Murray, Minor & the OED

James Augustus Henry Murray  (1837-1915) Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford English Dictionary.  The first edition was published initially in 124 unbound parts (or fascicles) for those who had taken out advance subscriptions, the first in 1884 and the last not till 1928, almost half a century after Murray had commenced work.   The second edition in 20 volumes — more than 5,000 definitions, almost 2 & a half million illustrative quotations, & over 21,500 pages. Massive tomes, all 30 cm. high, & some over 5 cm. thick.  When he started, Murray had estimated that it would amount to about 7,000 pages in four volumes & take about ten years. Murray didn’t live to see the 1928 completion date, but after his death  in 1915 remainder of the Dictionary was written by Murray’s official collaborators: Henry Bradley (second editor from 1887, & chief editor on Murray’s death), William Craigie & Charles Onions.

Murray’s OED work was carried out in an unheated & poorly ventilated grey corrugated-iron portable shed lined with deal timber erected next to his house. Murray called it the Scriptorium, i.e., “a writing-room… set apart for the copying of manuscripts”.  There were actually two Scriptoria, one at the Midland village Mill Hill and then in Oxford.

Tucked away in Murray’s alphabetical acknowledgment list of the volunteers in the preface to the first completed volume is the entry “Dr. W.C. Minor of Crowthorne,” who contributed over 12,000 quotations — sometimes at the rate of over a hundred a week. Both men had been corresponding on Dictionary matters for over a decade, & while during that period Murray had been aware of Minor’s address (“Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire”), he had assumed that he was a medical officer at that institution.  William Chester Minor (1834–1920) was a physician, an American Civil War surgeon, but he was not on staff at the asylum, but a convicted criminally insane murderer! (a self-immolating, paranoid schizophrenic). During The Battle of the Wilderness in 1864, 5,371 Union soldiers deserted.  In an effort to prevent additional desertion & avoid mass executions, doctors were ordered to brand a 1.5 inch ‘D’ on the face of convicted deserters. Dr. Minor branded the face of an Irishman, & went mad– thoughts of retribution haunted him for the rest of his life.  It was this imagined retaliation that drove him to murder an innocent factory worker on the streets of London in 1872, after which he was imprisoned in the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.  From there he found out about the OED, and sent submissions to Murray.

Winchester, Simon    The Professor & the Madman : A Tale of Murder, Insanity, & the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary  HarperCollins, 1998