The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  With good fortune—and with a high statistical likelihood—they would in due course receive a letter and a package from Doctor Minor, giving the precise chapter and verse for whatever was wanted, enclosing the quotation slips at the very instant they were needed to be pasted onto a page for the compositors, the typesetters and the printers.

  The first word to be tried in this way was a deceptively simple one (to the extent that any individual word is simple compared to any other). It was a word that was due to be included in the dictionary’s second fascicle, or part, being readied to be printed and published in the later summer of 1885. Please inspect your word lists, wrote a subeditor, to see if you can find in them references to the word art, and to all its derived forms.

  The letter went directly to Doctor Minor at Broadmoor, as his invitational letter had suggested. Whichever of Murray’s subeditors first asked him the question in reply had no ideas about the man from whom an answer was sought. For many years thence no one in the Scriptorium was to learn anything about him, except for the undeniable truth that he was very good at his job, very quick, and on his way to becoming an indispensable member of the great new dictionary team.

  Art was to be his first test.

  8

  ANNULATED, ART, BRICK-TEA, BUCKWHEAT

  Poor (), a. (sb.) Forms: a. 3–5 pouere (povere), 3–6 pouer (pover), (4 poeuere, poeure, pouir), 4–5 poer, powere, 5 poyr, 5–6 power, (6 poware). β 3–5 poure, 4–6 powre, pour. γ. 3–7 (-9 dial.) pore, 4–7 poore, (6) 7– poor. δ. Sc. and north. dial. 4–6 pur, 4–8 pure, (4 puyre, 5 pwyr, poyr, 6 peur(e, pwir, puire), 6– puir(ü), (9 peer). [ME. pov(e)re, pouere, poure, a. OF. povre, -ere, poure, in mod.F. pauvre, dial. paure, pouvre, poure = Pr. paubre, paure, It. povero, Sp., Pg. pobre:-L. pauper, late L. also pauper-us, poor. The mod.Eng. poor and Sc. puir represent the ME. pōre: with mod. vulgar pore, cf. whore and the pronunciation of door, floor.

  On account of the ambiguity of the letter u and its variant v before 1600, it is uncertain whether ME. pouere, poure, pouer, meant pou- or pov-. The phonetic series paupere(m, paupre, paubre, pobre, povre, shows that povre preceded poure, which may have been reached in late OF., and is the form in various mod.F. dialects. But the 15th and early 16th c. literary Fr. form was povre, artificially spelt in 15th c. pauvre, after L. pauper, and ME. pōre (the source of mod.Eng. poor) seems to have been reduced from povre like o’er from over, lord from loverd. Cf. also POORTITH, PORAIL, POVERTY. But some Eng. dialects now have pour (paur), which prob. represents ME. pour (pūr).]

  I. 1. Having few, or no, material possessions; wanting means to procure the comforts, or the necessaries, of life; needy, indigent, destitute; spec. (esp. in legal use) so destitute as to be dependent upon gifts or allowances for subsistence. In common use expressing various degrees, from absolute want to straitened circumstances or limited means relatively to station, as ‘a poor gentleman’, ‘a poor professional man, clergyman, scholar, clerk’, etc. The opposite of rich, or wealthy. Poor people, the poor as a class: often with connotation of humble rank or station.

  6. Such, or so circumstanced, as to excite one’s compassion or pity; unfortunate, hapless. Now chiefly colloq.

  In many parts of England regularly said of the dead whom one knew; = late, deceased.

  The first slips of snow white unlined paper, six inches by four, and covered with William Minor’s neat, elaborately cursive, and so distinctively American handwriting in greenish black ink, began to drift out from the Broadmoor post room in the spring of 1885. By the late summer they were arriving at their destination in small brown paper packets every month, and then larger packets every week. Before long the gentle shower of paper had turned into a raging blizzard, one that was to howl up from Crowthorne unceasingly for almost all of the next twenty years.

  The paper slips were not, however, sent to Mill Hill. By the time Doctor Minor had begun to engage in the second stage of his work, contributing the quotations rather than amassing the lists, James Murray and his team had all moved up to Oxford. The editor had been persuaded to give up his comfortable job as a schoolteacher, and despite the poor pay and the interminable hours, he had taken the plunge into full-time lexicography.

  This was in spite of a general mood of malaise and wretchedness. Murray’s experiences with the first years of work on the big dictionary were far from happy, and many were the times he had vowed to resign. The Delegates at the Press were parsimonious and interfering; the pace of work was proving insufferably slow; his health was suffering from the interminable hours, his monomaniacal devotion to an almost impossible task.

  But then there was one sustaining fact: The first of the fascicles, the revenue-producing installments into which Oxford insisted that the dictionary be divided, had at last been published, on January 29, 1884. Nearly five years had elapsed since James Murray had been appointed editor. Twenty-seven years had passed since Richard Chenevix Trench had given his famous address in which he called for a new English dictionary. Now, in a muddy off-white cover and with its sheets half uncut, was the first part, 352 pages’ worth of all the known English words from A to Ant, published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford, at a price of twelve shillings and sixpence.

