AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE
The Sisyphean project of compiling the first Oxford English Dictionary was an extraordinary collaboration between a celebrated Scottish lexicographer and a lunatic asylum inmate, finds Stuart Kelly
A collaboration between a lexicographer and lunatic asylum inmate led to the first Oxford English Dictionary
He never got to Z. By the time of his death in 1915, James Murray – probably the most diligent, hardworking and incisive lexicographer of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century – had overseen A-D, H-K, O, P and T for what was originally called A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, but is known to us as the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray took on the gargantuan task in 1879 and it was proposed to stretch to four volumes. By the completion of the first edition in 1928 it was in twelve volumes, with 414,825 words defined and nearly two million citations.
Prior to the OED, the most prestigious and comprehensive was Samuel Johnson’s of 1755. But it had a word-list of only 42,773. Johnson did inject a great deal of humour into his work
Murray left school at fourteen because his family could not pay the school fees
– defining a lexicographer as a ‘harmless drudge’ or defining Monsieur as a ‘term of reproach for a Frenchman’. Johnson sought to give examples of how a word was used by citing the classics of English poetry, writers such as Shakespeare, Milton and Pope. Most importantly it was a single-handed endeavour – Johnson had just one clerk to assist him.
The OED was completely different. Murray’s was a team effort. He not only had several employees, including his eleven children, but asked for the public to send in rare usages they found in their own reading – a decision that would have somewhat dramatic consequences. Furthermore, he was particularly keen on finding the earliest occurrences rather than the more high-falutin ones.
It is quite a remarkable achievement, especially when you factor in Murray’s background. He was born in 1837 in the village of Denholm near Hawick, the son of a weaver. He left school at fourteen because the family could not pay the school fees, but by dint of being an autodidact he became a schoolteacher in Hawick three years later.
Although in later life he looked rather austere – a kind of Gandalf of bookworms – he seems to have been a clubbable cove, being one of the founders of the Hawick Archaeological Society and later a fixture of the Philological Society. In 1861 he courted a young music teacher, Maggie Scott. They had a daughter who tragically died of tuberculosis and Murray was advised to quit the dreich Scottish Borders and move to London. Within a year Maggie had succumbed to the same disease.
In London he worked in the Chartered Bank of India, and eventually fell in love again with Ada Agnes Ruthven, with whom he would have the eleven children who assisted on the dictionary. (A curious fact: the best man at their wedding was Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone who claimed Murray had first taught him about the properties of electricity).
He tried to secure a position in the
British Museum – unsuccessfully – and in his application listed his linguistic prowess as having Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin, Portuguese, Vaudois, Provençal, Dutch, German and Danish as well as Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Moeso-Gothic, Celtic, some Slavonic and Russian and could read Hebrew, Peshisto, Aramaic, Arabic, Coptic and Phoenician. Murray never have met John Leyden, and I cannot find a scrap of evidence that he ever studied his career, but it would be strange if he had not heard of him, being one of the most famous sons of Denholm in the early-nineteenth century. Leyden was renowned as an astonishing linguist – some memoirs claim he knew 36 languages at the time of his untimely death in Java.
But he must have been an inspiration – largely self-taught, from a humble background and proceeding to become a judge in India. It is probably unlikely that Murray ever saw the curious Text House on Denholm Green, situated right next to his childhood home. It was built in 1910 and has rather gnomic texts embossed on the walls – ‘Take tent in time ere time be tint’, ‘All was others, all will be others’. By that period he was firmly ensconced in his Scriptorium on Oxford’s Banbury Road, working indefatigably on the dictionary.
Murray may have come to the attention of the delegates of the Oxford University Press committee tasked with the creation of the dictionary for two reasons. He had published a book in 1873, The Dialects of the Southern Counties of Scotland, and had written on etymology for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. But perhaps most importantly he was meticulous, polymathic and possessed of a staggering work ethic. The OED had found their man.
Murray does not seem to have hobnobbed in the Senior Common Rooms of the Oxford college once he moved there, and it would be fair to say in appearance he became more eccentric. The Scriptorium itself might have raised a few donnish eyebrows. Rather than working in the Bodleian, he assembled this massive project in a corrugated tin shed in his back garden. Inside it is honeycombed with little boxes to store the hundreds of thousands of slips detailing a word, its origin and its earliest known usage. The amount of mail he received eventually necessitated the Post Office installing a personal pillar box for him outside his house. It was rumoured that a letter addressed to James Murray, Oxford, would reach him.
Much anti-Gallic enthusiasm greeted Johnson’s dictionary, mostly about it being the Herculean efforts of one man (the French equivalent took forty scholars). Murray took a different approach, advertising in book shops, printing houses and
“In Broadmoor the delusional Minor believed he was being abducted at night and taken to Istanbul
circulating libraries for readers who had unearthed quaint or unusual words. To all extents and purposes it was the Victorian equivalent of Open Source media and crowd-funding.
One of Murray’s most voluminous correspondents was William Minor, an American from a Berkshire village called Crowthorne. Murray could be slightly naïve or perhaps incurious, and presumed that Broadmoor was the village’s stately pile rather than a lunatic asylum. A strange epistolary friendship emerged, and not a wholly unself-interested one. Whatever else he was, Minor was a genius at ferreting out first usages, variants, etymologies and regional variations.
Born in Ceylon in 1834, William Chester Minor was sent to a military academy at New Haven in Connecticut, then studied at Yale University before enrolling as an army surgeon. He saw sickening and barbarous Civil War action at the Battle of the Wilderness and was transferred to New York’s red light district where he developed an unhealthy relationship with the prostitutes that led to his containment at St Elizabeth’s asylum. I do not think it anachronistic to suggest Minor was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Minor decided to move to London, thinking that the change of scene would calm him. It decidedly did not. Minor took rooms in Lambeth, then a slum, and started his dalliances with the demi-monde. He also became paranoid and convinced himself that a local labourer kept breaking into his rooms. On 17 February 1872 he shot the man. Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity and his sojourn in Broadmoor, where he had a moderately handsome allowance for buying antiquarian books, began. Even in the dark days of Victorian treatment of the mentally ill, it would seem uncontentious to say that giving bladed instruments to maniacs is not wise policy.
By 1920 the timbre of Minor’s delusions had altered. Instead of his lodgings being searched, he now believed he was being abducted at night and taken as far away as Istanbul (a city he had never visited) and forced to perform paedophilic acts. Yet the solution lay close to hand. The paper knife that had gleaned out and teased off words now separated Minor from his own penis.
Were Murray and Minor friends? That is a difficult question. Murray visited Minor in Broadmoor and was unfailingly complimentary about his work: ‘We could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone.’ After the self-castration, Murray lobbied for leniency to the then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, who had Minor transferred back to St Elizabeth’s.
There remains one final mystery. James Murray’s baptismal register lists his name, unsurprisingly, as James Murray. But before his knighthood and after the move to England he took to signing himself as James Augustus Henry Murray. Social climbing? Pretentiousness? Both seem unlikely.
The only mention he makes of it is that there were ‘too many Jimmy Murrays down here’. I like to think of it as a pawky bit of humour. The man who was so precise, so forensic, and so committed to getting it all right was more than happy to play fast and loose with his own name.