The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (25 page)

The truth, however, turns out to be only marginally less romantic. It surfaces in a letter Murray wrote in 1902 to a distinguished friend, Dr. Francis Brown, in Boston, and which turned up in a wooden box in the attic of one of William Minor’s very few living relations, a retired businessman living in Riverside, Connecticut. The letter appears to be the full and complete original, although it was the exhausting habit of many letter writers of the time to prepare a fair copy of all their outgoing mail, and in so doing occasionally to edit and elide some passages.

His first contact with Minor, writes Doctor Murray, came very soon after the beginning of his work in the dictionary—probably 1880 or even 1881. “He proved to be a very good reader, who wrote to me often,” and, as has already been mentioned, Murray thought only that he must be a retired medical man with plenty of time on his hands:

By accident, my attention was called to the fact that his address,
Broadmoor, Crowthorne
, Berkshire, was that of a large lunatic asylum. I assumed that (perhaps) he was the medical officer of that institution.

But our correspondence was of course entirely limited to the Dictionary and its materials, and the only feeling I had towards him was that of gratitude for his immense help, with some surprise at the rare and expensive old books that he evidently had access to.

This continued for years until one day, between 1887 and 1890, the late Mr. Justin Winsor, Librarian of Harvard College, was sitting chatting in my Scriptorium and among other things remarked “you have given great pleasure to Americans by speaking as you do in your Preface of poor Dr. Minor. This is a very painful case.”

“Indeed,” I said with astonishment, “in what way?”

Mr. W. was equally astonished to find that in all these years I had corresponded with Dr. Minor I had never learned nor suspected anything about him; and he then thrilled me with his story.

The great librarian—for Justin Winsor remains one of the grandest figures in all of nineteenth-century American librarianship, and a formidable historian to boot—then told the story, which Murray then retold to his friend in Boston. Some of the facts are wrong, as facts tend to be when related over a period of years—Murray says that Minor went to Harvard (while in fact he went to Yale), and repeats the probably apocryphal story that he was driven mad by having to witness the execution of two men after a court-martial. He goes on to say that the shooting happened in the Strand—then, unlike now, one of London’s more fashionable streets—rather than in the grim purlieus of the Lambeth waterside. But essentially the story is relayed correctly, after which Murray resumes his own narrative.

I was of course deeply affected by the story; but as Dr. Minor had never in the least alluded to himself or his position, all I could do was to write to him more respectfully and kindly than before, so as to show no notice of this disclosure, which I feared might make some change in our relations.

A few years ago an American citizen who called on me told me he had been to see Dr. Minor and said he found him rather low and out of spirits, and urged me to go to see him. I said I shrank from that, because I had no reason to suppose that Dr. Minor thought I knew anything about him personally.

He said: “Yes, he does. He has no doubt that you know all about him, and it really would be a kindness if you would go and see him.”

I then wrote to Dr. Minor telling him that, and that Mr. (I forget the name) who had recently visited him had told me that a visit from me would be welcome. I also wrote to Dr. Nicholson, the then Governor, who warmly invited me—and when I went, drove me from and to the Railway Station and invited me to lunch, at which he also had Dr. Minor, who I found was a great favorite with his children.

I sat with Dr. Minor in his room or cell many hours altogether before and after lunch, and found him, as far as I could see, as sane as myself, a much cultivated and scholarly man, with many artistic tastes, and of fine Christian character, quite resigned to his sad lot, and grieved only on account of the restriction it imposed on his usefulness.

I learned (from the Governor, I think) that he has always given a large part of his income to support the widow of the man whose death he so sadly caused, and that she regularly visits him.

Dr. Nicholson had a great opinion of him, gave him many privileges and regularly took distinguished visitors up to his room or cell, to see him and his books. But his successor the present governor has not shown such special sympathy.

