The Surgeon of Crowthorne

by Simon Winchester

  The tone of this and other such letters as survive seems halfway between the obsequious and the detached, dignified and controlled on the one hand, and leavened with Uriah Heep-like toadying on the other. Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from the others in their cells.

  Though he has no idea at all of his correspondent’s character or circumstances – thinking him still ‘a practising medical man of literary tastes with a good deal of leisure’ – Murray seems to recognize something of his pleading tone. He notices, for instance, the curious way that Minor seems to prefer to be working on those words that were current – like art first, then blast and buckwheat – and that were in the process of being placed into the succession of pages, parts and volumes of the moment. Murray notes in a letter to a colleague that Minor clearly very much wanted to stay up to date – that unlike most other readers he had no interest in working on words that were destined for volumes and letters to be published years and decades hence. The editor writes later that he felt Minor clearly wanted to be able to feel involved, to enjoy the impression that he, Minor, was somehow a part of the team, doing things in tandem with the scribes up at the Scriptorium.

  Minor was none too far from Oxford, after all – perhaps he felt as though he were at a detached college, like St Catherine’s Society or Mansfield Hall, and that his cells – or what Murray still thought of as his comfortable, book-lined brown study – were just a rurally detached extension of the Scriptorium, a den of scholarly creation and lexical detective work. Had anyone chosen to ponder further, he might have wondered at the strange symmetry of the two men’s settings – pinioned as each was among great stacks of books, single-mindedly devoted to learning of the most recondite kind, each man’s only outlet his correspondence, in great daily storms of paper and floods of ink.

  Except there was a difference: Minor remained profoundly and irreversibly mad.

  The Broadmoor attendants had noticed some improvement in the very early 1880s, when he first replied to the appeal from Mill Hill. But as the years went on, and as Minor passed dejected and alone through the milestone of his fiftieth birthday in June 1884 – his elderly stepmother having visited him the month before, on her way home to America from Ceylon, where she had stayed since her husband’s death – so the old ills returned, reinvigorated, reinforced.

  ‘Dear Dr Orange,’ he writes to the Broadmoor superintendent at the beginning of the next September, ‘The defacement of my books still goes on. It is simply certain that someone besides myself has access to them, and abuses it.’ His handwriting is shaky, uncertain. He heard his cell door opening at 3 a.m. the night before, he says, and goes on, raving, ‘The sound of that door, as you may verify, since the alteration, is unmistakable; and you could be as morally sure of its closure by the sound, as of anything you do not really see.’ If there is no other remedy, he warns, ‘I shall have to send my books back to London, and have them sold.’ Thankfully this small tantrum was short-lived. Had it continued, or worsened, the Dictionary might have lost one of its closest and most valuable friends.

  A month later a new obsession grips him. ‘Dear Dr Orange – Let me mention one fact that falls in with my hypothesis. So many fires have occurred in the US originating quite inexplicably in the interspace of ceiling and floor that, I learn now, Insurance Companies refuse to ensure large buildings – mills, factories – which have the usual hollow spacing under the floor. They insist upon solid floors. All this has come to notice within ten years; but no one suggests any explanation.’

  Except Minor, that is. Fiends have been creeping about in the interstices between floors and ceilings, and have wrought mischief and committed crimes – not least in Broadmoor, where they hide and crawl out at night, to abuse the poor doctor nightly, mark his books, steal his flute and abuse him cruelly. The hospital, he says, must have solid floors built in: otherwise, no fire insurance, and a host of nightly misdeeds.

  The daily reports flow in a kind of seamless syrup of insanity. Four cakes stolen; his flute gone; his books all marked; he himself frog-marched up and down the corridor by Attendants James and Annett. A spare key used at night to allow villagers into his rooms to abuse him and his possessions. Minor, in his drawers and shirt, stockings and slippers, complaining that small pieces of wood were forced into his lock, that electricity was used on his body, that ‘a murderous lot’ had beaten him during the night and had left a savage pain all along his left side. Scoundrels came to his room. Attendant Coles came at 6 a.m. and ‘used his body’. ‘It is a very dirty business,’ he screamed one morning, standing now only in his drawers, ‘that a fellow cannot sleep without Coles coming in like that.’ Again as before: ‘He made a pimp of me!’