  Here, at last, was the first morsel of substance: part one of A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society, edited by James A. H. Murray, LL.D., Sometime President of the Philological Society, with the Assistance of Many Scholars and Men of Science.

  Murray could not help but be proud; the problems that seemed so insuperable, and that so pressed down on him, would tend to vanish whenever he held the flimsy paper-covered volume in his hand. And in a sudden sunburst of birthday-eve optimism, the editor—he would be forty-seven in less than a week—declared that he now felt confident in predicting that the final part would be published in eleven years’ time.

  It was in fact to take another forty-four.

  But now, after all the years of waiting, the interested world could at least see the magnificent complexity of the undertaking, the detail, the filigree work, the sheer intricacies of exactitude that the editors were bent on compiling. Those in England could write and receive a copy for 12s. 6d; those in the United States received a fascicle printed in Oxford, but published by Macmillan in New York, for $3.25.

  The first part’s first word—once the four pages devoted to the simple letter a had been accounted for—was the obsolete noun aa, meaning “a stream” or “a watercourse.” There was a quotation supporting its existence from a work of 1430, which had a reference to the still rather damp and water-girt Lincolnshire town of Saltfleetby, in which, four centuries earlier, there had been a rivulet known locally as “le Seventown Aa.”

  The first properly current word in the fascicle was aal, a Bengali or Hindi name for a plant related to the madder, from which a dye could be extracted and used to color clothes. Andrew Ure’s 1839 Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures and Mines provided the authority: “He has obtained from the aal root a pale yellow substance which he calls morindin.”

  And then the first properly English word—if, a linguist might quibble, there ever is such a thing. It was to be aardvark, the half armadillo, half anteater that lives in sub-Saharan Africa and has a sticky two-foot tongue. Three quotations are offered, the earliest from 1833.

  Thus does the vast emporium of words begin to display itself, through acatalectic and adhesion, via agnate and allumine, to animal, answer, and, finally, to ant. By that last, Murray’s team meant a great deal more than “simply the small social insect of the Hymenopterous order” there is also the contraction for ain’t, a rare prefix meaning “anti-,” as with antacid, and more commonly the suffix derived from the French for “sometimes,” and appended to make words like tenant, valiant, claimant, and pleasant. Three hundred and fifty pages of scholarly amassment, the first pages of what would in more than four decades’ time swell to no fewer than 15,487.

  It was in the new Scripto
rium in Oxford that Doctor Murray was to do all future work on the dictionary. He and Ada and their considerable family—six sons and five daughters—had moved there in the summer of 1884, six months after A-Ant. They had taken a large house on what were then the northern outskirts of the city, at 78 Banbury Road. It was called Sunnyside. The house, large and comfortable in the manner of North Oxford, which is a sedate settling ground for the university’s greater dons and lesser institutes, exists still, together with the red pillarbox that the Post Office erected outside to swallow up the immense amounts of outgoing letters. Today the house is occupied by a popular anthropologist, and he has changed it little enough on the outside.

  Only the Scriptorium—the Scrippy, as the Murray family knew it, which Murray’s own dictionary defines as “the room in a religious house set apart for the copying of manuscripts”—has gone. Perhaps not surprisingly: No one, even in Victorian times, much liked the iron-and-corrugated-tin construction, fifteen feet by fifty, that was put up in the back garden. The next-door neighbor said it spoiled his view, and so Murray had it sunk into a three-foot-deep trench, which made it damp and cold for the staff and produced a huge bank of discarded earth that offended the neighbors even more. When it was finished, people said it looked like a tool shed, a stable, or a washhouse, and those who labored in it cursed the monkish asceticism of its construction and its irredeemably bone-chilling cold, and called it “a horrid, corrugated den.”

  But it was twenty feet longer than the Mill Hill Scriptorium (which does still exist, an annex to the library of what is still a costly and fashionable school), and the arrangements for filing, sorting and then using the incoming quotation slips—which by now were flooding in at the rate of more than a thousand each day—were much improved.

  There were 1,029 pigeonholes built at first (Coleridge had just 54); then banks of shelves were built as the volume and the sheer weight of slips became unmanageably large. Long and well-polished mahogany tables supported the texts selected for the word of the day or the hour, and large churchly lecterns held up the main dictionaries and reference books to which Murray and his men made constant reference. The leader himself had placed his seat and desk on a dais back in the Mill Hill days; here at Oxford there was a more democratically level floor, but Murray’s stool was taller than the rest, and he presided from it still with unchallenged authority, seeing all, missing little.

  He organized the workings of the Scriptorium as might an officer on a battlefield. The slips were the peculiar province of the quartermaster corps, of which Murray was quartermaster general. The packages would come in each morning, a thousand or so slips a day. One reader would check quickly to see if the quotation was full and all words were spelled properly; then a second—often one of Murray’s children, each of whom was employed almost as soon as he or she was literate, paid sixpence a week for half an hour a day and rendered precociously crossword capable—would sort the contents of each bundle into the catchwords’ alphabetical order. A third worker would then divide the catchwords into their various recognized parts of speech—bell as noun, bell as adjective, bell as verb, for instance—and then a fourth employee would see that the quotations assembled for each were arranged chronologically.

