The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (19 page)

Doctor Minor was clearly in one of his more scholarly, reflective, and positive moods when he read the pamphlet, for he responded with alacrity and enthusiasm. He wrote to James Murray almost immediately, formally volunteering his services as a reader.

It is not wholly clear, though, just when this was—not clear exactly when Minor first started his legendary work. Murray recalled later that he had received Minor’s letter “very soon after I commenced the Dictionary.” No correspondence between the doctor and the dictionary has been traced, however, until 1885—which is hardly “very soon.”

But one clue exists: There had been an article in the
Athenaeum
magazine in September 1879, suggesting that Americans might like to become more keenly involved, and it is quite probable that Minor, who is known to have subscribed to the magazine in Broadmoor, would have seen it. Based on this assumption, on Murray’s recollections, and on the records of Minor’s contributions that have lately been unearthed in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, it seems probable that his relationship with the dictionary got under way in 1880 or 1881.

But where did Murray think his correspondent was living, and what did he think he did? Murray told his correspondent that he remembered only that the first and subsequent letters from Minor had been addressed to the dictionary office simply from “Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire.” Murray was too busy to ruminate on the matter, no matter how curiously familiar the address might have been. By the time he read Minor’s first letter he had already received about eight hundred similar letters in response to his appeal—he was being swamped by the success of his entreaty.

He replied to Minor with his characteristic courtesy, saying that on the basis of his apparent qualifications, enthusiasm, and interest he should start reading immediately, going through any of the volumes he might already have, or else looking to the dictionary office for copies of books he might require.

In due course, Murray continued, the doctor could expect to receive particular word requests—in the particular event that the dictionary editors had trouble finding quotations for a specific word on their own. For the time being, however, Doctor Minor and all the other early respondents, to whom the editor expressed his “considerable gratitude,” should just start reading and should start making word lists and writing quotations in a careful, systematic, but general way.

Two additional sheets of printed paper Murray was enclosing with the letter, which underlined a formal agreement that Doctor Minor had been officially welcomed as a volunteer reader, would offer any necessary further advice.

But through all this, James Murray explained some years later, “I never gave a thought to who Minor might be. I thought he was either a practicing medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure, or perhaps a retired medical man or surgeon who had no other work.”

The truth about his new American correspondent was a great deal stranger than this detached, innocent, and otherworldly Scotsman could have ever imagined.

7

ENTERING THE LISTS

catchword
(kæ·t∫w
d). [f. C
ATCH
- 3 b + W
ORD
.]

1.
Printing
. The first word of the following page inserted at the right-hand lower corner of each page of a book, below the last line. (Now rarely used.)

2.
A word so placed as to catch the eye or attention;
spec.
a.
the word standing at the head of each article in a dictionary or the like;

1879
Directions to Readers for Dict.
, Put the word as a catchword at the upper corner of the slip.
1884
Athenæum
26 Jan. 124/2 The arranging of the slips collected…and the development of the various senses of every Catchword.

The two small closely printed sheets that came as an addendum to Murray’s first letter turned out to be a set of meticulously worded instructions. When his morning mail was delivered by the ward staff that day, Minor must have fallen upon this one envelope eagerly, reading and rereading its contents. But it was not the content alone that fascinated him: A list of rules for dictionary helpers was not the cause of his excitement.

It was the simple fact that they had been sent to him in the first place. The letter from James Murray represented, in Minor’s view, a token of the further forgiveness and understanding that Eliza Merrett’s visits to him had already suggested. The invitation seemed a long-sought badge of renewed membership in the society from which he had been so long estranged. By being sent these sheets of rules he was, he felt, being received back into a corner of the real world. A corner that admittedly was still housed in a pair of cells in an alien madhouse—but one that had firmly forged links to the world of learning, and connections with a more comfortable reality.

After a decade of languishing in the dark slough of imprisonment, intellectual isolation, and remove, Minor felt that at last he was being hoisted back up onto the sunlit uplands of scholarship. And with what he saw as this reenlistment in the ranks, so Minor’s self-worth began, at least marginally, to reemerge, to begin seeping back. From the little evidence that survives in his medical records, he appears to have started recovering his confidence and even his contentment, both with every moment that he spent reading Murray’s acceptance letter, and then when he prepared to embark on his self-set task.

For a while at least he seemed truly happier. Even the sternly worded Victorian ward notes of the day hint that the temper of this usually suspicious, broody, prematurely elderly-looking middle-aged man (he was now approaching fifty) had somehow started to turn. His personality was undergoing, even if only for a short while, a sea change—and all because, at long last, he had something valuable to do.