  And yet as came the madness, so came the words. Many of those that fascinated him were Anglo-Indian, reflecting his birthplace: there was bhang, brinjal, catamaran, cholera, chunam and cutcherry. He liked brick-tea. By the time of the middle 1890s he became very active working on the letter ‘D’, and though there were some Hindustani words like dubash and dubba and dhobi; he was interested also in what were regarded as the core-words of the Dictionary – and contributions of quotations are in the OED archives for words like delicately, directly, dirt, disquiet, drink, duty and dye. He was able more often than not to supply the quotation for the first use of a word – always an occasion for celebration. For the use of the word dirt as meaning earth, he quotes from John Fryer’s New Account of East India and Persia, published in 1698. For one meaning of magnificent, for one of model, for reminiscence and for spalt, the first work by Du Bosc also provided ideal material.

  The Dictionary staff at Oxford noticed only one small and strange rhythm to Minor’s frantic pace: that in the high summertime rather fewer packages would come. Perhaps, they speculated innocently, Dr Minor liked to spend the warm days outside, away from his books – a reasonable explanation indeed. But when the autumn came around, and the evenings began to darken, so he worked ceaselessly again, replying to every request, asking repeatedly and anxiously about the progress of the enterprise, and inundating the team with ever more packages of slips – more quotations, even, than were needed.

  ‘One could wish that Dr Minor had made about half the number of references,’ wrote Murray to another editor, overwhelmed, ‘but indeed one never really knows what words will come of use till one comes to deal with the word lexicographically.’

  His method of working was very different from everyone else’s, in that he was sending in to Oxford only slips of quotations for words that he knew were actually wanted, and not all and any words that merely interested him, as most other volunteers did. For that reason it is more difficult to make a quantitative comparison, to set the numerical achievement of his work against that of the other great contributors. Perhaps at the end of the project he had actually sent in no more than 10,000 slips, which sounds a fairly modest number. But as virtually all of them proved to be useful, and because every one of them was wanted and had been ordered up, so his achievement as a contributor more than equals the effort achieved by some others, in sending 10,000 slips a year.

  The Oxford team were indeed grateful. The preface to the first completed volume, Volume I: A–B, when finished in 1888 – a full nine years after the project was begun – contains a one-line mention. It might as well have been a page of fulsome thanks: and it made their contributor supremely proud, not least because it was, by happenstance, discreet enough to offer no hint to others of his strange situation. It said simply, and elegantly: ‘Dr W. C. Minor’.

  Grateful though they might have been, the Oxford team were also becoming, as time went on, very, very puzzled. And Murray was more puzzled than all of them.

  Who exactly was this brilliant, strange, exacting man? they asked each other. Murray attempted, fruitlessly, to inquire. Crowthorn
e was less than forty miles from Oxford, an hour by the Great Western Railway via Reading. How was it that Minor, so distinguished and energetic a man, and so much a neighbour, was never to be seen? How could there be a man of such lexicographical skills, who had so much leisure and energy and lived so very close, and yet never seemed to want to see the temple to which he sent so many thousands of offerings? Where was the man’s curiosity? What was his pleasure? Was he somehow unwell, disabled, frightened? Could it be that he felt intimidated by the company of great Oxford men like these?

  The answer to the deepening mystery came about in a curious manner. It was delivered to Murray by a passing scholar-librarian, who stopped by at the Scriptorium in 1889 to talk about more serious matters. In the course of a talk that ranged across the entire spectrum of lexicography he made a chance reference to the Crowthorne doctor.

  How kind the good James Murray had evidently been to him, remarked the scholar. ‘How good you have been to our poor Dr Minor.’

  There was a startled pause, and the assistants and secretaries in the Scriptorium who had overheard the conversation suddenly stopped in their tracks. As one, they looked up, towards where their leader and his visitor were sitting.

