PENGUIN BOOKS
THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE
‘A weird and wonderful story of an eccentric friendship, and a slice of history’ Sunday Times
‘What a revelation. Beautifully told and awe-inspiring’ Daily Mail
‘An extraordinary tale, and Simon Winchester could not have told it better… a splendid book’ Economist
‘A vivid parable – full of suspense, pathos and humour’ Wall Street Journal
‘A cracking read’ Spectator
‘The linguistic detective story of the decade’ The New York Times
‘Masterful… one of those rare stories that combine human drama and historical significance’ Independent
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simon Winchester was born and educated in England, has lived in Africa, India and China, and now lives in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Having reported from almost everywhere during more than thirty years as a foreign correspondent, he now contributes to a variety of American and British magazines and makes regular broadcasts for the BBC.
Simon Winchester’s other books include Outposts: Travels to the Remains of the British Empire; Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles; The Pacific; Pacific Nightmare, a fictional account of the aftermath of the Hong Kong hand-over; Prison Diary, Argentina, the story of three months spent in a Patagonian jail on spying charges during the Falklands war; The River at the Centre of the World – A Journey up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time; the number-one international bestseller The Surgeon of Crowthorne; and The Map that Changed the World, which tells the extraordinary story of William Smith, pioneering geologist of the British Isles. His most recent book is Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.
THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE
A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary
SIMON WINCHESTER
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Viking 1998
Published in Penguin Book 1999
48
Copyright © Simon Winchester, 1998
All rights reserved
Frontispiece: the ‘Call to the Contributors’ has been reproduced from a New English Dictionary pamphlet of April 1879, by permission of Oxford University Press
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-194204-9
To the memory of G. M.
Contents
Preface
Chapter One Saturday Night in Lambeth Marsh
Chapter Two The Man Who Taught Latin to Cattle
Chapter Three The Madness of War
Chapter Four Gathering Earth’s Daughters
Chapter Five The Big Dictionary Conceived
Chapter Six The Scholar in Cell Block 2
Chapter Seven Entering the Lists
Chapter Eight Annulated, art, brick-tea, buckwheat
Chapter Nine The Meeting of Minds
Chapter Ten The Unkindest Cut
Chapter Eleven Then Only the Monuments
Chapter Twelve Postscript
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Suggestions for Further Reading
AN APPEAL
TO THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING AND ENGLISH-READING PUBLIC
TO READ BOOKS AND MAKE EXTRACTS FOR THE PHILOLOGICAL SOCIETY’S
NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY.
IN November 1857, a paper was read before the Philological Society by Archbishop Trench, then Dean of Westminster, on ‘Some Deficiencies in our English Dictionaries,’ which led to a resolution on the part of the Society to prepare a Supplement to the existing Dictionaries supplying these deficiencies. A very little work on this basis sufficed to show that to do anything effectual, not a mere Dictionary-Supplement, but a new Dictionary worthy of the English Language and of the present state of Philological Science, was the object to be aimed at. Accordingly, in January 1859, the Society issued their ‘Proposal for the publication of a New English Dictionary,’ in which the characteristics of the proposed work were explained, and an appeal made to the English and American public to assist in collecting the raw materials for the work, these materials consisting of quotations illustrating the use of English words by all writers of all ages and in all senses, each quotation being made on a uniform plan on a half-sheet of notepaper, that they might in due course be arranged and classified alphabetically and by meanings. This Appeal met with a generous response: some hundreds of volunteers began to read books, make quotations, and send in their slips to ‘sub-editors,’ who volunteered each to take charge of a letter or part of one, and by whom the slips were in turn further arranged, classified, and to some extent used as the basis of definitions and skeleton schemes of the meanings of words in preparation for the Dictionary. The editorship of the work as a whole was undertaken by the late Mr. Herbert Coleridge, whose lamented death on the very threshold of his work
An extract from the call to the contributors to what would eventually become the Oxford English Dictionary.
Preface
mysterious (mI’stIər1əs), a. [f. L. mystērium MYSTERY1 + OUS. Cf. F. mystérieux.]
1. Full of or fraught with mystery; wrapt in mystery; hidden from human knowledge or understanding; impossible or difficult to explain, solve, or discover; of obscure origin, nature, or purpose.
Popular myth has it that one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history took place on a cool and misty late autumn afternoon in 1896, in the small village of Crowthorne in Berkshire.
One of the parties to the colloquy was the formidable Dr James Murray, the then editor of what was later to be called the Oxford English Dictionary. On the day in question he had travelled fifty miles by train from Oxford to meet an enigmatic figure named Dr W. C. Minor, who was among the most prolific of the thousands of volunteer contributors whose labours lay at the core of the Dictionary’s creation.
For very nearly twenty years beforehand these two men had corresponded regularly about the finer points of English lexicography. But they had never met. Minor seemed never willing or able to leave his home at Crowthorne, never willing to come to Oxford. He was unable to offer any kind of explanation, or do more than offer his regrets.