The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  The twin notions of selecting the right editor and the proper publisher continued to vex the lexicographical and commercial literary establishments of England for the final years of the seventies. Oxford’s Delegates first dismayed everyone by saying that they cared little for Murray’s specimens: They wanted more proof that Murray had looked hard enough for quotations for his four chosen words; they said they didn’t like the way he had offered the words’ pronunciations; and they dithered about whether or not his etymological section should be omitted (not least because they were already publishing a quite separate and scholarly Etymological Dictionary of their own).

  In exasperation Murray and Furnivall looked hopefully toward the Cambridge press, but the syndics there (the local equivalent of the Oxford Delegates) offered only a brusque rebuff. Lobbying went on, in common rooms and London clubs, week after week. And as time passed, so Oxford slowly became persuaded that changes could be made, that the powers that be might ultimately find the pages of the proposed book to be acceptable, that Murray might well be the man, and that the big dictionary could in fact one day have the commercial and intellectual appeal that Oxford wanted.

  It was finally, on April 26, 1878, that James Murray was invited up to Oxford for the first meeting with the Delegates themselves. He had come expecting to be terrified of them; they imagined they would be dismissive of him. But to everyone’s surprised delight, he found that he rather liked the grand old men who sat in that great Oxford boardroom, and, more to the point, they discovered in short order that they very much liked him. The upshot of the meeting was the Delegates’ decision, in a moment of subdued and characteristically Oxonian jubilation—celebrated with a glass or two of indifferent dry sherry—to proceed.

  Arguments over the details of the contract—which were often bitter, but were rarely conducted in person by a decidedly other-worldly James Murray (though his hard-headed wife, Ada, did have things to say)—took another full year. Finally, on March 1, 1879, almost a quarter of a century after the speech by Richard Chenevix Trench, a document was formally agreed upon: James Murray was to edit, on behalf of the Philological Society of London, The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, which would spread itself across an estimated seven thousand quarto pages in four thick volumes, and take ten years to complete. It was still a woeful underestimate, but the work was now beginning properly, and this time it was never to stop.

  Within days Murray had made two decisions. First, he would build a corrugated iron shed on the grounds of Mill Hill School, he would call it the Scriptorium (the first of his two specially built headquarters), and would edit the great dictionary from there. And second, he would write and have published a four-page appeal—“to the English-speaking and English-reading public”—for a vast fresh corps of volunteers. The committee, he declared, “want help from readers in Great Britain, America and the British Colonies, to finish the volunteer work so enthusiastically commenced twenty years ago, by reading and extracting the books which still remain unexamined.”

  The four sheets of paper—eight pages of writing—went out to the magazines and newspapers of the day, which regarded them as a press release and published such parts as seemed likely to interest their readers. They went out also to bookshops and newsstands, and assistants handed them to customers. Librarians handed them out as bookmarks, and there were small wooden cases in shops and libraries from which the public could take them and read them. Before long they had found wide circulation all around the United Kingdom and its various dominions, old and new.

  And sometime in the early 1880s one copy, at least, left inside a book or slipped between the pages of a learned journal, found its way to one of two large cells on the top floor of Block 2 of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Crowthorne, Berkshire. It was read, voraciously, by William Minor, a man for whom books, with which one of his two cells was lined from floor to ceiling, had become a second life.

  Doctor Minor had been an inmate at Broadmoor for the previous eight years. He was deluded, true; but he was a sensitive and intelligent man, a graduate of Yale, and well read and curious. He was, understandably, preternaturally anxious to have something useful to do, something that might occupy the weeks and months and years and decades that stretched without limit—“Until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be Known”—before him.

  This invitation from a Dr. James Murray of Mill Hill, Middlesex, N.W., it seemed, promised an opportunity for intellectual stimulus—and perhaps even a measure of personal redemption—that was far better than any he could otherwise imagine. He would write, immediately.