  ‘Poor Dr Minor?’ asked Murray, as perplexed as any of those who were now keenly listening. ‘What can you possibly mean?’

  Chapter Nine

  The Meeting of Minds

  || dénouement (de’numã). [F. dénouement, dénoûment, formerly desnouement, f. dénouer, desnouer, in OF. desnoer to untie = Pr. denozar, It. disnodare, a Romantic formation from L. dis- + nodāre to knot, nodus knot.]

  Unravelling; spec. the final unravelling of the complications of a plot in a drama, novel, etc.; the catastrophe; transf. the final solution or issue of a complication, difficulty, or mystery.

  Modern literary myth maintains, even today, that the strangest puzzle surrounding William Chester Minor’s career was this: just why did he not attend the Great Dictionary Dinner – a dinner to which he was invited, and that was held in Oxford on the glittering evening of Tuesday, 12 October 1897?

  It was Jubilee Year, and Oxford was in more than a mood for a party. The Dictionary was at long last going well. The faltering progress of the early years was now accelerating – the fascicle Anta – Battening had been published in 1885, Battentlie–Bozzom in 1887, Bra – Byzen in 1888. A new spirit of efficiency had settled on the Scriptorium. And as crowning glory Queen Victoria had in 1896 ‘graciously agreed’, as the court liked to say, that the just completed third volume – embracing the entirety of the infuriating letter ‘C’ – should be dedicated to her.

  An aura of majestic permanence had all of a sudden invested the Dictionary. There was no doubt now that it would eventually be finished – for since it had been regally approved, who could now ever brook its cancellation? With that happy realization, and now that the Queen had done her part, so now Oxford, in high mood for celebration, decided it could follow suit. James Murray deserved to be given honours and thanks: and who more appropriate than the great man’s adopted university to bestow them.

  The university’s new Vice-Chancellor decided that a big dinner – slap-up, to employ a phrase that the Dictionary was eventually to quote from 1823 – should be held in Murray’s honour. It would be staged in the huge hall at The Queen’s College, where by old tradition a scholar with a silver trumpet sounds a fanfare to summon guests in to dine. It would celebrate what The Times, on the day of the dinner, proclaimed to be ‘the greatest effort probably which any university, it may be any printing press, has taken in hand since the invention of printing… It will not be the least of the glories of the University of Oxford to have completed this gigantic task.’ The evening would be a memorable Oxford event.

  As indeed it was. The long tables were splendidly decorated with flowers and with all the best silverware and crystal that Queen’s could roust from its cellars. The menu was forthright and English – clear turtle soup, turbot with a lobster sauce, haunch of mutton, roast partridges, Queen Mab pudding, strawberry ice. Like the Dictionary itself, it was also flavoured generously, but not too generously, with a hint of Gallicisms: sweetbreads after the mode of Villeroi, grenadines of veal, ramequins. The wines were plentiful and excellent: an 1858 Amontillado, an 1882 Maraschino of Zara, a Château-d’Yquem and Champagne by Pfungst, 1889. The guests wore white tie, academic robes, medals. During the speeches – and after a Loyal Toast at which the graciousness of Her Majesty was loyally noted, and her six decades on the throne proudly congratulated – they smoked cigars.

  They must have smoked long and well. There were no fewer than fourteen speeches – Murray on the entire history of Dictionary-making, the head of the Oxford University Press on his belief that the project was a great duty to the nation, and the egregious Furnivall, as lively and amusing as ever, taking time from recruiting buxom Amazons from the ABC tea-house to come a-rowing with him to speak on what he saw as Oxford’s heartless attitude towards the admission of women.

  Among the guests could be counted all the great and good of the academic land. The editors of the Dictionary, the Delegates of the Press, the printers, members of the Philological Society and, not least, some of the most assiduous and energetic of the staff and volunteers.

  There was Mr F. T. Elworthy of Wellington, the Reverend W. E. Smith of Putney, Lord Aldenham (better known by friends of the Dictionary as Mr H. Hucks Gibbs), Mr Russell Martineau and Monsieur F. J. Amours. The list was long: and so sonorous were the names and so evidently awesome their achievements, the diners, well into their port and cognac by now, heard them out in a silence that was easy to confuse with rapture.

