The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (23 page)

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 contributions 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
(d
e
n
·ma
). [F.
dénouement, dénoûment
, formerly
desnouement
, f.
dénouer, desnouer
, in OF.
desnoer
to untie = Pr.
denozar
, It.
disnodare
, a Romanic formation from L.
dis- + nod
re
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.