  Then a subeditor, one of the more exalted members of the team, would subdivide the meanings of each word into the various shades it had enjoyed over its lifetime; also at this point (if he had not done so earlier) he would make a first stab at writing that most crucial feature of most dictionaries—the definition.

  Defining words properly is a fine and peculiar craft. There are rules—a word (to take a noun as an example) must first be defined according to the class of things to which it belongs (mammal, quadruped), and then differentiated from other members of that class (bovine, female). There must be no words in the definition that are more complicated or less likely to be known than the word being defined. The definition must say what something is, and not what it is not. If there is a range of meanings of any one word—cow having a broad range of meanings, cower having essentially only one—then they must be stated. And all the words in the definition must be found elsewhere in the dictionary—a reader must never happen upon a word in the dictionary that he or she cannot discover elsewhere in it. If the definer contrives to follow all these rules, stirs into the mix an ever-pressing need for concision and elegance—and if he or she is true to the task, a proper definition will probably result.

  By now the words from the envelope of quotations would have been assembled into the smallest of subgroups, each with a stated meaning and a definition—either just written by a junior, or written some time before when the word was in a half-completed state. It simply remained now to divide these subgroups chronologically, so as to demonstrate—with the army of quotations—just how the shades of meaning of the catchword had altered and evolved over its lifespan.

  Once this was done, Murray would take the collections of slips for each of the subgroups for any distinct and defined target word and arrange or rearrange or further subdivide them as he saw fit. He would write and insert the word’s etymology (which Oxford, despite the existence of its own etymological dictionary, did in the end see fit to allow Murray to include) and its pronunciation—a tricky decision, and one likely to provoke, as it has, ceaseless controversy—and then make a final selection of the very best quotations. Ideally there should be at least one sentence from the literature for each century in which the word was used—unless it was a very fast-changing word that needed more quotations to suggest the speed of its new shadings.

  Finally, with that all squared away, Murray would write the concise, scholarly, accurate, and lovingly elegant definition for which the Dictionary is well known—and send the finished columns over to the press. It would be set in a Clarendon or an Old Style typeface (or in Greek or other foreign or Old English or Anglo-Saxon face when needed), and returned to the Scriptorium, printed in galley. It was ready to be set onto a page, and the page made into a form for placing on the great letterpress engines in the stone printing works down in the back of Walton Street.

  Murray was no whiner, but his letters tell a great deal about the difficulty of the task he had set himself—and that the publishers, who wanted to see a return on their investment, in turn had set him. The expressed hope was that two parts—six hundred pages of finished dictionary—might be published each year. Murray himself tried gallantly to complete work on thirty-three words every day—and yet “often a single word, like Approve…takes 3/4 of a day itself.”

  Murray spoke of the trials of the work in his presidential address to the Philological Society, and a subsequent Athenaeum article in March 1884—an article that led to his first real contact with William Minor. He referred to the difficulty “of pushing our way experimentally through an untrodden forest where no white man’s ax has been before us.”

  Only those who have made the experiment know the bewilderment with which editor or sub-editor, after he has apportioned the quotations for such a word as above…among 20, 30 or 40 groups, and furnished each of these with a provisional definition, spreads them out on a table or on the floor where he can obtain a general survey of the whole, and spends hour after hour in shifting them about like pieces on a chess-board, striving to find in the fragmentary evidence of an incomplete historical record, such a sequence of meanings as may form a logical chain of development. Sometimes the quest seems hopeless; recently, for example, the word art utterly baffled me for several days: something had to be done with it: something was done and put in type; but the renewed consideration of it in print, with the greater facility of reading and comparison which this afforded, led to the entire pulling to pieces and reconstruction of the edifice, extending to several columns of type.

  It was at about this time, when Murray was so very vexed over art, that one of his subeditors—or perhaps it was Murray himself—wrote the first official request to Broadmoor. They wanted Doctor Minor to find out if he had earmarked any quotations for art tha
t suggested other meanings, or which came from earlier dates, than had been assembled so far. Sixteen distinct shades of meaning had been uncovered for the noun: Perhaps Minor had some more, or some further illumination of the word. If so, then he—and anyone else, for that matter—should kindly send them back to Oxford, posthaste.

  Eighteen letters duly came in about the word from a variety of readers who had seen the article. One of the replies, undeniably the most fruitful, came from Broadmoor.

  In comparison with all other readers, who had offered merely one sentence or two, the unsung Doctor Minor had enclosed no fewer than twenty-seven. He struck his subeditors in Oxford as not only a meticulous man; he was also very prolific, and able to tap deep into wells of knowledge and research. The dictionary team had made a rare find.

  It has to be said that most of Minor’s quotations for this particular word came from a somewhat obvious source: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous Discourses, written in 1769, the year after he became president of the Royal Academy. But they were of inestimable value to the dictionary makers—and as proof, there today, standing as a mute memorial to the beginnings of his work, is the first known quotation that William Chester Minor had placed in the finished book.