  He took down paper and a pen, and in a firm hand wrote his address: Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berks. A perfectly ordinary address. To anyone who did not know any better it was merely a means of describing an ordinary house, in an ordinary village, in a prettily rural royal county just beyond the boundaries of London.

  And even if someone outside did know the word asylum, the sole definition that was available at the time was quite innocent in its explanation. The meaning was to be found in Johnson’s dictionary, naturally: “A place out of which he that has fled to it, may not be taken.” An asylum was to Doctor Johnson no more than a sanctuary, a refuge. William Chester Minor was quite content to be seen to write from inside such a place—just so long as no one looked too closely for the deeper and more sinister meaning that the word was then gathering to itself in the hard times of Victorian England.

  6

  THE SCHOLAR IN CELL BLOCK TWO

  Bedlam (be·dləm). Forms: I-3 betleem, 3 beþþleæm, 3–6 beth(e)leem, 4 bedleem, 4–8 bethlem, 6– -lehem, 3–7 bedlem, 5 bedelem, 6 bedleme, 6–7 -lame, 6– bedlam. [ME. Bedlem = Bethlem, Bethlehem; applied to the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, in London, founded as a priory in 1247, with the special duty of receiving and entertaining the bishop of St. Mary of Bethlehem, and the canons, etc. of this, the mother church, as often as they might come to England. In 1330 it is mentioned as ‘an hospital,’ and in 1402 as a hospital for lunatics (Timbs); in 1346 it was received under the protection of the city of London, and on the Dissolution of the Monasteries, it was granted to the mayor and citizens, and in 1547 incorporated as a royal foundation for the reception of lunatics. Thence the modern sense, of which instances appear early in 16th c.]

  2. The Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem, used as an asylum for the reception and cure of mentally deranged persons; originally situated in Bishopsgate, in 1676 rebuilt near London Wall, and in 1815 transferred to Lambeth. Jack or Tom o’ Bedlam: a madman.

  3. By extension: A lunatic asylum, a madhouse.

  Minor, William Chester. A thin, pale and sharp-featured man with light sandy-coloured hair, deep-set eyes and prominent cheek bones. He is 38 years old, of superior education, indeed a surgeon, but of no known religion. He weights 10 stone, one pound, and is formally classified as being Dangerous to Others. He was charged with the willful murder of one George Merrett of Lambeth, was found Not Guilty on the Grounds of Insanity. He says he has been the victim of persecution for years—the victim of the lower classes, in whom he has no faith. Persons unknown are trying to injure him, with poison.

  So begin the case notes for Broadmoor patient 742, based on an examination conducted in the afternoon of the day he was admitted, Wednesday, April 17, 1872.

  Guards had brought him there in shackles, along with another murderer—a man who was classified “Too Insane to be Tried”—named Edmund Dainty: Both had been waiting in jail at Newington in Surrey until the necessary papers had been brought down from London. They were brought first by steam train to the small red-brick Gothic railway station that had been built by and then named for Wellington College, one of the great schools of southern England, which stood nearby. A black Broadmoor landau, its roof closed, then took Minor and his escorts through the narrow, leafy lanes winding around the tiny village. The horses were sweating slightly as they hauled the four-wheel vehicle and its occupants up the low sandstone hill at the top of which
stands Broadmoor itself.

  The Special Hospital, as it is called today, still looks a forbidding place, even though much of what must have rendered it quite terrifying in Victorian times is now hidden discreetly behind its high, smoothly round-topped, modern maximum-security walls. In 1872 Doctor Minor came to the original front gate—two triple-storied towers with heavily barred windows, with an imposing archway between, topped by a large black-faced clock. The arch was closed by a massive pair of green outer wooden doors. A peephole in one snapped open at the sound of the horses’ hooves, the doors swung back to reveal another set of heavy gates, ten yards deeper into the asylum.

