Simon Winchester


 
 


 
 

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 The Professor and the Madman
Simon Winchester
HarperCollins: 1998
The Author's Words
It has been known for at least the last eighty years that among the scores of volunteers who helped contribute quotations to the OED, and who are listed in the great Preface to Volume 1, there was a murderer. He was named William Chester Minor, and he was a wealthy American surgeon-soldier who went mad when he was forced to brand a deserter during the Civil War. He came to England, uncured and incurable, and during a fit of madness shot a man dead. He was sentenced to be confined without parole in the newly-built Broadmoor Asylum for Criminal Lunatics in Crowthorne, Berkshire. 

It was while he was in his cell that Minor came across James Murray's famous Call for Volunteers, and decided, probably as a means of personal redemption, to begin work as a reader for the OED. Over the next thirty-eight years he contributed thousands upon thousands of quotations - prompting Murray once to say that 'the supreme position is certainly held by Dr W. C. Minor of Broadmoor. So enormous have been Dr Minor's contributions...that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone'. But there has long been a mystery over exactly how and when James Murray came to know of Minor's strange fate and condition, and how the two men - who became firm friends - first met. The conventional story - given something of a semi-official imprimatur by K. M. Elisabeth Murray in Caught in the Web of Words, her biography of her grandfather - is that Murray knew nothing, and the discovery was a total astonishment. As both she and the lexicographical scholar Jonathon Green recounted more recently in his Chasing the Sun, Murray knew only that Minor lived in Crowthorne, and for some inexplicable reason was never able to come to Oxford - less than fifty miles away - to take part in celebrations, or to receive the thanks and congratulations of the editors for whom he laboured. As both authors were to write, a puzzled and even faintly exasperated Murray eventually decided to visit Crowthorne for himself to find out exactly who his contributor was. He was delighted, the story went, to find a horse-drawn carriage drawn up at the railway station. He mused happily on the forthcoming meeting as he was clip-clopped through the Berkshire countryside and up a long poplar-lined driveway to a large Victorian mansion. On being escorted to the book-lined study of an important-looking man within, he made a formal speech of introduction, presuming him to be his long-sought helpmeet. 'Not at all,' the man returned. 'My name is Nicholson, I am the Governor of Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, and the Dr Minor whom you seek is here because he is a murderer, and a madman. He is an American, and the longest-staying of all the asylum patients.' In the telling, this version usually concludes with Collapse of Stout Party, a general expression of amazement, and the beginnings, nonetheless, of a long and fruitful friendship between the two men. 

Now, more than a century after the events, the truth behind this engaging myth can be revealed. It has come to light in the form of a letter recently found in a locked box in the attic of one John Minor of Riverside, Connecticut, a retired businessman who is a surviving great-great-great nephew of the long-dead Dr Minor. The letter was written by James Murray to a friend in Boston in 1902, and it recounts, with definitive precision, what actually happened. Murray, it turned out, had long suspected that Minor had an association with the asylum. However, he wrongly (though not unreasonably) assumed that he was a doctor on its staff, or even the Director. He never presumed to enquire further, however: with classical Victorian rectitude he confined all of his correspondence with Minor to dictionary matters only. He imagined merely that Minor was highly educated, probably moneyed, and that he had plenty of time on his hands. However, in the late 1880s Murray had a visitor at Oxford - the then librarian of Harvard College, Dr Justin Winsor. The two men were chatting in the Scriptorium when Winsor suddenly made a remark that James Murray thought exceedingly odd. 

'You have given great pleasure to Americans', he said, 'by speaking as you do in your Preface of poor Dr Minor. This is a very painful case.'

'Poor Dr Minor?' exclaimed Murray. 'Poor? What can you possibly mean?' 

And thus the whole story - already known to the better-informed of American newspaper readers, who had been aware that one of their number had been sent to Broadmoor for murder - came out. It was a tale, told by Winsor, that quite astonished the innocent Calvinist lexicographer, a man who had perhaps never wholly outgrown the provincial restrictions of his Hawick upbringing. It took many years for Murray to pluck up the courage actually to visit Broadmoor, and eventually to confront the reality of his extraordinary contributor. During those intervening years, however, the great editor took great pains to ensure that all the letters he sent to Minor, while conveying no hint of his newly acquired knowledge, were couched in tones that were kind and considerate, and which made the old inmate perfectly well aware that James Murray, his sub-editors, the combined majesty of all Oxford and the community around the world who were involved in the great undertaking of the fixing of the English language, fully appreciated the efforts the unhappy American was making, from within the confines of his strange and tragic circumstances. 
 

My Review
While watching Book Notes on C-SPAN a few months ago, I listened to Simon Winchester tell his story of this murder who became one of the biggest contribitors to the OED, and could not wait to read it for myself.  The book is only 242 pages, but I took my time reading it.  Winchester's use of beautiful words, is nearly enough to carry the story alone.  However, the lives of the two men, Dr. W. C. Minor and Dr. James Murray, is captivating. 

I would highly recommend this work to anyone.  Yes, it is somewhat academic at time, but the compelling plot too complex and engrossing to allow the reader to put the book down.
 
 

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