He did just as everyone hoped. Letters record the specific assistance he gave—over words like develop (which caused the editors no end of difficulty), over Devanagari (the script in which Hindi, among others, is written), over diagram, diaskeuast, 2 handsome, and the pronoun He (he provided quotations for he being used as a word for mountains and rivers, for the redundant or pleonastic he being used in phrases such as the noble Murray he, of the combinations he that and he who or the slightly different he who, in the sense of anyone who, and of he combined in a prepositional phrase like he of Oxford or Henry VIII, he ofthe six wives). Reading the Hall letters, and the Hall books that were recovered from his little cottage after his death, reminds one forcefully of the richness and complexity of the work that all were engaged upon.
When he died, on 1 February 1901, the Scriptorium staff were stunned. `It is with the profoundest regret that we have to record his death,' Murray wrote in his Preface to Volume VI. Fitzedward Hall, for all his troubles, had `rendered invaluable help in all the portions hitherto published of the Dictionary'. The section in which Murray wrote these words concludes with definitions of the noun lap—`a liquid food for dogs, that part of a railway track used in common by more than one train, the front portion of the body from the waist to the knees of a person seated' … to all of which lexical complications this remarkable, unforgettable, and deeply troubled volunteer had devoted his time.
The other most celebrated of the volunteers—though as a reader of books and provider of quotations, and not as a critical student of the proofs—was an American also. He was a troubled man too— William Chester Minor, a former surgeon-soldier in the United States Army, a survivor of the Civil War who in the autumn of 1871 had been sent by his family in Connecticut across to London, to convalesce after falling desperately ill at home. Some weeks before he had been dismissed from the army because of his strange and erratic behaviour. Since he was well born and well connected, he was, however, allowed to keep his pension; and since he was a talented painter and flautist, and a collector of rare books, it was expected that he would improve.
The calming airs and cultured society of London did not improve his condition, though. He became even more ill, and in February 1872, during an attack of what now looks to have been paranoid schizophrenia, he shot and murdered an innocent working man on a night-time street in Lambeth. He gave himself up to the police, and was tried—found innocent of wilful murder by virtue of what by now was his very evident insanity. He was still sentenced to be put away, for the public good: he was ordered to spend the remainder of his life—or at Her Majesty's pleasure, as the court's archaic language had it—in one of Britain's then most up-to-date asylums for criminal lunatics, Broadmoor, in the Berkshire village of Crowthorne.
The story of Fitzedward Hall might seem one of anger, bitterness and yet an obsessive devotion to duty; that of W. C. Minor, by contrast, is one of dangerous madness, ineluctable sadness, and ultimate redemption—redemption in which his work for the Dictionary became in time his therapy, a labour that he needed to perform in order to remain halfway sane. If the outward parallels between the two men—both Americans, both learned, both with Eastern connections, 3 both troubled in the mind—are intriguing, the different ways in which the two made their separate contributions to the Dictionary—and the ways in which the Dictionary in turn made improvements to their lives—seem even more so.
Minor discovered the Dictionary in 1881, or thereabouts—we cannot be entirely certain, but at almost the same time as Hall wrote his first letter to the editor. The way in which Minor made the connection is uncertain, too—he may well have seen a mention of the project in the Athenaeum, to which it is known he subscribed from his cell, and which urged Americans to help. The story I prefer to believe is that the widow of the man he murdered, Mrs Eliza Merrett, who (somewhat improbably) came regularly to visit him at Broadmoor, carried without knowing it a copy of Murray's famous Appeal for Readers in a pile of books she had brought for the prisoners' library. It is said that Minor found the small slip of paper between two volumes, read it, and exclaimed that this, this dictionary work, was how he could to some extent now redeem himself.
However the connection was made, Minor worked assiduously for the next 21 years until he fell ill, in 1902, after cutting off his own penis during a fit of insane self-loathing. Murray paid endless tributes to him: one read, `Second only to the contributions of Dr Fitzedward Hall in enhancing our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases and constructions have been those of Dr W. C. Minor, received week by week.'
Minor's technique of word-gathering was very different from those of most other readers—and though he rarely equalled the totals of the super-contributors (such as those noted in the epigraph, like the also apparently often insane Thomas Austin, who had already contributed 165,000 slips by 1888, with more to come), he performed his work in such a way as to make himself uniquely useful to the dictionary makers.
He read, prodigiously. He had two cells at Broadmoor, one in which he ate and slept and painted and played his flute, the other which he had shelved as his library, and in which he kept his very considerable collection of antiquarian books. Knowing that all of the books he had collected were likely to be of use to the Dictionary, he created a potentially very useful way of reading them.
He would first prepare, by folding a number of sheets of paper together, a small eight-page quire of blank writing paper. He would then open the chosen book from his library, one that he suspected might hold a number of interesting words, 4 and begin reading. When he came upon a word that interested him and which he thought, in time, might interest the Dictionary staff, and which, moreover, was used in what he considered to be `an illustrative way' in the book, he would write it down in tiny letters—he was capable of the most minute legible handwriting—in his folderlike booklet.
Let us say, for sake of argument, that the word was bungalow, and that it appeared in the self-evidently illustrative sentence: `Every day I stopped once or twice at a travellers' bungalow, or rest-house' (which is a quotation that Minor did indeed find in an 1875 copy of Lippincott's Magazine, and which the Dictionary later used). He would place the word in his booklet so that it was likely, eventually, to occupy its logical place in what he was in essence creating, an alphabetical index of the main book. Hence he would place bungalow on a very early page (since its first letter was b) somewhere towards the bottom (since its second letter was u) of the page.
If the next word-and-quotation he found interesting was bread, he would position this word somewhere above bungalow, leaving enough space for words whose second letters lay within the range
-re to -un, words like broken, bubble, and bully and which, if he happened upon them later, would slide in between those he had already found. If the next word that intrigued him was chortle, he would place this on a page or so a little further on; and if it was youngster, say, then it would go on the middle part of a page towards the end of the book. Against each word he would write the page number and line on which he had found it, so that he could find the sentence that included it in just a matter of moments.
After some weeks of work—being a prisoner who was, essentially, serving out a life sentence, he had a limitless number of weeks ahead of him, so time was not a problem as it might have been for others—he would find he had completed a full word index for the book. He would head it with the title of the book; and then begin work on another, making another booklet for that, and then another and another, and so on.