The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

hefted high over the swamps, on viaducts on which the trains (including those of the London Necropolis Railway, built to take corpses to the cemeteries in the suburb of Woking) chuffed and snorted,

He had brought with him a letter from a friend at Yale University, recommending him to John Ruskin, the celebrated British artist and critic. The two men had met once, and Minor had been encouraged to take his watercolors along with him on his travels, and to paint as a form of relaxation.

“You will be detained in safe custody, Dr. Minor,” said the judge, “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.” It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.

It took more than seventy years to create the twelve tombstonesize volumes that made up the first edition of what was to become the great Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED’s guiding principle, the one that has set it apart from most other dictionaries, is its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English and using them to illustrate the use of the sense of every single word in the language.

Quotations could show exactly how a word has been employed over the centuries; how it has undergone subtle changes of shades of meaning, or spelling, or pronunciation; and, perhaps most important of all, how and more exactly when each word slipped into the language in the first place. No other means of dictionary compilation could do such a thing: Only by finding and showing examples could the full range of a word’s past possibilities be explored.

“Treat me as a solar myth, or an echo, or an irrational quantity, or ignore me altogether.”

he made attempts to teach the local cows to respond to calls in Latin;

Here was an inescapable irony of the Civil War, not known in any conflict between men before or since: the fact that this was a war fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men—and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minié ball, but not yet quite with anesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin. The common soldier was thus in a poorer position than at any time before: He could be monstrously ill treated by all the new weaponry, and yet only moderately well treated with all the old medicine.

The speaker was the dean of Westminster, a formidable cleric by the name of Richard Chenevix Trench. Perhaps more than any other man alive, Doctor Trench personified the sweepingly noble ambitions of the Philological Society. He firmly believed, as did most of its two hundred members, that some kind of divine ordination lay behind what seemed then the ceaseless dissemination of the English language around the planet. God—who in that part of London society was of course firmly held to be an Englishman—naturally approved the spread of the language as an essential imperial device; but he also encouraged its undisputed corollary, which was the worldwide growth of Christianity. The equation was really very simple, a formula for undoubted global good: The more English there was in the world, the more God-fearing its peoples would be. (And for a Protestant cleric there was a useful subtext: If English did manage eventually to outstrip the linguistic influences of the Roman Church, then its reach might even help bring the two churches back into some kind of ecumenical—if Anglican-dominated—harmony.)

The “English dictionary,” in the sense that we commonly use the phrase today—as an alphabetically arranged list of English words, together with an explanation of their meanings—is a relatively new invention. Four hundred years ago there was no such convenience available on any English bookshelf.

Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly normal and ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, “look something up.” Indeed the very phrase—when it is used in the sense of “searching for something in a dictionary or encyclopedia or other book of reference”—simply did not exist. It does not appear in the English language, in fact, until as late as 1692, when an Oxford historian named Anthony Wood used it.

Shakespeare is thought to have drawn many of his classical allusions from a specialized Thesaurus that had been compiled by a man named Thomas Cooper—its many errors are replicated far too exactly in the plays for it to be coincidence—and he is thought also to have drawn from Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique. But that was all; there were no other literary, linguistic, and lexical conveniences available.

It was a small octavo book of 120 pages, which Cawdrey titled A Table Alphabeticall…of hard unusual English Words. It had about 2,500 word entries. He had compiled it, he said, “for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons, Whereby they may more easilie and better understand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to use the same apply themselves.”

or else words that had been invented specifically to impress others, the so-called “inkhorn terms” with which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books seem well larded.

So, fantastic linguistic creations like abequitate, bulbulcitate, and sullevation appeared in these books alongside archgrammacian and contiguate, with lengthy definitions; there were words like necessitude, commotrix, and parentate—all of which are now listed, if listed at all, as “obsolete” or “rare” or both. Pretentious and flowery inventions adorned the language—perhaps not all that surprising, considering the flowery fashion of the times, with its perukes and powdered periwigs; its rebatos and doublets; its ruffs, ribbons; and scarlet velvet Rhinegraves. So words like adminiculation, cautionate, deruncinate, and attemptate are placed in the vocabulary too, each duly cataloged in the tiny leather books of the day; yet they were words meant only for the loftiest ears, and were unlikely to impress Cawdrey’s intended audience of ladies, gentlewomen, and “unskillful persons.”

Or else the creators of these hardword books put forward explanations that were complex beyond endurance, as in a book called Glossographia by Thomas Blount, which offers as its definition of shrew: “a kind of Field-Mouse, which if he goes over a beasts back, will make him lame in the Chine; and if he bite, the beast swells to the heart, and dyes…. From hence came our English phrase, I beshrew thee, when we wish ill; and we call a curst woman a Shrew.”

They can still be found today, often cased in boxes of brown morocco. They are hugely heavy, built for the lectern rather than the hand. They are bound in rich brown leather, the paper is thick and creamy, the print impressed deep into the weave. Few who read the volumes today can fail to be charmed by the quaint elegance of the definitions, of which Johnson was a master. Take for example the word for which Shakespeare might have hunted, elephant. It was, Johnson declared: The largest of all quadrupeds, of whose sagacity, faithfulness, prudence and even understanding, many surprising relations are given.

Swift was the fiercest advocate of all. He once wrote to the earl of Oxford to express his outrage that words like bamboozle, uppish, and—of all things—couldn’t were appearing in print. He wanted the establishment of strict rules banning such words as offensive to good sense.

“No language as depending on arbitrary use and custom can ever be permanently the same, but will always be in a mutable and fluctuating state; and what is deem’d polite and elegant in one age, may be accounted uncouth and barbarous in another.”