Yet in its very value lay a problem, as Minor saw it. The doctor swiftly came to realize, and was daunted by the realization, the simple fact that this great work’s immense potential value to history, to posterity, and to the English-speaking world meant that it had to be done properly. Murray’s papers had explained that the dictionary was all about the gathering of hundreds of thousands of quotations. It was a task that was almost unimaginably vast. Could it be done, from an asylum cell?

Minor was both wise enough to understand and ask himself the question (since he knew well where he was, and why he was there) and then, in a partial answer, to applaud Murray for having taken the right approach to the work on which he was about to embark. Minor’s own love of books and literature gave him some knowledge of dictionaries, and an appreciation of what was good and what not so good about those that had already been published. So on reflection he decided that he very much wanted to work for the project, and to be a part of it—not solely because it would give him something worthwhile to do, which was his first reason, but mainly because in his opinion Murray’s plan for doing it was so self-evidently right.

But Murray’s plan meant that there was clearly going to be much more to his cellbound duties than the mere enjoyment of a blissful and leisured romp through the history of published English literature. Minor needed now to pay absolutely scrupulous regard to what he read, to trawl religiously for whatever happened to be needed by Murray’s team, and eventually to select from the cod of his net the very best possible entries to send away to be included in the book.

Murray’s notes showed him how best this might be done. The quotations, said the editor’s first page, were to be written on half sheets of writing paper. The target word—the “catchword,” as Murray liked to call it—was to be written at the top left. The crucial date of the quotation should be written just below it, then the name of the author and title of the cited book, the page number, and finally, the full text of the sentence being quoted. Preprinted slips had already been prepared for some books that were important, well known, and likely to be used a great deal, familiar works by such as Chaucer, Dryden, Hazlett, and Swift—readers assigned to these books needed only write to Mill Hill to have some sent; otherwise, Murray asked them to please write out their own slips in full, arrange them alphabetically, and send them on to the Scriptorium.

All this was simple enough. But, everyone wanted to ask—just what words were to be sought out?

Murray’s early rules were clear and unambiguous:
Every
word was a possible catchword. Volunteers should try to find a quotation for each and every word in a book. They should perhaps concentrate their efforts on words that struck them as rare, obsolete, old-fashioned, new, peculiar, or used in a peculiar way; but they should also look assiduously for ordinary words as well, providing that the sentence that included it said something about the use or meaning of the word. Special attention also needed to be paid to words that seemed to be new or tentative, obsolete or archaic, so that the date could be used to help fix the moment of their introduction into the language. All that, Murray hoped, was surely plain enough.

But then again, asked would-be readers—how many quotations should be supplied for each word? “As many as convenient,” Murray wrote back, especially where different contexts tended either to explain differences in the meaning or helped to illustrate the subtle variations in a particular word’s usage. The more quotation slips that came in to the iron shed he had built in Mill Hill, the better: He assured readers that he had an ample supply of assistants to sort them, and that his floors had been especially strengthened to hold them.

(More than two tons of slips of papers had already come in from Coleridge and Furnivall’s first efforts, Murray added. But he didn’t allow as to how many of them had been nibbled at by mice or ruined by damp, nor did he reveal that one batch was found in a baby’s bassinet, or that a load of slips beginning with the letter
I
had been left in a broken-bottomed hamper in an empty vicarage, or that the entire letter
F
had been accidentally sent off to Florence, or that thousands of slips were so poorly handwritten that, Murray reported to a friend, it would have made for easier reading if they had been written in Chinese.)

The second sheet of notes seemed to Minor at first to offer rather more practical, if much more prosaic, help. It first made clear that Murray had a fund from which he could repay the postage to those volunteers who sent packages of slips but could not afford to do so; and it asked that the packages be sent to Mill Hill by book post, with their ends unsealed, so that Murray didn’t have to pay fines for those that had been shut with even the tiniest bit of adhesive (forbidden by Post Office regulations).

Many early readers turned out to be dreadfully confused; they simply did not understand the scope of their allotted task. For example, asked a couple of them, Did every single use of the word
the
within any one book require an illustrative quote? There would be tens of thousands from any volume, before any of the substantive words were even begun. And further, wailed one of the women readers, what if one had plowed through all 750 pages of a volume, as she just had, and found not a single rare word to extract?

Murray’s notes offer a tolerant and genial-enough response to this kind of complaint, though a faint sense of his Calvinist asperity glimmers between the lines. No, he spoke through moderately gritted teeth, there was really no need to offer scores of illustrations for definite articles and prepositions, unless the circumstances turned out to be very strange. And no, no,
no
! books were
not
to be scoured for rare words alone—he had to remind volunteers of this fact time and again. Readers must find and note
all and any
words that seemed interesting, or that were quoted in interesting and signifying ways or in ways that were
good, apt
, or
pithy
.