The meeting took place in January 1891—six years earlier than is favored by the romantics who repeat the dictionary dinner story. Murray had written to Nicholson asking for permission, and in the letter we can almost feel his childlike, knee-squeezing anticipation of the event.

It will give me great satisfaction to make the acquaintance of Dr. Minor, to whom the Dictionary owes so much, as well as yourself who have been so kind to him. I shall probably come by the train you name (the 12 from Reading) but have not had time to look up the time-table, or rather to ask my wife to do so; for in such matters I deliver myself automatically into her hands, and she tells me, “Your train starts so and so, and you will go by such a train, and I will come into the Scriptorium and fetch you to get ready five minutes before.” I thankfully comply, and do my work until the “five minutes before” arrives.

It is now abundantly clear that the two men knew each other personally, and saw each other regularly, for almost twenty years from that date. The first encounter over lunch was to begin a long and firm friendship, based both on a wary mutual respect, and, more particularly, on their passionate and keenly shared love for words.

For both men, the first sight of the other must have been peculiar indeed, for they were uncannily similar in appearance. Both were tall, thin, and bald. Both had deeply hooded blue eyes, neither using spectacles (though Minor was profoundly myopic). Doctor Minor’s nose looks a little hooked, Doctor Murray’s finer and more aquiline. Minor has an air of avuncular kindliness; Murray much the same, but with a trace of the severity that might well distinguish a lowland Scot from a Connecticut Yankee.

But what was most obviously similar about the men were their beards—in both cases white, long, and nicely swallow-tailed—with thick moustaches, sideburns, and ample buggers’ grips. Both looked like popular illustrations of Father Time; boys in Oxford would see Murray tricycling by and call out, “Father Christmas!” at him.

True, Doctor Minor’s had a more ragged and unkempt look about it, doubtless because the arrangements for cutting and washing inside Broadmoor were rather less sophisticated than in the outside world. Murray’s beard, on the other hand, was fine and well-combed and shampooed, and looked as though no particle of food had ever been allowed to rest there. Minor’s was the more homely, while Murray’s was more of a fashion statement. But both were magnificently fecund arrangements. When the beards were added to the other collections of the pair’s individual attributes, each must have imagined, for a second, that he was stepping toward himself in a looking-glass, rather than meeting a stranger.

The two men met dozens of times in the next several years. By all accounts they liked each other—a liking subject only to Doctor Minor’s moods, to which Murray became over the years fully sensitive. He often had the foresight to telegraph Nicholson, to ask how the patient was; if low and angry, he would remain at Oxford; if low and likely to be comforted, he would board the train.

When the weather was poor the men would sit together in Minor’s room—a small and practically furnished cell not too dissimilar from a typical Oxford student’s room, and just like the room Murray was to be given at Balliol, once he was made an honorary fellow. It was lined with bookshelves, all of which were open except for one glass-fronted case that held the rarest of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works from which much of the
OED
work was being done. The fireplace crackled merrily. Tea and Dundee cake were brought in by a fellow inmate whom Minor had hired to work for him—one of the many privileges Nicholson, like Orange before him, accorded his distinguished inmate.

There was a whole raft of other perks besides. He was able to order books at will from various antiquarian dealers in London, New York, and Boston. He was able to write uncensored letters to whomever he chose. He was able to have visitors more or less at will—and told Murray with some pride that Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man he murdered, would come to his rooms quite frequently. She was not an unattractive woman, he said, though it was thought that she drank rather too much for comfort.

He subscribed to magazines, which he and Murray would read to each other: The
Spectator
was one of his favorites, and
Outlook
, which was mailed to him by his relations in Connecticut. He took the
Athenaeum
, as well as the splendidly arcane Oxford publication
Notes & Queries
, which even today makes puzzling inquiries of the world’s literary community, about unsolved mysteries of the bookish world. The
OED
used to publish its word desiderata there; until Murray began visiting Crowthorne, this was Minor’s principal means of finding out which particular words the
OED
staff were working on.

