The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  It is the second quotation under the sense “The Arts,” and it reads simply: “1769 Reynolds, Sir J. Disc. I Wks. 1870 306 There is a general desire among our Nobility to be distinguished as lovers and judges of the Arts.”

  Unwittingly, Sir Joshua’s words were to provide the starting point for a relationship between Doctor Murray and Doctor Minor that would combine sublime scholarship, fierce tragedy, Victorian reserve, deep gratitude, mutual respect, and a slowly growing amity that could even, in the loosest sense, be termed friendship. Whatever it was called, it was a link that would last the two men until death finally separated them thirty years later. The work Doctor Minor did for the dictionary, and which began with Reynold’s Discourses, continued for the next two decades; but some stronger bond than a simple love of words had also been forged, and it was one that kept these two so different elderly men intimately connected for half as long again.

  It was to be seven years before they met, however. During that time Minor began to send out his quotations at a prodigious rate—at times many more than a hundred new slips every week, as many as twenty a day, all in a neat, firm hand. He would write to Murray—always rather formally, straying only rarely into matters that were not within his self-appointed purview.

  The first correspondence that survives, from October 1886, was largely about agricultural matters. Perhaps the doctor, taking a break from his work at the table, had stood up to stretch and had gazed wistfully from his cell window down at the farm laborers in the valley below, watching them stacking the late autumn sheaves and drinking warm cider under the oaks. He refers in his letter to a book he is reading, called The Country Farme, by Gervase Markham, published in 1616, and to occurrences of the verb bell—as when the ripening hops swell out in bell shapes in late August. Blight, too, catches his attention, as well as blast, and then heckling, which on farms once meant the process of separating the individual stems of the flax plant from each other, and only later became used (often in a political context) in the sense of catechizing someone, making his or her arguments stand up to severe scrutiny, as a flax plant might stand when divided for the scutcher.

  He likes the word buckwheat too—and its French translation blé noir—and finds such niceties as “ointment of buck-wheat.” He clearly revels in his work: One can almost feel him squirming with something akin to teenage excitement as he offers: “I could give you more if you wanted,” and as a teasing bonus throws in a small temptation on the thoroughly amusing word horsebread. He signs off, seeming to will a response from the great man on the great outside: “I trust same may be useful to you—Very truly yours, W. C. Minor, Broadmoor. Crowthorne. Berks.”

  The tone of this and other such letters as survive seems halfway between the obsequious and the detached: dignified and controlled on the one hand, and leavened with Uriah Heep—like toadying on the other. Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells.

  Though he has no idea at all of his correspondent’s character or circumstances—thinking him still a practicing medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure—Murray seems to recognize something of his pleading tone. He notices, for instance, the curious way Minor seems to prefer to work on those words that are current—like art first and then blast and buckwheat—and that are in the process of being placed into the succession of pages, parts, and volumes of the moment. Murray notes in a letter to a colleague that Minor clearly very much wants to stay up to date—that unlike most other readers he has no interest in working on words that are destined for volumes and letters to be published years and decades hence. The editor writes later that he feels Minor clearly wants to be able to feel involved, to enjoy the impression that he, Minor, is somehow a part of the team, doing things in tandem with the scribes up at the Scriptorium.

  Minor was none too far from Oxford, after all—perhaps he felt as though he were at a detached college, like St. Catherine’s Society or Mansfield Hall, and that his cells—or what James Murray still thought of as his comfortable, book-lined brown study—were just a rurally detached edition of the Scriptorium, a den of scholarly creation and lexical detective work. Had anyone chosen to ponder further, he or she might have wondered at the strange symmetry of the two men’s settings—pinioned as each was among great stacks of books, single-mindedly devoted to learning of the most recondite kind, each man’s only outlet his correspondence, in great daily storms of paper and floods of ink.

  Except there was a difference: William Minor remained profoundly and irreversibly mad.

  The Broadmoor attendants had noticed some improvement in the very early 1880s, when he first replied to the appeal from Mill Hill. But as the years went on, and as Minor passed dejected and alone through the milestone of his fiftieth birthday in June 1884—his elderly stepmother having visited him the month before, on her way home to the United States from Ceylon, where she had stayed since her husband’s death—so the old ills returned, reinvigorated, reinforced.

  “Dear Dr. Orange,” he writes to the Broadmoor superintendent at the beginning of the next September. “The defacement of my books still goes on. It is simply certain that someone besides myself has access to them, and abuses it.”

  His handwriting is shaky, uncertain. He heard his cell door opening at 3 A.M. the night before, he says, and goes on, raving, “The sound of that door, as you may verify, since the alteration, is unmistakable; and you could be as morally sure of its closure by the sound, as of anything you do not really see.” If he has no other remedy, he warns, “I shall have to send my books back to London, and have them sold.” Thankfully this small tantrum was short-lived. Had it continued or worsened, the dictionary might have lost one of its closest and most valuable friends.

