The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (6 page)

The first heading, with three sources quoted, shows how the word has been used to mean, literally, “the chief personage in a drama”; the next three quotations demonstrate a subtle difference, in which the word means “the leading personage in any contest,” or “a prominent supporter…of any cause.” By general consent this second meaning is the more modern; the first is the older and now somewhat archaic version.

The oldest quotation used to illustrate the first of these two meanings was that tracked down by the dictionary’s lexical detectives from the writings of John Dryden in 1671. “’Tis charg’d upon me,” the quotation reads, “that I make debauch’d Persons…my protagonists, or the chief persons of the drama.”

This, from a lexicographical point of view, seems to be the English word’s mother lode, a fair clue that the word may well have been introduced into the written language in that year, and possibly not before. (But the
OED
offers no guarantee. German scholars in particular are constantly deriving much pleasure from winning an informal lexicographic contest that aims at finding quotations that antedate those in the
OED
: At last count the Germans alone had found thirty-five thousand instances in which the
OED
quotation was
not
the first; others, less stridently, chalk up their own small triumphs of lexical sleuthing, all of which Oxford’s editors accept with disdainful equanimity, professing neither infallibility nor monopoly.)

This single quotation for
protagonist
is peculiarly neat, moreover, in that Dryden explicitly states the newly minted word’s meaning within the sentence. So from the dictionary editors’ point of view there is a double benefit, of having the word’s origin dated and its meaning explained, and both by a single English author.

Finding and publishing quotations of usage is an imperfect way of making pronouncements about origins and meanings, of course—but to nineteenth-century lexicographers it was the best method that had yet been devised—and it has not yet been bettered. From time to time experts succeed in challenging specific findings like this, and on occasions the dictionary is forced to recant, is obliged to accept a new and earlier quotation and give to a particular word a longer history than the Oxford editors first allowed. Happily
protagonist
itself has not so far been successfully challenged on chronological grounds. So far as the
OED
is concerned, 1671 still stands: The word has for three hundred odd years been a member of that giant corpus known as the English vocabulary.

The word appears again, and with a new supporting quotation, in the 1933
Supplement
—a volume that had to be added because of the sheer weight of new words and new evidence of new meanings that had accumulated during the decades when the original dictionary was being compiled. By now another shade of meaning had been found for it—that of “a leading player in some game or sport.” A sentence supporting this, from a 1908 issue of
The Complete Lawn Tennis Player
, is produced in evidence.

But then comes the controversy. The other great book on the English language, Henry Fowler’s hugely popular
Modern English Usage
, which was first published in 1926, insisted—contrary to what Dryden had been quoted as saying in the
OED
—that
protagonist
is a word that can only ever be used in the singular.

Any use suggesting the contrary would be grammatically utterly wrong. And not just wrong, Fowler declares, but absurd. It would be nonsense to suggest that there could ever be two characters in a play, both of whom could be described as the most important. One either is the most important person, or one is not.

It took more than half a century before the
OED
decided to settle the matter. The 1981
Supplement
, in the classically magisterial way of the dictionary, tries to counter the excitable (and now, as it happens, late, Mr. Fowler). It offers a new quotation, reinforcing the view that the word can be used plurally or singularly as the need arises. George Bernard Shaw, it says, wrote in 1950: “Living actors have to learn that they too must be invisible while the protagonists are conversing, and therefore must not move a muscle nor change their expression.” Perhaps Fowler’s great linguistic authority was technically correct but, the dictionary explains in an expanded version of its 1928 definition, perhaps only in the specific terms of classical Greek theater for which the word was first devised.

In the commonsense world of modern English—the world that, after all, the great dictionary was designed to reify and define—to fix, in dictionary-speak—it is surely quite reasonable to have two or more leading players in any story. Many dramas have room for more than one hero, and both or all may be equally heroic. If the ancient Greeks were one-hero dramatists, then so be it. In the rest of the world, there could be as many as the dramatists cared to write parts for.

Now there is a twenty-volume second edition of the dictionary, with all the material from the supplements fully integrated with the original work, and new words and forms that have emerged in the years since inserted as needs be. In that edition
protagonist
appears in what is currently considered to be its true fixity: with three main meanings and nineteen supporting quotations. Dryden’s remains unaltered, the first appearance of the word,
and
in the plural; and to give even greater weight to the notion that the plural is a perfectly acceptable form, both
The Times
and the thriller writer and medievalist Dorothy L. Sayers are quoted in addition to Shaw. The word is thus now properly lexically set for all time, and is stated by the almost unchallengeable authority of the
OED
to be available for use in either the singular or the multiple.

Which happens to be just as well, considering—and to reiterate the point—the existence of two protagonists in this story.

The first one, as is already clear, is Dr. William Chester Minor, the admitted and insane American murderer. The other is a man whose lifetime was more or less coincident with Minor’s, but who was different in almost all its other respects: He was named James Augustus Henry Murray. The lives of the two men were over the years to become inextricably and most curiously entwined.

And, moreover, both were to be entwined with the
Oxford English Dictionary
, since the second of the two men, James Murray, was to become for the last forty years of his life its greatest and most justly famous editor.

James Murray was born in February 1837, the eldest son of a tailor and linen draper in Hawick, a pretty little market town in the valley of the Teviot River, in the Scottish Borders. And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. “I am a nobody,” he would write toward the end of the century, when fame had begun to creep up on him. “Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.”

But it has long since proved impossible to ignore him, as he was to become a towering figure in British scholarship. Honors were showered on him during his lifetime, and he has achieved the standing of a mythic hero since his death. Murray’s childhood alone, which was uncovered twenty years ago by his granddaughter Elisabeth, who opened his trunk of papers, hints temptingly that he was destined—despite his unpromising, unmoneyed, unsophisticated beginnings—for extraordinary things.

