The Professor and the Madman

by Simon Winchester

I sent Attendant Harfield for the Medical Officer and went to see if I could assist Dr. Minor. Then he told me—he had cut his penis off. He said he had tied it with string, which had stopped the bleeding. I saw what he had done.

The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at last its great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

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.

In 1989, using the new abilities of the computer, Oxford University Press issued its fully integrated second edition, incorporating all the changes and additions of the supplements in twenty rather more slender volumes. To help boost sales in the late seventies a two-volume set in a much-reduced typeface was issued, a powerful magnifying glass included in every slipcase. Then came a CD-ROM, and not long afterward the great work was further adapted for use on-line.

The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man. Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.