Although the men talked principally about words—most often about a specific word, but sometimes about more general lexical problems of dialect and the nuances of pronunciation—they did, it is certain, discuss in a general sense the nature of the doctor’s illness. Murray could not help noticing, for instance, that Minor’s cell floor had been covered with a sheet of zinc—“to prevent men coming in through the timbers at night”—and that he kept a bowl of water beside the door of whichever room he was in—“because the evil spirits will not dare to cross water to get to me.”

Murray was aware, too, of the doctor’s fears that he would be transported from his room at night and made to perform “deeds of the wildest excess” in “dens of infamy” before being returned to his cell by dawn. Once airplanes were invented—and Minor, being American, kept keenly up to date with all that happened in the years after the Wright Brothers first flew at Kitty Hawk—he incorporated them into his delusions. Men would then break into his rooms, place him in a flying machine, and take him to brothels in Constantinople, where he would be forced to perform acts of terrible lewdness with cheap women and small girls. Murray winced as he heard these tales, but held his tongue. It was not his place to regard the old man with anything other than sad affection; and besides, his work for the dictionary continued apace.

When the weather was fine the two men would walk together on the Terrace—a wide gravel path inside the asylum’s south wall, shaded by tall old firs and araucaria, the monkey-puzzle tree. The lawns were green, the shrubbery filled with daffodils and tulips, and once in a while other patients would emerge from the blocks to play football, or walk, or sit staring into space from one of the wooden benches. Attendants would lurk in the shadows, making sure there were no outbreaks of trouble.

Murray and Minor, hands behind their backs, would walk in step, slowly back and forth along the three hundred yards of the Terrace, always in the shadows of either the gaunt red buildings or of the seventeen-foot wall. They always seemed animated, deep in conversation; papers were produced, sometimes books. They did not speak to others, and gave the impression of inhabiting a world of their own.

Sometimes Doctor Nicholson would invite the pair in for afternoon tea; and on one or two occasions Ada Murray came to Broadmoor too, and remained with Nicholson and his family in the superintendent’s comfortably furnished house while the men pored over the books in the cell or on the gravel walkway. There was always sadness when the time came for the editor to leave: The keys would turn, the gates would clang shut, and Minor would be left alone again, trapped in a world of his own making, redeemed only when, after a day or so of quiet mourning, he could take down another volume from his shelves, select a needed word and its most elegant context, pick up his pen, and dip it in the ink to write once more: “To Dr. Murray, Oxford.”

The Oxford Post Office knew the address well: It was all that was needed to communicate by letter with the greatest lexicographer in the land, and make sure the information got through to him at the Scriptorium.

Few enough letters between the two men survive. There is a lengthy letter from 1888, in which Minor writes about the quotations containing the word
chaloner
—an obsolete name for a man who manufactured shalloon, which was a woolen lining material for coats. He is interested, according to a later note, in the word
gondola
, and finds a quotation from Spenser, in 1590.

Murray talked about his new friend often, and liked to include him—and indeed, with some discreet reference to his condition—in the speeches he was often obliged to make. In 1897, for instance, his notes survive for a speech he was to give at a dictionary evening at the Philological Society: “About 15 or 16,000 add’l slips rec’d during the past year. Half of those supplied by Dr. W. C. Minor whose name and pathetic story, I have often before alluded to. Dr. M. has in reading 50 or 60 books, mostly scarce, of the 16
^th
-17
^th
C. His practice is to keep just ahead of the actual preparation of the Dictionary.”

Two years later Murray felt able to be more fulsome still:

The supreme position…is certainly held by Dr. W. C. Minor of Broadmoor, who during the past two years has sent in no less than 12,000 quots [
sic
]. These have nearly all been for the words which Mr. Bradley and I were actually occupied, for Dr. Minor likes to know each month just what words we are likely to be working on during the month and to devote his whole strength to supplying quotations for those words, and thus to feel that he is in touch with the making of the Dictionary.