He had decided, as Murray was to decide a century later, that the best way—indeed the only way—to compile a full dictionary was to read: to go through all literature and list the words that appeared on hundreds of thousands of pages.

For while we might laugh at the quaint charm of his definition of elephant, or of oats (“a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”), or lexicographer (“a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words”), we can only be staggered by his dealing with, say, the verb take. Johnson listed, with supportive quotations, no fewer than 113 senses of this particular verb’s transitive form and 21 of the intransitive. “To seize, grasp or capture; to catch with a hook; to catch someone in an error; to win popular favor; to be effective; to claim to do something; to assume the right…to mount a horse, to flee, to perform what one does in removing one’s clothing….”

on April 15, 1755, there appeared: A Dictionary of the English Language, in which the Words are deduced from their Originals and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the best Writers to which are prefixed a History of the Language and an English Grammar, by Samuel Johnson, A.M., in Two Volumes.

Johnson managed to combine being both a lexicographer and a supremely literate man: “In the whole tradition of the English language and literature the only dictionary compiled by a writer of the first rank is that of Dr. Johnson.”

Samuel Johnson remained calmly modest. Not unduly so, for he was proud of his work but awed by the magnificence of the language he, with such foolhardiness, had chosen to tackle. The book remained his monument. James Murray was to say in later years that whenever someone used the phrase “the Dictionary,” as one might say “the Bible” or “the Prayer Book,” he or she referred to the work by Doctor Johnson.

“I am not yet so lost in lexicography,” he says in his famous preface, “as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” His life had been devoted to the gathering in of those daughters, but it was heaven that had ordained their creation.

It was referred to simply as the “big dictionary.”

It was an essential credo for any future dictionary maker, he said, to realize that a dictionary was simply “an inventory of the language” and decidedly not a guide to proper usage.

“A Dictionary,” Trench said, “is an historical monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view, and the wrong ways into which a language has wandered…may be nearly as instructive as the right ones.”

The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature—and to comb the London and New York newspapers and the most literate of the magazines and journals—must be instead “the combined action of many.” It would be necessary to recruit a team—moreover, a huge one—probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.

Any such dictionary certainly should not be an absolutist, autocratic product, such as the French had in mind: The English, who had raised eccentricity and poor organization to a high art, and placed the scatterbrain on a pedestal, loathed such Middle European things as rules, conventions, and dictatorships.

In the end more than six million slips of paper came in from the volunteers; and Coleridge’s dreamy estimate that it might take two years to have the first salable section of the dictionary off the presses—for it was to be sold in parts, to help keep revenues coming in—was wrong by a factor of ten.

No one had a clue what they were up against: They were marching blindfolded through molasses.

He had been caught in the rain on the way to a Philological Society lecture, and he had sat through it in the unheated upstairs room on St. James’s Square, caught a chill, and died. His last recorded words were: “I must begin Sanskrit tomorrow.”

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.)

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.

And though the conversations apparently stopped short of developing into any real friendship, it is believed that she made Minor an offer that was to lead to the second of the major developments of this period of his life. She agreed, it seems, to bring parcels of books to Minor from the antiquarian dealers in London.

(More than two tons of slips of papers had already come in from Coleridge and Furnivall’s first efforts, Murray added. But he didn’t allow as to how many of them had been nibbled at by mice or ruined by damp, nor did he reveal that one batch was found in a baby’s bassinet, or that a load of slips beginning with the letter I had been left in a broken-bottomed hamper in an empty vicarage, or that the entire letter F had been accidentally sent off to Florence, or that thousands of slips were so poorly handwritten that, Murray reported to a friend, it would have made for easier reading if they had been written in Chinese.)

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Minor wants desperately to know that he is being helpful. He wants to feel involved. He wants, but knows he can never demand, that praise be showered on him. He wants respectability, and he wants those in the asylum to know that he is special, different from others in their cells.

Both looked like popular illustrations of Father Time; boys in Oxford would see Murray tricycling by and call out, “Father Christmas!” at him.

In a sense doing all those dictionary slips was his medication; in a way they became his therapy. The routine of his quiet and cellbound intellectual stimulus, month upon month, year upon year, appears to have provided him with at least a measure of release from his paranoia. His sad situation only worsened when that stimulus was gone: when the great book ceased to function as his lodestone, when the one fixed point on which his remarkable but tortured brain was able to concentrate became detached, so then he began to spiral downward, and his life began to ebb.

Around the Evergreen Cemetery a high chain-link fence keeps out an angry part of New Haven, well away from the stern elegance of Yale. The simple existence of the fence underlines a sad and ironic reality: Dr. William Minor, who was among the greatest of contributors to the finest dictionary in all the English language, died forgotten in obscurity, and is buried beside a slum.

Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

One word—and only one word—was ever actually lost: bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s dictionary, was actually mislaid by Murray and was found, a stray without a home, long after the fascicle Battentlie-Bozzom had been published.

There is some occasional carping that the work reflects an elitist, male, British, Victorian tone. Yet even in the admission that, like so many achievements of the era, it did reflect a set of attitudes not wholly harmonic with those prevalent at the end of the twentieth century, none seem to suggest that any other dictionary has ever come close, or will ever come close, to the achievement that it offers. It was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.

Dr. Lawrence Kohl at the University of Alabama was kind enough to take time both to discuss the mechanics of Civil War branding and to speculate (in an impressively informed way) on the effects such punishment might have had on Irishmen who fought in the Union Army—the latter his particular specialty as a historian of the period.