The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (7 page)

A year later James was engaged to another young woman and a year later still, married. While he had clearly loved and admired Maggie Scott, it was soon abundantly clear that in Ada Ruthven, whose father worked for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway and was an admirer of Alexander von Humboldt, and whose mother claimed to have been at school with Charlotte Brontë, here was a woman who was far more his social and intellectual equal. They were to remain devoted, and to have eleven children together, the first nine, according to the wishes of James’s father-in-law, bearing the middle name Ruthven.

A letter that James Murray wrote in 1867, his thirtieth year, applying for a position with the British Museum, offers some of the flavor of his barely believable range of knowledge (as well as his unabashed candor in telling people about it):

I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit during the whole of my life, and that I possess a general acquaintance with the languages & literature of the Aryan and Syro-Arabic classes—not indeed to say that I am familiar with all or nearly all of these, but that I possess that general lexical and structural knowledge which makes the intimate knowledge only a matter of a little application. With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a less degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal and various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer, I having prepared some works for publication upon these languages. I know a little of the Celtic, and am at present engaged with the Sclavonic, having obtained a useful knowledge of the Russian. In the Persian, Achaemenian Cuneiform, & Sanscrit branches, I know for the purposes of Comparative Philology. I have sufficient knowledge of Hebrew and Syriac to read at sight the Old Testament and Peshito; to a less degree I know Aramaic Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician to the point where it was left by Genesius.

It somewhat beggars belief that the museum turned his job application down. Murray was initially crushed but soon recovered. Before long he was consoling himself in a characteristic way—by comparing, in lexical terms, the sheep-counting numerology of the Wowenoc Indians of Maine with that of the moorland farmers of Yorkshire.

Murray’s interest in philology might have remained that of an enthusiastic amateur had it not been for his friendship with two men. One was a Trinity College, Cambridge, mathematician named Alexander Ellis, and the other a notoriously pigheaded, colossally rude phonetician named Henry Sweet—the figure on whom Bernard Shaw would later base his character Professor Henry Higgins in
Pygmalion
, which was transmuted later into the eternally popular
My Fair Lady
(in which Higgins was played, in the film, by the similarly rude and pigheaded actor Rex Harrison).

These men swiftly turned the amateur dabbler and dilettante into a serious philological scholar. Murray was introduced into membership of the august and exclusive Philological Society—no mean achievement for a young man who, it must be recalled, had left school at fourteen and had not thus far attended a university. By 1869 he was on the society’s council. In 1873—having left the bank and gone back to teaching (at Mill Hill School)—he published
The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland
: It was a work that was to gild and solidify his reputation to the point of wide admiration (and to win him the invitation to contribute an essay on the history of the English language for the ninth edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
). It also brought him into contact with one of the most amazing men of Victorian England—the half-mad scholar-gypsy who was secretary of the Philological Society, Frederick Furnivall.

Some thought Furnivall—despite his devotion to mathematics, Middle English, and philology—a total clown, an ass, a scandalous dandy, and a fool (his critics, who were legion, made much of the fact that his father maintained a private lunatic asylum in the house where the young Frederick had grown up).

He was a socialist, an agnostic, and a vegetarian, and “to alcohol and tobacco he was a stranger all his life.” He was a keen athlete, obsessed by sculling, and was particularly fond of teaching handsome young waitresses (recruited from the ABC teashop in New Oxford Street) the best way to get the most speed out of a slender racing boat he had designed. A photograph of him survives from 1901: He wears an impish smirk, not least because he is surrounded by eight pretty members of the Hammersmith Sculling Club for Girls, content and well-exercised women whose skirts may be long but whose shirts lie snug on their ample breasts. In the background stands a stern Victorian matron, clad all in tough serge weeds, scowling.

Frederick Furnivall was indeed an appalling flirt. He was condemned by many as socially reprehensible for committing the doubly unpardonable sin of marrying a lady’s maid and then abandoning her. Dozens of editors and publishers refused to work with him: he was “devoid of tact or discretion…had a boyish frankness of speech which offended many and led him into unedifying controversies…his declarations of hostility to religion and to class distinctions were often unreasonable and gave pain.”

But he was a brilliant scholar, and, like James Murray, he had an obsessive thirst for learning; among his friends and admirers he could count Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Kingsley; William Morris; John Ruskin—Doctor Minor’s London mentor, it would later turn out—and the Yorkshireborn composer Frederick Delius. Kenneth Grahame, a fellow sculler who worked at the Bank of England, came duly under Furnivall’s spell, wrote
The Wind in the Willows
and painted Furnivall into the plot as the Water Rat. “We learned em!” says Toad. “We taught em” corrects Rat. Furnivall may have been a cunning mischief-maker, but he was also often right.

He may have been Grahame’s mentor; but he was a much more significant figure in James Murray’s life. As the latter’s biographer was to say, admiringly, Furnivall was to Murray “stimulating and persuasive, often meddlesome and exasperating, always a dynamic and powerful influence, eclipsing even James in his gusto for life.”

He was in many ways a Victorian’s Victorian, an Englishman’s Englishman—and a natural choice, as the country’s leading philologist, to take a dominant role in the making of the great new dictionary that was then in the process of being constructed.

It was Furnivall’s friendship with and sponsorship of James Murray—as well as Murray’s links with Sweet and Ellis—that were to lead, ultimately, to the most satisfactory event of all. This occurred on the afternoon of April 26, 1878, at which time James Augustus Henry Murray was invited to Oxford, to a room in Christ Church College, Oxford, and to an awesome full meeting of the grandest minds in the land, the Delegates of the Oxford University Press.

They were a formidable group—the college dean, Henry Liddell (whose daughter Alice had so captivated the Christ Church mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson that he wrote an adventure book for her, set in Wonderland); Max Müller, the Leipzig philologist, Orientalist, and Sanskrit scholar who now held Oxford’s chair of Comparative Philology; the Regius Professor of History, William Stubbs, the man who was credited in Victorian times with having made the subject worthy of respectable academic pursuit; the canon of Christ Church and classical scholar, Edwin Palmer; the warden of New College, James Sewell—and so on and so on.

High Church, high learning, high ambition: These were the Men Who Counted, the architects of the great intellectual constructions that originated during England’s haughtiest and most self-confident time. As Isambard Kingdom Brunel was to bridges and railways, as Sir Richard Burton was to Africa, and as Robert Falcon Scott was soon to be to the Antarctic, so these men were the best, the makers of indelible monuments to learning—of the books that were to be the core foundation of the great libraries all around the globe.

And they had a project, they said, in which Doctor Murray might well be very interested indeed. A project that, unwittingly on the parts of all concerned, was eventually to put James Murray on a collision course with a man whose interests and whose piety were curiously congruent with his own.

At first blush William Minor might seem to have been a man more marked by his differences from Murray than by such similarities as these. He was rich where Murray was poor. He was of high estate where Murray’s condition was irredeemably, if respectably, low. And though he was almost the same age—just three years separated them—he had been born both of a different citizenship and, as it happens, in a place that was almost as many thousands of miles away from Murray’s British Isles as it was then thought prudent and practicable for ordinary people to reach.

3

THE MADNESS OF WAR

Lunatic
(l
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a.
[ad. late L.
l
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, f. L.
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moon: see -
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