He was a precocious, very serious little boy; he turned steadily into an astonishingly learned teenager, tall, well built, with long hair and an early, bright red beard that added to his grave and forbidding appearance. “Knowledge is power,” he declared on the flyleaf of his school exercise book, and added—for as well as having a working knowledge by the time he was fifteen of French, Italian, German, and Greek, he, like all educated children then, knew Latin—“
Nihil est melius quam vita diligentissima
” (Nothing is better than a most diligent life).

He had a voracious appetite, indeed an impassioned thirst for all kinds of learning. He taught himself about the local geology and botany; he found a globe from which he could learn geography and foster a love for maps; he unearthed scores of textbooks from which he could take on the enormous burden of history; he observed and took pains to remember all the natural phenomena about him. His younger brothers would tell how he once awakened them late one night to show them the rising of Sirius, the Dog Star, whose orbit and appearance over the horizon he had calculated and that proved, to the family’s sleepy exultation, to be perfectly correct.

He particularly cherished encountering and interrogating people he met who proved to be living links with history: He once found an ancient who had known someone who was present when Parliament proclaimed William and Mary joint sovereigns in 1689; then again, his mother would recount over and over how she had heard tell of the victory at Waterloo; and when he had children himself he would allow them to be dandled on the knees of an elderly naval officer who was present when Napoleon agreed to surrender.

He left school at fourteen, as did most of the poorer children of the British Isles. There was no money for him to go on to the fee-paying grammar school in nearby Melrose, and in any case his parents enjoyed some confidence in the lad’s ability to teach himself—by pursuing, as he had vowed, the
vita diligentissima
. Their hopes proved well founded: James continued to amass more and more knowledge, if only (as he would admit) for the sake of knowledge itself, and often in the most eccentric of ways.

He engaged in furious digs at a multitude of archaeological sites all over the Borders (which, being close to Hadrian’s Wall, was a treasure trove of buried antiquities); he made attempts to teach the local cows to respond to calls in Latin; he would read out loud, by the light of a minute oil lamp, the works of a Frenchman with the grand name of Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné, and translating for his family, who gathered about him, fascinated.

Once, trying to invent water wings made from bundles of pond iris, he tied them to his arms but was turned upside down by more buoyancy than he calculated, and would have drowned (he was a nonswimmer) had not his friends rescued him by pulling him from the lake with his five-foot-long bow tie. He memorized hundreds of phrases in Romany, the language of the passing Gypsies; he learned bookbinding; he taught himself to embellish his own writings with elegant little drawings, flourishes, and curlicues, rather like the monkish illuminators of the Middle Ages.

By seventeen this “argumentative, earnest, naïve” young Scot was employed in his hometown, as an assistant headmaster, eagerly passing on the knowledge that he had so keenly amassed; by twenty he was a full-fledged headmaster of the local subscription academy (“ages ten to sixteen, fees one guinea a term”); and with his brother Alexander he became a leading member of that most Victorian and Scottish of bodies, the Hawick branch of the Mutual Improvement Institute. He gave his first lecture—“Reading, Its Pleasures and Advantages”—and went on to present learned papers to the town’s Literary and Philosophical Society on his new passion of phonetics, on the origins of the pronunciation and the foundations of the Scottish tongue, and—once he had discovered its delights—on the magic of Anglo-Saxon.

And yet all this early promise seemed suddenly doomed, first by the onset of love and then by the upset of tragedy. For in 1861, when he was just twenty-four, James met and the following year married a handsome but delicate infant-school music teacher named Maggie Scott. Their wedding picture shows James a strangely tall, vaguely simian figure in his ill-fitting frock coat and baggy trousers; a man with hugely long, knee-brushing arms; an unkempt beard; hair already thinning near the peak; eyes narrow and intense: neither happy nor unhappy, but full of thought, his mind seemingly filled with a kind of distracted foreboding.

Two years later they had a baby girl they christened Anna. But, as was wretchedly commonplace at the time, she died in infancy. Maggie Murray herself then fell gravely ill with consumption and was said by the Hawick doctors to be unlikely to withstand the rigors of another long Scottish winter. The recommended treatment was to sojourn in the South of France but that, given James’s tiny schoolmastering wage, was quite out of the question.

Instead the forlorn couple took off for London and modest lodgings in Peckham. James Murray, now twenty-seven, had to his bitter disappointment been forced by his domestic circumstances to abandon all his current intellectual pursuits, all his digging and delving and his pronouncements on linguistics, phonetics, and the origins of words—on which topic he was then enjoying a lively correspondence with the notable scholar Alexander Melville Bell, father of the infinitely more famous Alexander Graham Bell.

Economic necessity and marital duty—though he was devoted to Maggie and never complained—had pressed him to become instead, and with a dreary predictability, a clerk in a London bank. With his employment, in starched cuffs and green eyeshade, perched on a high stool at the back of the head office of the Chartered Bank of India, it seemed as though the story might have come to an ignominious end.

Not so. Within just a matter of months he was back in the traces. He had renewed his eccentric pursuit of learning—studying Hindustani and Achaemenid Persian on his daily commute, trying to determine by their accents from which region of Scotland various London policemen came, lecturing on “The Body and its Architecture” before the Camberwell Congregational Church (where, as a confirmed and lifelong teetotaler, he was a keen member of the Temperance League), and even noting with amused detachment, while his still-sickly and well-loved Maggie was dying, that in her nightly delirium she lapsed into the broad Scots dialect of her childhood, abandoning the more refined tones of a schoolteacher. That small discovery, that marginal addition to his learning, went some way to helping him through the misery of her subsequent death.