  As it happens the most copious remarks that were made that night about the volunteers relate to two men who had much in common: both were Americans, both spent time in India, both were soldiers, both were mad; and, though both were invited, neither one of them came to the Oxford dinner.

  The first was Dr Fitzedward Hall, who came from Troy, New York. His was a bizarre story. Just as he was going up to Harvard in 1848, his family demanded that he set off for Calcutta to track down an errant brother. His ship was wrecked in the Bay of Bengal; he survived and became fascinated by Sanskrit, studying it to the point where he was eventually offered the Chair in Sanskrit at Government College in what was then called Benares, the holiest city in the Ganges valley. He fought for the British side as a rifleman during the 1857 Mutiny, then left India in 1860 and became a professor of Sanskrit at King’s College, London, and librarian at the India Office.

  And then, quite precipitously, his life fell terribly apart. No one is sure why, except that he had a furious row with a fellow Sanskrit scholar named Theodor Goldstücker. It was a row of such gravity – linguists and philologists were known to be mercurial and hold eternal grudges – that it caused Hall to quit the India Office, have himself summarily suspended from the Philological Society and leave London for a small village in Suffolk.

  People there said he was a drunkard, a foreign spy, hopelessly immoral and an academic phoney. He in turn accused all Britons of rounding on him, of ruining his life, of driving away his wife and displaying only a ‘fiendish hatred’ of Americans. He turned the key in the lock of his cottage in Marlesford and – except for the occasional steamer voyage back home to New York – lived the life of a near total country recluse.

  And yet he wrote, every single day, to Murray at Oxford – a correspondence that continued for twenty years. The two men never met – but over the years Hall without complaint compiled slips, answered queries, offered advice, and remained the staunchest ally of the Dictionary during its bleakest days. Small wonder but that Murray wrote in the great preface: ‘above all we have to record the inestimable collaboration of Dr Fitzedward Hall, whose voluntary labours have completed the literary and documentary history of numberless words, senses and idioms, and whose contributions are to be found on every page’.

  Those at the dinner knew why he did not come: they knew he was a recluse,
a hermit, that he was difficult. But no one knew – or so the story has long had it – exactly why the man next mentioned did not come. Murray, in writing the celebrated preface, had been almost equally generous in his praise: ‘also the unflagging services of Dr W. C. Minor, which have week by week supplied additional quotations for the words actually preparing for press’. ‘Second only to the contributions of Dr Fitzedward Hall,’ Murray was to write a little later, ‘in enhancing our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases and constructions, have been those of Dr W. C. Minor, received week by week.’

  But where, asked the gathered assembly, was Dr Minor? He was living only at Crowthorne, sixty minutes away by the green-and-gold steam trains of the Great Western. He was not notorious as an ill-tempered misanthrope, like Dr Hall. His letters had always been noted for their courtesy and solicitousness. So why could he not have the courtesy to come? To some who dined at Queen’s on that glorious autumn evening, Dr Minor’s absence must have seemed a melancholy footnote to an otherwise glorious literary moment.

  The received wisdom has it that Murray was perplexed, even vaguely irritated. According to one version of the story, it is said that he vowed, with all the knowledge of his lexicography, to take a leaf from Francis Bacon, who in 1625 had written in English the axiom from the hadith, to the effect that ‘If the hill will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet will go to the hill.’

  It is said that he promptly wrote to Minor, his letter supposedly reading as follows:

  You and I have now known each other through correspondence for fully seventeen years, and it is a sad fact that we have never met. Perhaps it has never proved convenient for you to travel; maybe it has been too expensive; but while it is difficult indeed for me to leave the work of the Scriptorium even for one day, I have long wanted to meet you, and may I perhaps suggest that I come to visit you. If this is convenient, perhaps you might suggest a day and a train, and if convenient for me I will telegraph the time of my expected arrival.