The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (26 page)

So enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone
. (Emphasis added.)

But the devotion of his whole strength was beginning to prove taxing, both to his body and his mind. His kindly friend Doctor Nicholson retired in 1895—still in pain from being attacked by a patient six years earlier, who hit him on the head with a brick concealed in a sock. He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.

Brayn was indeed a martinet, a jailer of the old school who would have done well at a prison farm in Tasmania or Norfolk Island. But he did as the government required: There were no escapes during his term of office (there had been several before, causing widespread alarm), and in the first year two hundred thousand hours of solitary confinement were logged by the more fractious inmates. He was widely feared and loathed by the patients—as well as by Doctor Murray, who thought he was treating Minor heartlessly.

And Minor continues to whinge. He complains of a hole in the heel of his sock, doubtless caused by some stranger’s shoe into which, at night, he had been obliged to place his foot (November 1896). Minor is suspicious that his wines and spirits are being tampered with (December 1896).

One curious snippet of information came from the United States later that same year, when it was noted rather laconically that two of Minor’s family had recently killed themselves—the letter going on to warn the staff at Broadmoor that great care should be taken lest whatever madness gripped their patient turned out to have a hereditary nature. But even if the staff thought Minor a possible suicide risk, no restrictions were placed on him as a result of the American information.

Some years before he had asked for a pocket knife, with which he might trim the uncut pages of some of the first editions of the books he had ordered: There is no indication that he was asked to hand it back, even with the harsh Doctor Brayn incharge. No other patient was allowed to keep a knife, but with his twin cells, his bottles, and his books, and with his part-time servant, William Minor seemed still to belong to a different category from most others in Broadmoor at the time.

In the year following the disclosure about his relatives, the files speak of Minor’s having started to take walks out on the Terrace in all weathers, angrily denouncing those who tried to persuade him to come back in during one especially violent snowstorm, insisting in his imperious way that it was his business alone if he wished to catch cold. He had more freedom of choice and movement than most.

Not that this much improved his temper. A number of old army friends from America happened to come over to London in 1899, and all asked to come to Broadmoor. But the old officer refused to see any of them, saying he did not remember them, and besides, he did not want to be disturbed. He formally applied to be given some “freedom of the vicinage,” to be let out on parole—the word he used being rather rare, and meaning essentially the same as “the vicinity.”

The elegance of his language convinced no one, however, and his application was firmly denied. “He is still of unsound mind and I am unable to recommend that his request be granted,” the superintendent wrote to the Home Secretary. (Or typed, it should be said: This is the first document in Minor’s file that was produced on a typewriter—an indication that while the patient remained in a miserable stasis, the outside world around him was changing all too rapidly.) The Home Secretary duly then turned down the prayer; on the form is added a bleak initialed notation from the heartless Doctor Brayn: “Patient informed, 12.12.99. RB”

His diet ticket shows him to be eating fitfully—lots of porridge, sago pudding, custard every Tuesday, but bacon and other meat only occasionally. He appears to have become increasingly unhappy, troubled, listless. “He seems unsettled,” is a constant theme of the attendants’ notes. A visit from Murray in the summer of 1901 cheered him up, but soon afterward the staff at the dictionary were beginning to notice a depressing change in their keenest surviving volunteer.

“I notice that he has sent no Q quotations,” wrote Murray to a friend.

But he has been very slack altogether for many months, and I have scarcely heard anything from him. He always is less helpful in summer, because he spends so much more time in the open air, in the garden and grounds. But this year it is worse than usual, and I have been feeling for a good while that I shall have to take a day to go and see him again, and try to refresh his interest.

In his lonely & sad position he requires a great deal of nursing, encouraging and coaxing, and I have had to go from time to time to see him.

A month later and things were no better. Murray wrote about him again—by now there are stories of him “putting his back up” and “refusing” to do the work that was wanted. He wrote something about the origin of the word
hump
, as on a camel—but aside from that, and coincident with the death of Queen Victoria, he lapsed into a sullen silence.

Another old army friend writing from Northwich, in Cheshire, in March 1902 asks Superintendent Brayn if he might be allowed to visit Minor, telling him in some distress that Minor himself had written saying that he ought not to, since “things were much changed, and that I might find it unpleasant.” Please give me your advice, the writer adds: “I do not wish to expose my wife to anything unpleasant.”

Brayn agreed: “I do not think it would be advisable for you to visit…there are no indications of any immediate danger, but his years are beginning to tell on him…his life is precarious.”

It was at about this time that there came the first indication that it might be better if Doctor Minor now be allowed to return to the United States, to spend his declining years—as he did seem to be in decline—close to his family.

Minor had been in Broadmoor now for thirty years—he was by far the longest-staying patient. He was sustained only by his books. Sadness had utterly enveloped him. He missed the ever-sympathetic Doctor Nicholson; he was perplexed by the more brutish regime of Doctor Brayn. His sole intellectual colleague among the Block 2 patients, the strange artist Richard Dadd, who had been sent to an asylum for stabbing dead his own father, had long since died. His own stepmother, Judith, whom he had seen briefly in 1885 on her way back from India, had died in New Haven in 1900. Age was fast winnowing out all those who were close to the mad old man.

Even old Fitzedward Hall had died, in 1901—an event that prompted Minor to fire off a letter of deep and abiding sadness to Murray. Along with his condolences went a request that the editor might perhaps enclose some more slips for the letters
K
and
O
—the news of the passing of his fellow countryman seems to have revived Minor’s interest in work a little. But only a little. He was now quite alone, in worsening health, harmless to all but himself. He was sixty-six years old, and showing it. The facts of his circumstances were beginning to weigh heavily on him.

Dr. Francis Brown, the distinguished physician in Boston to whom Murray had written the full account of Minor and their first meeting, thought he might intervene. After hearing from Murray he had written to the Department of the Army in Washington and then to the American Embassy in London, and now in March to Doctor Brayn, suggesting that—without Minor’s knowledge—a petition be sent to the Home Office asking for his release into his family’s custody and his return to the United States. “His family would rejoice to have him spend his last days in his own land and nearer to them.”

But the pitiless Brayn did not make the recommendation to the Home Secretary; and neither the embassy nor the U.S. Army chose to become involved. The old man was to stay put, encouraged only by the occasional correspondence from Oxford, but increasingly dispirited, angry, and sad.

A crisis was clearly about to erupt—and erupt it did. The event that in Hayden Church’s orotund phrase “was the most striking feature in the American’s history” struck without any warning that was heeded, on a cold morning at the beginning of December 1902.

10

THE UNKINDEST CUT

Masturbate
(
), v. [f. L. masturb
t-, ppl. stem of
masturb
r
, of obscure origin: according to Brugmann for *
mastiturb
r
f. *
mazdo
- (cf. Gr.
 pl.) virile member + turba disturbance. An old conjecture regarded the word as f.
manu-s
hand +
stupr
re
to defile; hence the etymologizing forms M
ANUSTUPRATION
, M
ASTUPRATE, -ATION
, used by some Eng. writers.] intr. and refl. To practise self-abuse.