The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

  And then, quite precipitously, his life fell terribly apart. No one is sure why, except that he had a furious dispute with a fellow Sanskrit scholar from Austria named Theodor Goldstücker. It was a dispute 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 said he was a drunkard, a foreign spy, hopelessly immoral, and an academic phony. He in turn accused all Britons of turning on him, ruining his life, 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 James 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 that Doctor Murray wrote in the great preface: “[A]bove 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 had not come: They knew that he was a hermit, that he was difficult. But no one knew—or so the story has long had it—exactly why the man next mentioned had not turned up. 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, wondered the gathered assembly, was Doctor Minor? He was living at Crowthorne, only sixty minutes away by the green-and-gold steam trains of the Great Western. He was not notorious as an ill-tempered misanthrope, like Doctor Hall. His letters had always been noted for their polite solicitousness. So why could he not have had the courtesy to come? To some who dined at Queen’s on that glorious autumn evening, Minor’s absence must have seemed a melancholy footnote to an otherwise glorious literary moment.

  The received wisdom has it that Doctor Murray was perplexed, even vaguely irritated. It is said that he vowed, out of all his lexicographic knowledge, to take a leaf from Francis Bacon, who in 1624 had written in English the axiom from the collection of the Prophet’s sayings known as the hadith, to the effect that “If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, then Mahomet must go to the mountain.”

  It is said that he promptly wrote to Doctor 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.

  Doctor Minor supposedly wrote back promptly, saying that he would of course be delighted to receive the editor, that he was so sorry that physical circumstances—he did not elaborate—had hitherto made it impossible for him to come up to Oxford, and suggested a number of trains from those listed in the Bradshaw. Murray duly selected a November Wednesday, and a train that, with a change in Reading, was due into the Wellington College railway station shortly after lunch.

  He telegraphed the details to Crowthorne, wheeled out his faithful black Humber tricycle, and, with his white beard blowing over his shoulder in the chilly breeze, set out down the Banbury Road, past the Randolph Hotel, the Ashmolean Museum, and Worcester College, and to the Up, or London-bound, platform of Oxford Station.

  The journey took just a little over an hour. He was pleasantly surprised, on arriving at Crowthorne, to find a brougham and a liveried coachman waiting for him. His long-held assumption that Minor must be a leisured man of letters was reinforced: Perhaps, he thought to himself, he was even a man of means.

  The horses clip-clopped through the fog-damp lanes. The magnificent pile of Wellington School lay neatly in the distance, a respectable distance from Crowthorne village itself, which was no more than a cluster of cottages, the piles of lawn leaves smoldering behind them. It was a pretty little place, quiet, well wooded, and rather self-contained.

  After a couple of miles the coachman swung the horses into a poplar-lined driveway that climbed a long, low hill. The cottages thinned out and were replaced by a number of small redbrick houses of a rather more severe look. Then the horses stopped before an imposing front gate, a pair of towers with a great black-faced clock between, and green-painted doors that were being opened by a servant. The editor was perhaps vaguely excited: This must have seemed to him a grand country house in which he was being exceedingly well received, as though expected for a sumptuous afternoon tea, or like someone arriving at Kedleston for luncheon with Lord Curzon.

  James Murray removed his cap and unbuttoned the Inverness tweed cape that had protected him from the cold. The servant said nothing, but ushered him inside and up a flight of marble stairs. He was swept into a large room with a glowing coal fire and a wall covered with portraits of gaunt-looking men. There was a large oak director’s desk, and behind it, a portly man of obvious importance. The servant backed out and closed the door.

  Murray advanced toward the great man, who rose. Murray bowed stiffly and extended his hand.

  “I, Sir, am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society,” he said in his finely modulated Scottish voice, “and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

  “And you sir, must be Dr. William Minor. At long last. I am most deeply honoured to meet you.”

  There was a pause. Then the other man replied:

  “I regret not, sir. I cannot lay claim to that distinction. I am the Superintendent of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is an American, and he is one of our longest-staying inmates. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.”

  Doctor Murray, as the story then continues, was in turn astonished, amazed, and yet filled with sympathetic interest. “He begged to be taken to Doctor Minor, and the meeting between the two men of learning who had corresponded for so long and who now met in such strange circumstances was an extremely impressive one.”