  A month later a new obsession grips him:

  Dear Dr. Orange—Let me mention one fact that falls in with my hypothesis. So many fires have occurred in the U.S. originating quite inexplicably in the interspace of ceiling and floor that, I learn now, Insurance Companies refuse to ensure large buildings—mills, factories—which have the usual hollow spacing under the floor. They insist upon solid floors. All this has come to notice within ten years; but no-one suggests any explanation.

  Except Doctor Minor, that is. Fiends have been creeping about in the interstices between floors and ceilings and have wrought mischief and committed crimes—not least in Broadmoor, where they hide and crawl out at night, to abuse the poor doctor nightly, mark his books, steal his flute, and torture him cruelly. The hospital, he says, must have solid floors built in: otherwise, no fire insurance, and a host of nightly misdeeds.

  The daily reports flow in a kind of seamless syrup of insanity. Four cakes stolen; his flute gone; his books all marked; he himself frog-marched up and down the corridor by Attendants James and Annett. A spare key used at night to allow villagers into his rooms to abuse him and his possessions. Doctor Minor, in his drawers and shirt, stockings and slippers, complaining that small pieces of wood were forced into his lock, that electricity was used on his body, that a “murderous lot” had beaten him during the night and had left a savage pain all along his left side. Scoundrels came to his room. Attendant Coles came at 6 A.M. and “used my body”—“It is a very dirty business,” he screamed one morning, standing now only in his drawers, “that a fellow cannot sleep without Coles coming in like that.” Again as before: “He made a pimp of me!”

  And yet as came the madness, so came the words. Many of those that fascinated him were Anglo-Indian, reflecting his birthplace: There were bhang, brinjal, catamaran, cholera, chunnam, and cutcherry. He liked brick-tea. By the time of the middle 1890s he became very active working on the letter D, and though there are some Hindustani words like dubash, dubba, and dhobi, he was interested also in what were regarded as the core words of the dictionary—and contr
ibutions of quotations are in the Oxford archives for such words as delicately, directly, dirt, disquiet, drink, duty, and dye. He was able more often than not to supply the quotation for the first use of a word—always an occasion for celebration. For the use of the word dirt meaning “earth,” he quotes from John Fryer’s New Account of East Indies and Persia, published in 1698. For one meaning of magnificence, for one of model, for reminiscence, and for spalt, a foolish person, the first work by du Boscq also provided ideal material.

  The dictionary staff at Oxford noticed only one small and strange rhythm to Minor’s frantic pace: that in the high summertime rather fewer packages would come. Perhaps, they speculated innocently, Doctor Minor liked to spend the warm days outside, away from his books—a reasonable explanation indeed. But when the autumn came around again, and the evening began to darken, so he began working ceaselessly again, replying to every request, asking repeatedly and anxiously about the progress of the work, and inundating the team with ever more packages of slips—more quotations, even, than were needed.

  “One could wish that Dr. Minor had made about half the number of references,” wrote Murray to another editor, overwhelmed, “but indeed one never really knows what words will come of use till one comes to deal with the word lexicographically.”

  Because his method of working was very different from everyone else’s, it is more difficult to make a quantitative comparison, to set the numerical achievement of his work against that of the other great contributors. Perhaps at the end of the project he had actually sent in no more than ten thousand slips, which sounds a fairly modest number. But as virtually all of them proved to be useful, and because every one of them was wanted, and had been ordered, so his achievement as a contributor more than equals the effort achieved by some others in sending ten thousand slips a year.

  The Oxford team was indeed grateful. The preface to the first completed volume, volume 1, A-B, when finished in 1888—a full nine years after the project was begun—contains a one-line mention. It might as well have been a page of fulsome thanks, and it made their contributor supremely proud, not least because it was, by happenstance, discreet enough to offer no hint to others of his strange situation. It said simply and elegantly: “Dr. W. C. Minor of Crowthorne.”

  Grateful though they might have been, the Oxford team was also becoming, as time went on, very, very puzzled. And Murray was more puzzled than all of them.

  Who exactly was this brilliant, strange, exacting man? they asked one another. Murray attempted, fruitlessly, to inquire. Crowthorne was less than forty miles from Oxford, an hour by the Great Western Railway via Reading. How was it that Minor, so distinguished and energetic a man, and so much a neighbor, was never to be seen? How could there be a man of such lexicographical skills, who had so much leisure and energy and lived so very close, and who yet never seemed to want to see the temple to which he sent so many thousands of offerings? Where was the man’s curiosity? What was his pleasure? Was he somehow unwell, disabled, frightened? Could it be that he felt intimidated by the company of great Oxford men like these?

  The answer to the deepening mystery came about in a curious manner. It was delivered to Doctor Murray by a passing scholar-librarian, who stopped by at the Scriptorium in 1889 to talk about more serious matters. In the course of a talk that ranged across the entire spectrum of lexicography, he made a chance reference to the Crowthorne doctor.

  How kind the good James Murray had evidently been to him, remarked the scholar. “How good you have been to our poor Dr. Minor.”

  There was a startling pause, and the subeditors and secretaries in the Scriptorium who had overheard the conversation suddenly stopped in their tracks. As one, they looked up, toward where their leader and his visitor were sitting.

  “Poor Dr. Minor?” asked Murray, as perplexed as any one of those who were now keenly listening. “What can you possibly mean?”

