somewhat improbably) came regularly to visit him at Broadmoor, carried without knowing it a copy of Murray's famous Appeal for Readers in a pile of books she had brought for the prisoners' library. It is said that Minor found the small slip of paper between two volumes, read it, and exclaimed that this, this dictionary work, was how he could to some extent now redeem himself.

  However the connection was made, Minor worked assiduously for the next 21 years until he fell ill, in 1902, after cutting off his own penis during a fit of insane self-loathing. Murray paid endless tributes to him: one read, `Second only to the contributions of Dr Fitzedward Hall in enhancing our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases and constructions have been those of Dr W. C. Minor, received wee
k by week.'

  Minor's technique of word-gathering was very different from those of most other readers—and though he rarely equalled the totals of the super-contributors (such as those noted in the epigraph, like the also apparently often insane Thomas Austin, who had already contributed 165,000 slips by 1888, with more to come), he performed his work in such a way as to make himself uniquely useful to the dictionary makers.

  He read, prodigiously. He had two cells at Broadmoor, one in which he ate and slept and painted and played his flute, the other which he had shelved as his library, and in which he kept his very considerable collection of antiquarian books. Knowing that all of the books he had collected were likely to be of use to the Dictionary, he created a potentially very useful way of reading them.

  He would first prepare, by folding a number of sheets of paper together, a small eight-page quire of blank writing paper. He would then open the chosen book from his library, one that he suspected might hold a number of interesting words, 4 and begin reading. When he came upon a word that interested him and which he thought, in time, might interest the Dictionary staff, and which, moreover, was used in what he considered to be `an illustrative way' in the book, he would write it down in tiny letters—he was capable of the most minute legible handwriting—in his folderlike booklet.