  The landau moved swiftly inside, the front doors were slammed closed and bolted hard, and the lights in the dim and cavernous reception area were switched on. Doctor Minor was ordered to step out, to be searched. His chains were removed, to be taken back to Surrey. The escorting tipstaff (the Broadmoor bailiff) handed over the papers—a long warrant in elegant copperplate, above the signature of Henry Austin Bruce, Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for the Home Department. The asylum superintendent, a kindly and sympathetic man named William Orange, had his deputy sign the receipt.

  Doctor Minor was led through the second set of gates and into Block 4, the admissions building. He heard the horses turn around, heard his escort clamber up into the carriage and order the driver to return to the railway station. He heard the outer gates open to let the carriage out, and then close again. There was a resounding second crash as the inner metal gates shut and were bolted and chained. He was now formally and properly a Broadmoor inmate, confined in what would probably be his home for the rest of his natural life.

  It was a fairly new home, however. Broadmoor had been open just nine years. It had been built because the state’s main lunatic asylum, the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem—from which we have the word bedlam for a madhouse—was now full to bursting. (By coincidence, it was located in Lambeth, less than a mile from the murder site.) Legal recognition of criminal madness had been established by Parliament in 1800, and judges had for the past half century been dispatching into asylums—and sentencing to stay there until the monarch’s “Pleasure be Known”—scores of men and women who would hitherto have been sent to ordinary prisons.

  The Victorians, with their characteristic mix of severity and enlightenment, believed the inmates could both be kept securely away from the public to whom they were so dangerous, and properly treated. But the enlightenment only went so far: While nowadays the Broadmoor inmates are patients, and Broadmoor itself a special hospital, a century ago there was no mincing of words: The inmates were lunatics and criminals, they were treated by “alienists” and “mad-doctors,” and Broadmoor was indubitably an asylum, in which they were firmly imprisoned.

  Broadmoor certainly looked and felt—and was meant to look and feel—like a prison. It had been designed by a military architect, Sir Joshua Jebb, who had previously created two of England’s darkest high-security penitentiaries, Pentonville and Dartmoor. It had long, gaunt cell blocks, severe and intimidating; all the buildings were of dark red brick; all the windows were barred; there was a huge wall topped with iron spikes and broken glass.

  The institution slouched crablike, ugly, and forbidding on top of its hill: Villagers would look up toward it and shudder. They tested the escape sirens every Monday morning: The banshee wails that echoed and reechoed across the hills were spine chilling; people said the birds remained silent, frightened, for many minutes afterward.

  But Doctor Minor, an American murderer—where to put him? The normal practice, which, to judge from his case notes, was almost certainly followed in Minor’s case, was to spend several early days asking the newcomer about himself, and then, if he wanted to discuss it, about the crime that had caused him to be sent there. (One newcomer, asked why he had killed his wife and children, told the superintendent: “I don’t know why I am telling you all of this. It’s none of your business As a matter of fact it was none of the judge’s business either. It was a purely family affair [emphasis added].”)

  Once that was duly accomplished—it was then standard Broadmoor practice never again to ask about the crime—the superintendent decided which of the six male blocks (there were two others for women, securely fenced off from the men) was most suitable. If the patient was judged suicidal (and his records were thereafter written on pink cards, not white) he was put in a cell in Block 6, where there were extra staff members to observe him all the time; if he was diagnosed epileptic he was put in another cell in the same block, a special cell that had padded walls and a wedge-shaped pillow on which he could not suffocate himself during a fit.

  If he was thought to be dangerous and violent, he was also shut up in Block 6, or maybe the slightly smaller-staffed Block 1—the two being known variously as the “strong blocks,” “the disturbed blocks,” or more recently the “refractory blocks.” Then as now the two buildings, grimmer and gaunter than the rest, were known among the inmates as the “back blocks,” because they have no view over the landscape. They are secure, tough, miserable.

