The Surgeon of Crowthorne, by Simon Winchester, Viking, 207pp, £10 in UK
For the lover of words, a dictionary is the most alluring of books. The true word lover can hardly open the greatest dictionary of all, the Oxford English Dictionary, to look up the spelling, pronunciation, definition and etymology of a single word only. Once into any volume of the OED, the searcher is inclined to linger, to browse there in a voluptuous state of verbal hypnosis.
For the advanced addict, what could be more delightfully beguiling than to play a part in an important work of dictionary-making? Simon Winchester, who was for twenty years a conscientious and adventurous journalist on the Guardian, has written a fascinating account of such dedication to words, the almost incredible life story of Dr W.C. Minor, a paranoid schizophrenic, murderer, and lexicographer extraordinary.
William Chester Minor, scion of a prosperous old New England family, was born in Ceylon in 1834. His father had sold his inherited printing business to go there as a Congregationalist missionary. William was well educated in Ceylon and then at Yale. He became a doctor and joined the Union army as a medical officer.
Winchester reasonably deduces that certain traumas experienced by Minor in the Battle of the Wilderness, one of the bloodiest engagements of the Civil War, probably triggered the breakdown that made Minor "profoundly and irreversibly mad". By the time he was honourably discharged from the army, he suffered from obscene nightmares and delusions of persecution.
In London, where he hoped to begin a year of European cultural exploration, he killed a man who, he mistakenly believed, had intruded into his bedroom in the middle of the night to harm him. Minor was convicted of murder and committed to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
Meanwhile, in Oxford, under the direction of James Murray, a lexicographer who also was a fanatic in his own way, research was slowly proceeding to prepare a comprehensive New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, which would eventually become known as the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Philological Society in 1857 urged that this vast work should be undertaken, the compilation of "the ultimate English dictionary", because, in Winchester's words, it was believed that "English was the quintessential imperial language and any books that dealt with it were important tools for the maintenance of the Empire". Not only should every word in the language be defined, it was decided, but, in order to enable its users to understand every nuance, its historical evolution at all stages must be illustrated with dated quotations.
The scholarly labour demanded was so prodigious that the editor and his small staff had to advertise for hundreds of dedicated, erudite and methodically accurate volunteers to contribute citations. Of this band of unpaid zealots, none was more enthusiastically prolific than a bibliophile who gave his address simply as Crowthorne, Berkshire - the address of Broadmoor Asylum.
After Dr Minor had repeatedly expressed his regret that he could not accept invitations to visit Oxford, Murray went to Crow thorne and discovered why. The two word lovers found they were so congenial, the Scottish academic and the American homicidal maniac, that a long, close friendship ensued. Minor continued to send valuable philological data to the Scriptorium in Oxford.
The first edition of the new dictionary was completed seventy years after the work began. The twelve massive volumes contained the definitions of 414,825 words, with 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. Murray said: "So enormous have been Dr Minor's contributions during the past 17 or 18 years that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries from his quotations alone."
After the Battle of the Wilderness, Minor was an atheist, but under Murray's influence he came to believe that there is a God. The widow of the man he had murdered forgave him and regularly visited the asylum. However, Minor's religious conversion had an unfortunate side-effect. He felt so guilty about his nocturnal erotic fantasies and their effect on his behaviour that he performed an autopeotomy. That's a very rare word which means he cut off his own penis.
Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic