May 12, 2002

A MYTH satisfies one’s taste for the extraordinary. Without a predominant mythical element, many an account of historical events would have been lifeless and colourless, for instance, what makes the reading of the Sindh conquest painfully fascinating is the mythical one-word message ‘Peccavi’ from Napier. The myth of “You see, Mr President, I have nothing to conceal even from you” gives a Churchillian twist to Roosevelt-Churchill wartime meetings in the US.

The dull, drab, tedious, and monotonous work of compiling A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, later known as the Oxford English Dictionary (started in 1857) had been enlivened and made exciting by some raconteurs through mythical accounts of the first meeting, in 1891, in a place near Oxford, of Dr James Murray, the editor of the Dictionary, with Dr William Chester Minor, a retired US army surgeon, who was about the most prolific volunteer contributor to the creation of the Dictionary. The story goes something like this:

“A very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr James Murray of the London Philological Society and editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is indeed an honour and a pleasure to at long last make your acquaintance — for you must be, kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr W.C. Minor?”

“I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the Governor of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient for more than twenty years. He is our longest staying resident. He committed a murder. He is quite insane.”

But Simon Winchester, in his book, The professor and the madman, did not take the route of myth in his study of the schizophrenic personality of Dr W.C. Minor, an American, whose voluntary contribution for the multi-volume Oxford English Dictionary entwined him to a curious relationship with its editor, Dr James Murray. Winchester delved into records on both sides of the Atlantic, and his efforts reached considerable depths. The story of Dr Minor, as it happened, Winchester has told excellently with a deep understanding of the problems and issues involved.

Born in Sri Lanka, of American parents, Minor graduated in medicine from Yale, and joined the American army as a surgeon, when the civil war was underway. A certain tide of events, in the civil war, caused eruption of mental illness in Dr Minor. He became paranoid. The US army authorities classified him as “delusional”, and as suffering from monomania — a form of mental illness that involves an obsession with a single topic. He was put on the retired list, and was detained in a lunatic asylum for eighteen months in Washington. Released from that asylum, in February 1871, Dr Minor, with his collections of rare and old books, easel, watercolours, brushes, and a revolver, left for London.

The work on the big Dictionary had already started in England in 1857. And, within months of his arrival in London, Dr Minor, suffering from delusion that he was being persecuted by some evil men, shot dead an innocent night-shift worker, George Merrett, in February 1872. Though he was held legally innocent of a murder because of his mental condition, Dr Minor was declared “certified criminal lunatic” to be held in permanent custody. He was detained in Broadmoor Asylum, Crowthorne, in Berkshire, near Oxford.

In 1879, Dr Murray, who had, by then, become the editor of the Dictionary, published an open invitation to English-speaking and English-reading public to participate in the collection of material by reading books and submitting quotations, relating to different words, which would assist the editorial team in compiling the Dictionary. A copy, somehow, reached Dr Minor in the asylum. He, immediately, responded to the appeal and offered his services to Murray to read rare, old and new books, collect definitions, life story of words, and quotations, relating to them.

For the next twenty years or so, Dr Minor read books from his prodigious collection, which he was allowed to keep in his cell. He was also permitted to purchase books from London. Working day after day for four years, Dr Minor started sending in 1885 his quotation slips to Dr Murray. And he did so for next twenty years! At times more than a hundred slips a week!! Dr Minor’s work impressed Murray and his colleagues. Whenever they had a problem with a word, they would ask Minor to help them out. But they had no idea about the man from whom help was sought. He was only forty miles away from their place of work in Oxford. Minor was irreversibly mentally ill, but in his moments of clearness, he had contributed scores of thousands of illustrative quotations, all of which proved useful.

The volume I of the Dictionary acknowledged the work of “Dr W.C. Minor of Crowthorne.” And, in the preface to volume III, Dr Murray wrote, “also the unflagging services of Dr W.C. Minor, which have week by week supplied additional quotations for the words—-” Dr Murray admitted that the contribution of Dr Minor enhanced their illustration of the literary history of individual words.

By 1910, six volumes of the Dictionary had been published. But the conditions in the Broadmoor Asylum had deteriorated and had become less congenial for Minor, who was being cruelly treated by the new administration of the Asylum. Ultimately, Winston Churchill, the British Home Secretary (and whose mother was an American), allowed Dr Minor to be transferred to a federal hospital in the American capital.

The book is an easy read. It is unputdownable. It has its own magic. And, the reader has been taken on a visit to interesting lexicographical byways, and to all that the author has found fascinating. It is a tale stitched, with care and concern, into a brilliant embroidery. What is riveting about the book is that it is free from subjective or any kind of waffle.

In the whole story, the unacclaimed and nameless character was the slain person — George Merrett. But for his murder, there would not have been thirty years of confinement of Dr Minor in Broadmoor, and he would not have been “an helpmeet” of Dr James Murray with his thousands of quotation slips. Befittingly, the author has dedicated the book to George Merrett.

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