The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  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 at 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, 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 calm 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 that ‘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 Greek theatre, for which the word was first devised.

  In the common-sense world of modern English – the world which, after all, the great Dictionary was designed to fix and define – 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 OED, 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 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, although it was different in almost all its other aspects: 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 OED, since 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 River Teviot, in the Scottish borderlands. And that was about all that he really wished the world to know about himself. ‘I am a nobody,’ he would write towards 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. Honours 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 unmasked twenty years ago by his granddaughter Elisabeth, who opened his trunk of papers, hints temptingly that he was destined – despite his unpromising, unmonied, 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.’

  He had a voracious appetite, 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 the dog-star Sirius, 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 present at the proclamation ofWilliam and Mary 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 borderlands (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 translate for his family, who gathered about him, fascinated.

  He once tried to invent water-wings from bundles of pond iris, tied them to his arms but was turned upside-down by more buoyancy than he had calculated, and would have drowned (he was a non-swimmer) 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 and flourishes and curlicues, rather like the monkish illuminators of the Middle Ages.

  By seventeen this ‘argumentative, earnest, naïve’ young Scot was employed in his home town as an assistant head schoolmaster, eagerly passing on the knowledge that he had so keenly gained; by twenty he was a fully fledged headmaster of the local Subscription Academy; and with his brother Alexander he became a leading member of that most Victorian and Scottish of bodies, the local Mutual Improvement Institute. He gave his first lecture, ‘Reading, Its Pleasures and Advantages’, and went on to present learned papers to the local Literary and Philosophical Society on his new passions of phonetics, on the origins of pronu
nciations, on the foundations of the Scottish tongue, and, once he had discovered its delights, on the magic of Anglo-Saxon.

  And yet all of 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, Murray met and the following year married a handsome but delicate infant-school music teacher named Maggie Scott. Their wedding picture shows Murray a strangely tall, vaguely simian figure in his ill-fitting frock coat and baggy trews, a man with hugely long knee-brushing arms, an unkempt beard, hair already thinning by 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 whom 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 rigours of another long Scottish winter. The recommended treatment was to sojourn in the South of France but that, given Murray’s tiny schoolmaster’s wage, was quite out of the question.

  Instead the forlorn couple took off for London, and modest lodgings in Peckham. Murray, now twenty-seven, had to his bitter disappointment been forced by his domestic circumstances to abandon all of his current intellectual pursuits, all of his digging and delving and pronouncements on linguistics and on 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, green eye-shade and 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 Achaemenian 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 teetotaller, he was a keen member of their Temperance League), and even noting with amused detachment, while his sickly and well-loved Maggie was dying, that in her nightly delirium she lapsed into the broad Scots dialect of her childhood, and abandoned 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.

  And one would be right in wondering about this detachment: a year after her death Murray 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 here in Ada Ruthven, whose father worked for the Great Indian Peninsular Railway and was an admirer of Humboldt, and whose mother claimed to have been to school with Charlotte Brontë, was a woman who was far more his social and intellectual equal. They were to remain devoted and to have eleven children together, ten of whom bore the middle name Ruthven, according to the wishes of the father-in-law.

  A letter that Murray then wrote in 1867, his thirtieth year, applying for a post with the British Museum, offers some of the flavour of his barely believable range of knowledge (as well as his unabashed candour 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 is left by Genesius.

  It somewhat beggars belief that the Museum turned down his job application. 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, were it not for his friendship with two men. One was a Trinity College, Cambridge, mathematician named Alexander Ellis, and the other a notoriously pig-headed, 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 (where Higgins was played, in the film, by the similarly rude and pig-headed 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 university. By 1869 he was on the Society’s Council. In 1873 – having now 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 a reputation to the point of wide admiration (and to win him the invitation to contribute an essay on the history of English language for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia 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 in her tough serge weeds, scowling.

  For 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’.

  He was, however, a brilliant scholar and, like Murray, had an obsessive thirst for learning; among his friends and admi
rers he could count Alfred Lord Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, William Morris, John Ruskin – Minor’s London mentor, it would later turn out – and the Yorkshire-born composer Frederick Delius. Kenneth Grahame, a fellow sculler who worked at the Bank of England, came duly under Furnivall’s spell, wrote 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 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 Murray – as well as Murray’s links with Sweet and Ellis – that was to lead, ultimately, to the most satisfactory event of all. This occurred on the afternoon of 26 April 1878, at which time James Augustus Henry Murray was invited to Oxford, to a room in Christ Church, 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 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 as 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.