A Tale Of Murder, Madness And The Oxford English Dictionary

I must briefly touch on a minor point of review as I have so many books that I feel I would like to share. I know that some months ago I mentioned Simon Winchesters novel, “The Surgeon Of Crowthorne”, a tale of murder, madness and The Oxford English Dictionary. The forerunner of his highly acclaimed, “The Map That Changed The World”. It is quite a remarkable story in as much as any book about the writing and compilation of a dictionary could be. The characters involved are both bizarre individuals and the events that lead to their quarter of a century long collaboration are profoundly strange. The two men worked tirelessly towards the same goal without ever meeting each other face to face until almost the time of their deaths. One man Dr James Murray, erudite and pious, a scholar in Oxford endowed with the task of compiling every English word and their illustrative quotations, the other Dr. W.C. Minor a retired, multi-millionaire, American army surgeon turned homicidal maniac, locked away in an institution for the criminally insane. His madness believed to have come from witnessing and working amidst the gruesome and bloody battlefields of the American Civil War. Confined to his prison in Crowthorne, Berkshire and despite his obviously declining mental stability, (e.g.: at one point he surgically slices off his own penis to stop the imaginary phantoms that plague him nightly from abusing him sexually any further), Minor remained stoically dedicated to rooting out hundreds of thousands of examples of words for inclusion in the great book to come. Together they laid the foundations for what still stands today as the most comprehensive collection of words and phrases ever assembled for any language, anywhere in the world. It is as sad as it is funny as it is bewildering in its enormity. The scale of the task versus the span of a human life and the race to achieve the virtually impossible within that remarkably small time span, all make for a tale worthy of telling. Winchester has again triumphed in crafting a story from subject matter that to my mind would be so very difficult to accurately and comprehensively describe and has succeeded admirably. Like his tale of the geological map-making, the enormity of the task belies comprehension. He picks his subject matter with an acute eye for the obscure bordering on the surreal. I have included some small excerpts verbatim from the book for you to facilitate your own conclusions.

“The Surgeon Of Crowthorne” by Simon Winchester.

Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern history took place on a cool and misty late autumn afternoon in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in Berkshire.

One of the parties to the colloquy was the formidable Dr James Murray, the then editor of what was later to be called the Oxford English Dictionary. On the day in question he had travelled fifty miles by train from Oxford to meet an enigmatic figure named Dr W.C. Minor who was among the most prolific of the thousands of volunteer contributors whose labours lay at the core of the Dictionary’s creation.

For nearly twenty years beforehand these two men had corresponded regularly about the finer points of English lexicography. But they had never met. Minor seemed never willing or able to leave his home at Crowthorne, never willing to come to Oxford. He was unable to offer any kind of explanation, or do more than offer his regrets.

Murray, who himself was rarely free from the burdens of his work at the Scriptorium in Oxford, had none the less long dearly wished to see and to thank his mysterious and intriguing helper. And particularly so by the late 1890’s, with the dictionary now well on its way to being half completed: official honours were being showered down upon its creators, and Murray wanted to make sure that all those involved - even men so apparently bashful as Minor – were recognised for the valuable work they had done. He decided he would pay a visit; and the myth that came to surround that visit goes something like this.

Once he had made up his mind to go, he telegraphed his intentions, adding that he would find it most convenient to take a train that arrived at Crowthorne Station – then actually known as Wellington College Station, since it served the famous boys’ school sited in the village – just after two on a certain Wednesday in November. Minor sent a wire by return to say that he was indeed expected and would be made most welcome. On the journey from Oxford the weather was fine; the trains were on time; the auguries, in short, were good.

At the railway station a polished landau and a liveried coachman were waiting, and with James Murray aboard they clip-clopped back through he lanes of rural Berkshire. After twenty minutes or so the carriage turned into a long drive lined with tall poplars, drawing up eventually outside a huge and rather forbidding redbrick mansion. A solemn servant showed the lexicographer upstairs, and into a book lined study, where behind an immense mahogany desk stood a man of undoubted importance. Murray bowed gravely, and launched into the brief speech of greeting that he had so long rehearsed:
‘A very good afternoon to you sir. I am Dr James Murray of the London Philological Society, and editor of the New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honour and a pleasure to at long last make your acquaintance – for you must be , kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr W.C. Minor?’
There was a brief pause, an air of momentary mutual embarrassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. A distant clank of keys. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and he spoke.
‘I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. Dr Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than twenty years. He is our longest-staying resident.’

The official government files relating to this case are secret, and they have been locked away for more than a century. But I have recently been allowed to see them. What follows is the strange, tragic and spiritually uplifting story that they reveal.

With regards the Oxford English Dictionary as a work of art.

“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 discernable in the delicately impressed feel of the inked-on paper – is 178 miles, the distance between London and 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.”

“This has been a 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.”

One must also not forget that the circumstances that placed 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. The murder of George Merrit left his wife Eliza and their six children in the direst of poverty in a gloomy Victorian era London.

It is a difficult book to bring into perspective other than to read it in its entirety. One other piece of information that was truly quirky was that the wife of the man whom Minor murdered was to become one of his most frequent visitors at the prison during his incarceration. He was eventually shipped home to America and placed permanently in a Washington asylum where he eventually died and not that long after the passing of James Murray. A great read and one that left me feeling more than a little amazed.

The latest version of the OED is available on CD-Rom for ₤178 or approx AUD$485. Given the time invested in its production and having read this book I would consider it the bargain of the century.