  After the first few days of interrogations the Broadmoor doctors realized that their new charge—a doctor himself, after all—was neither epileptic, nor liable to kill himself, nor sufficiently violent to do anyone an injury. So he was sent to Block 2—a relatively comfortable wing that was usually kept for parole patients. It was called the “swell block,” the word used in the British sense, meaning it tended to be occupied by swells. A visitor once wrote that Block 2 had an atmosphere “described by someone familiar with both, as identical with that at the Athenaeum Club.” It is difficult to imagine that too many members of this most genteel of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, which included on its rolls most of the bishops and learned men of the land, were thrilled by the comparison.

  Yet Minor was made more than just tolerably comfortable—not least because he was a well-born, well-educated man. And he had an income: All the Broadmoor officials knew he was a retired soldier, with a regular army pension paid from the United States. So he was given not one cell but two, a pair of connecting rooms at the south end of the block’s top floor. The rooms were kept unlocked by day; at night any medicines and food he might need were handed in through a long vertical slot, too narrow for an arm to reach out, with a lockable door on its outer side.

  The windows had iron bars on the inside—but to compensate there was an enchanting view: a long shallow valley of cattle-filled meadows with the cows standing in the shadow of great oak trees; the Broadmoor tennis courts and a small cricket ground to one side; a line of low blue hills crowned with beeches in the distance. On that early spring day, with clear skies and lilacs and apple blossom and the songs of larks and thrushes, perhaps the sentence may not have seemed altogether a nightmare.

  At the north end of the corridor sat the guard—known at the asylum as an attendant—who kept watch over the twenty men on his floor. He had keys, presided over the ever-locked door to the floor itself, and would let them in and out of their rooms to visit the bathroom; and during the day he kept a small gas flame burning, from a brass jet beside him. The men were not allowed matches: This is where they came to light their cigarettes or their pipes, from the tobacco ration they were handed each week. (The tobacco all came from H.M. Customs service: Anything confiscated as contraband at the ports was handed over to the Home Office for distribution at the prisons and the state lunatic asylums.)

  Within days the American vice-consul was writing, making sure that the hapless army officer was being well looked after. Might it be possible for “our poor friend,” he prayed, to have some of his personal effects sent down? (They had been left at the consulate to help pay any of the diplomats’ expenses at court.) Is it in theory possible to visit? To cheer him up, could we send him a pound of Dennis’s coffee and some French plums? Mr. Orange was silent on the specific matter of plums, but told the consul that Doctor Minor could have whatever he liked so long as it didn’t prejudice hi
s safety or the asylum’s disciplined running.

  So a week later the official sent up a leather portmanteau by rail: It held a frock coat and three waistcoats, three pairs of drawers and four undervests, four shirts, four collars, six pocket handkerchiefs, a prayer book, a box of photographs, four pipes, cigarette papers, a bag of tobacco, a map of London, a diary, and a fob watch and gold chain—the last a family heirloom, it had been said during the trial.

  Most important of all, the superintendent reported later, the doctor was given back his drawing materials: a cheap deal drawing box and its contents, a paintbox and a collection of pens, a drawing board, sketchbooks, and painting cards. He would now be able to occupy his time constructively, which all patients were encouraged to do.

  Over the succeeding months Minor furnished his cells comfortably—much, indeed, as a member of the Athenaeum might. He had money: His officer’s pension of about twelve hundred dollars a year was paid to his brother Alfred in Connecticut—he acted for William, whom the state had designated “an incapable person”—who regularly telegraphed funds to England to keep his sick brother’s running account up-to-date. Using this constant credit, Doctor Minor satiated his one consuming passion: books.

  He demanded first that his own books be sent over from home in New Haven. Once they were installed he ordered, from the big London bookstores, scores upon scores of new and secondhand volumes, which he first stacked in precarious piles in his cells until he asked—and paid for—bookshelves to be built. In the end he had converted the more westerly of the two rooms into a library, with a writing desk, a couple of chairs, and floor-to-ceiling teak bookshelves.