The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

"Working on the history of the dictionary as I have been, I’ve been really conscious of just how many individuals there are who have an amazing story to tell. Like the man who only worked on the dictionary for a little while, but then went off and got captured by the Russians on the Eastern Front in the First World War . There are all sorts of stories and these people just have little footnotes in my book because my job, in The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, is to tell the story of the project. I’ve tried not to get too distracted by all these fascinating stories, though sometimes there are very long footnotes… Get the weekly Five Books newsletter No, not all of them. Some of them are amazing because they gave their entire working lives to this one project, and, for that reason, didn’t leave any other mark on the world, they’re obscure figures. The Surgeon of Crowthorne is not about one of the staff, but about one of the people who sent in quotations to the dictionary, a man called W.C. Minor. The quotations for the dictionary were sent in by members of the public. W.C. Minor was a member of the public, but he just happened to be a murderer who was banged up in Broadmoor. He was an American who had fought in the American Civil War and was traumatised by his experiences. His family sent him over to this country to rehabilitate; it didn’t work. He remained convinced that people were out to kill him, and he shot a man in the street and was put away when Broadmoor was really quite new. The name Broadmoor has such a resonance now, but not then. The story goes that when this useful material started coming into the dictionary from this address, ‘Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire,’ it sounded like a nice country house: perhaps it was from somebody who had a lot of leisure time, with private means. Eventually James Murray discovered that actually, no. The crime and the trial had been in the papers, it was well-known in America, and he had heard about it. Dr Minor was clearly insane, and one part of his mind was unhinged. He was convinced that he was being spirited off to Constantinople every night. But another part of his mind was perfectly capable of reading books and writing out quotations for the dictionary in a useful, intellectual way, and he did that for many years. Because of the obsessive quality of Dr Minor’s work, the quotations he supplied were really useful, and it makes a great story. In fact, it’s currently being made into a film, with Mel Gibson as James Murray and Sean Penn as Dr Minor. The Surgeon of Crowthorne was apparently not a clear enough title in the American market, so they re-titled it The Professor and the Madman for the American edition, which is more vivid, though James Murray was never a professor. He mainly read books from the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. In those days, if you were well-off—and he came from a well-off family—you could have quite nice rooms in Broadmoor. I seem to remember he actually had other inmates waiting on him. He played his flute and he had fine books which he would read for the dictionary. Quite often they were books about travel to far away places. He didn’t read them in quite the same way as other people read books for the dictionary. He would make indexes to each book in tiny, tiny writing — almost exhaustive word-by-word indexes which you would have to be obsessive to do. Nowadays, you just expect to be able to search for any word in an e-book. He was doing that on paper. An ordinary volunteer reader would just have to make the best guess they could. So if you’re reading a book and you come across a word that you think, ‘Gosh that’s quite unusual for this period’ or ‘It sounds like an early use of the word,’ then you’d send it in. With Dr Minor, if the editors told him, ‘We’re working on this word here and we need examples before this date,’ then he could look it up in his little indexes. He got special attention because his work was so useful. The editors did issue lists of: ‘These are the words that we are working on, and the earliest example we have so far is 1682. Can anyone do better than that?’ They were called lists of ‘desiderata,’ and they went out to people closely involved with the dictionary. Dr Minor fought in the American Civil War in the 1860s. He went to Broadmoor in the early 1870s and began to work on the OED in the 1880s and carried on into the 1900s. So The Surgeon of Crowthone is a really good story focusing on just one, well two, individuals—Dr Minor and James Murray—but there must be so many other books that you could write about some of the individuals who contributed to the OED."