  The story of this first meeting is, however, no more than an amusing and romantic fiction. It was created by an American journalist named Hayden Church, who lived in London for most of the first half of this century. It first appeared in England in the Strand magazine in September 1915, and then again, revised and amplified, in the same journal six months later.

  In fact Church had already tried it out on an American audience, writing anonymously for the Sunday Star in Washington, D.C., in July 1915. The story was splendidly sensationalized, with the kind of lurid, multilayered headline that has sadly gone almost out of fashion.

  AMERICAN MURDERER HELPED WRITE OXFORD DICTIONARY, read the first, extending over all eight columns of the page. MYSTERIOUS CONTRIBUTOR TO AN ENGLISH DICTIONARY PROVED TO BE A RICH AMERICAN SURGEON CONFINED IN BROADMOOR CRIMINAL LUNATIC ASYLUM FOR A MURDER COMMITTED WHILE HE WAS IN A DERANGED CONDITION—HOW SIR JAMES MURRAY, EDITOR OF THE DICTIONARY, WHO SET OUT, AS HE THOUGHT, TO VISIT THE HOME OF A FELLOW SAVANT, FOUND HIMSELF AT THE ASYLUM AND HEARD THE EXTRAORDINARY TALE, WHICH BEGINS DURING THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR WHEN THE PRINCIPAL WAS A SURGEON IN THE NORTHERN ARMY—CONTRIBUTOR WEALTHY AND NOW LIVI
NG IN AMERICA, SAYS HIS FRIEND.

  The breathless headline told of an even more exhausting story—but one made more than faintly ludicrous by its author’s inability or unwillingness to name Minor. In every reference he is called simply Doctor Blank, as in “And you sir, must be Dr. Blank. I am most honoured to meet you.”

  The story nonetheless went down well with its American audience, which had been given hints and snippets in the years before—the arrest of one of their officers for murder in London not having passed unnoticed at the time, his imprisonment receiving occasional dustings-off as new correspondents and new diplomats found their way to the English capital. But the revelation of his work for the dictionary was new, and in this regard Hayden Church had a good, old-fashioned scoop. The wires picked the story up; it appeared in papers around the world, and as far away as Tientsin, China.

  But in London it did not go down so well. Henry Bradley, who by this time had taken over from Murray as editor in chief of what was now formally known as the Oxford English Dictionary, took exception to the Strand article. He wrote an angry letter to the Daily Telegraph, complaining of “several misstatements of fact,” and that “the story of Dr. Murray’s first interview with Dr. Minor is, so far as its most romantic features are concerned, a fiction.”

  Hayden Church dashed off a spirited reply to Bradley, which the Telegraph, naturally liking a fight, happily published. It contains vague rebuttals, citing only “a host of correspondents, some of them of great eminence”—but none of whom are named—who had confirmed the major aspects of the story. It pleads, limply, that “I have the best of reasons for believing the account of the meeting between Minor and Murray to be accurate.”

  The oddest part of Church’s reply, however, is its enigmatic postscript. “I have just been in communication with one of the most distinguished literary men in England, who…pointed out that there did not appear in my article what he personally considered the most striking feature of all in the American’s history [emphasis added].”

  Strictly true or not, Hayden Church’s account of the first meeting turned out to be simply far too good to ignore. It enthralled all England, people said. It took their mind off World War I—1915, after all, was the year of Ypres, of Gallipoli, of the sinking of the Lusitania, and people were no doubt content to have such a saga as a diversion from the grim realities of the fighting. “No romance,” said the Pall Mall Gazette, “is equal to this wonderful story, of scholarship in a padded cell.”

  Virtually all subsequent references to the saga of Oxford dictionary making retell Church’s story, to a greater or lesser degree. In her justly celebrated biography (1977) of her grandfather, Miss K. M. Elisabeth Murray retells Church’s version of events almost without question, as does Jonathon Green in a more general book on the history of lexicography, published in 1996. Only Elizabeth Knowles, an Oxford University Press editor who became intrigued by the story in the early 1990s, takes a cooler and more detached view: Still, she is clearly perplexed that no definitive account of the first meeting can be found. The patina applied by decades of good use has made the legend pleasingly credible.

  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.