  9

  THE MEETING OF MINDS

  Dénouement (). [F. dénouement, dénoûment, formerly desnouement, f. dénouer, desnouer, in OF. desnoer to untie = Pr. denozar, It. disnodare, a Romanic formation from L. dis- + nodāre to knot, nodus knot.]

  Unravelling; spec. the final unravelling of the complications of a plot in a drama, novel, etc.; the catastrophe; transf. the final solution or issue of a complication, difficulty, or mystery.

  Modern literary myth maintains, even today, that the strangest puzzle surrounding William Chester Minor’s career was this: Just why did he not attend the great dictionary dinner—a dinner to which he was invited—held in Oxford on the glittering evening of Tuesday, October 12, 1897?

  It was Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Year, and those who were connected with the OED project were in more than a mood for a party. The dictionary was at long last going well. The faltering progress of the early years was now accelerating—the fascicle Anta-Battening had been published in 1885, Battentlie-Bozzom in 1887, Bra-Byzen in 1888. A new spirit of efficiency had settled on the Scriptorium. And as crowning glory Queen Victoria had in 1896 “graciously agreed,” as the court liked to say, that the just-completed volume 3—embracing the entirety of the infuriating letter C (which the lexicographers found unusually filled with ambiguities and complexities, not least because of its frequent overlaps with the letters G, K, and S)—should be dedicated to her.

  An aura of majestic permanence had all of a sudden invested the dictionary. There was no doubt now that it would eventually be completed—for since it had been royally approved, who could ever brook its cancellation? With that happy realization, and with the queen having done her part, so Oxford, in high mood for celebration, decided it could follow suit. James Murray deserved to be given honors and thanks—and who more appropriate than the great man’s adopted university to bestow them?

  The university’s new vice-chancellor decided that a big dinner—“slap-up,” to employ a phrase that the dictionary was to quote from 1823—should be held in Murray’s honor. It would be staged in the huge hall at the Queen’s College, where by old tradition a scholar with a silver trumpet sounds a fanfare to summon guests in to dine. It would celebrate what The Times, on the day of the dinner, proclaimed to be “the greatest effort probably which any university, it may be any printing press, has taken in hand since the invention of printing…. It will not be the least of the glories of the University of Oxford to have completed this gigantic task.” The evening would be a memorable Oxford event.

  As indeed it was. The long tables were splendidly decorated with flowers and with all the best silverware and crystal that Queen’s could roust from its cellars. The menu was forthright and English—clear turtle soup, turbot with lobster sauce, haunch of mutton, roast partridges, Queen Mab pudding, and strawberry ice. But like the dictionary itself, it was also flavored generously, but not too generously, with Gallicisms: “sweet-breads after the mode of Villeroi, grenadines of veal, ramequins.” The wines were plentiful and excellent: an 1858 amontillado sherry, an 1882 Adriatic maraschino liqueur, an aged Château d’Yquem, and champagne by Pfungst, 1889. The guests wore white tie, academic robes, medals. During the speeches—and after a “loyal toast” in which the graciousness of her majesty was duly noted, and her six decades on the throne proudly congratulated, they smoked cigars.

  They must have smoked long and well. There were no fewer than fourteen speeches—James Murray on the entire history of dictionary making, the head of the Oxford University Press on his belief that the project was a great duty to the nation, and the egregious Henry Furnivall, as lively and amusing as ever, taking time from recruiting buxom Amazons from the local ABC teahouse to come a-rowing with him, to speak on what he saw as Oxford’s heartless attitude toward the admission of women.

  Among the guests could be counted all the great and the good of the academic land. The editors of the dictionary, the Delegates of the press, the printers, members of the Philological Society and, not least, some of the most assiduous and energetic of the volunteer readers.

  There was
Mr. F. T. Elworthy of Wellington; Miss J. E. A. Brown of Further Barton, near Cirencester; the Rev. W. E. Smith of Putney; Lord Aldenham (better known by friends of the dictionary as Mr. H. Huck Gibbs); Mr. Russell Martineau; Monsieur F. J. Amours; and for the later parts of D, the Misses Edith and E. Perronet Thompson, both of Reigate. The list was long: but so sonorous were the names and so evidently awesome their achievements, the diners, well into their port and cognac by now, heard them out in a silence that was easy to confuse with rapture.

  As it happens, the most fulsome remarks made about the volunteers that night relate to two men who had much in common: Both were Americans, both spent time in India, both were soldiers, both were mad, and though both had been invited, neither one came to the Oxford dinner.

  The first was Dr. Fitzedward Hall, who came from Troy, New York. His was a bizarre story. Just as he was about to enter Harvard in 1848, his family demanded that he set off for Calcutta to track down an errant brother. His ship was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal; he survived and became fascinated by Sanskrit, studying it to the point where he was eventually offered the chair in Sanskrit at Government College in Varanasi, then called Benares, the holiest city in the Ganges Valley. He fought for the British side during the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857, as a rifleman; then left India in 1860 and became Sanskrit professor at King’s College, London, and librarian at the India Office.