Product Description

The making of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the OED's editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible - Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell-bound life to work on the English language.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34422 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Subtitled "A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words," this is a remarkable account of the life of W.C. Minor. Not a famous name, but a quite extraordinary man. Minor was an American Army surgeon and millionaire who contributed enormously by post to the first, epic edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) while hidden away in obscurity in Berkshire, England. As the author points out, the OED is the most important work of reference ever created, and, given the globalisation of the English language, is likely to remain so for centuries. But when in 1896 Sir James Murray, the formidable editor of the OED, at last travelled down to Berkshire to find this elusive lexicographer and thank him for all his work, he found Minor in Broadmoor: patient Number 742.

Minor was educated, gentlemanly, industrious, and a psychopathic killer, who had gunned down a man at random in the London streets because he believed his victim was an Irish terrorist after his blood.

Simon Winchester won't win any prizes for the elegance of his prose style, but he has dug up a strange and extraordinary life story and turned it into a compelling piece of historical detective work. He never really penetrates into the central mystery of Minor's madness, because no one can. The mystery remains, inviolable, and makes his tale all the more darkly compelling. --Christopher Hart

About the Author
Simon Winchester has had an award-winning 20 year career as Guardian correspondent. He lives in New York and is the Asia-Pacific Editor for Conde Nast Traveler and contributes to a number of American magazines, as well as the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and the BBC. He has written numerous books. THE RIVER AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD (Viking 1997/Penguin 1998) has been shortlisted for the 1998 Thomas Cook/Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award.

Customer Reviews

Stranger than Fiction
This book recounts a tale so improbable that as fiction it would have been hard to believe. Two Victorian lives become entwined. On the one hand, a great scholar who has bettered himself through learning, a man of towering reputation and influence; on the other, a millionaire madman whose delusional grip on reality has failed him and left him isolated in a lunatic asylum, a continent away from his family, with only his books for company.

Somehow their paths collide, and for years they work at a distance to create together the greatest reference book in the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary.

Eventually they meet, and their rapport blossoms into true friendship. A strange story unfolds, of gothic madness, violence, improbable love and eventual disintegration.

At times uplifting, at others rather muted, this book can at times be unevenly paced; but overall it is a very rewarding read.

A Dictionary will never be the same again …………..
This is a well-told tale that leads the audience through some of the politics involved in the production of the Oxford English Dictionary. The author has fictionalised the account at times through necessity, but made it clear that this is what he has done, in a story that combines murder most foul with the troubled life of the murdered.

The dictionary (“OED”) was a product of the Victorian ‘we can do anything’ optimism, and was undoubtedly a hugely ambitious project. The task would probably have been finished without the help of Dr William Chester Minor, a resident of a large country house in Berkshire (and better known as Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane). However, the work was enormously advanced by the surgeon / murderer. Minor grasped the vast amount of work involved, and had the tiem and source material to contribute freely. He also had a wonderful method in his searching out quotations for the normal and abnormal use of words. His method enabled the editorial team, led by Dr James Murray, to request help from Minor and know thay would receive an enlightening and quality answer.

Minor died in 1920, back in his native America, more that 7 years before the completion of the OED. In the completed work there are 414835 words defined, and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

The English speaking world is indebted to the contributions of William Minor. We are also grateful to Simon Winchester for telling the tale with clarity and humour. Winchester also debunks the mythical account of the first meeting between Dr Murray and Minor. I got the feeling that the author liked the fabled account, even though he knew it not to be true (and clearly states that fact).

Winchester missed some significant information.
The subject of "The Surgeon of Crowthorne," by Simon Winchester, is the collaboration of Sir James A. H. Murray, editor of the "Oxford English Dictionary," and Dr. William C. Minor, the American volunteer who worked on the "O.E.D." for 20 years while an inmate in the Broadmoor Lunatic Asylum for the criminally insane. I am a New York playwright who, in 1995, completed a full-length drama focusing on James Murray and William Minor, called "The Dictionary," and whose help Mr. Winchester sought when he was first considering writing his book. (Winchester mentions me in his Acknowledgments.)

Ultimately, Winchester was able to get to almost all of the sources that I had used, as well as a number that I could never have reached. Nonetheless, there is some significant information that Winchester missed in his book, as well as a number of inaccuracies in "The Surgeon of Crowthorne."

About Minor's death Winchester writes, incorrectly, "There were no obituaries." An obituary was published in 1921 in "Yale University Obituary Record of Graduates Deceased During the Year Ending July 1, 1920." From this obituary one learns that Minor was born in the East Indies; that he entered the Yale School of Medicine in 1861 and was graduated in 1863; that he was incarcerated at Broadmoor, transferred to St. Elizabeth's in the U.S., and later transferred from St. Elizabeth's to The Retreat, in Hartford, where he died on March 26, 1920. The Yale obituary also mentions his brother Alfred.

Winchester refers to the lawyer who defended Minor in his murder trial, but does not mention the lawyer's name. My research suggests that the person who defended Minor is the same one who defended Oscar Wilde. The man's name is Edward Clarke. I am surprised that Winchester did not seize upon this possibility.

Winchester theorizes that Minor's clinically paranoid dread of the Irish, and of the Fenians in particular, was the result of his experience as a Union Army Surgeon with Irish troops during the Civil War.

Winchester neglects the fact that during the years that Minor was stationed in New York (on Governors Island) the Fenians were, in fact, his real enemy. Minor lived in New York during 1867 and 1868, when the local papers frequently covered events pertaining to the revolutionary movement in Ireland and to activities of the Irish in New York. In March of 1867 the Irish cause held the front page of just about every newspaper every day. It was during the week of March 18 that the expectation of a Fenian attack on Canada, still part of the British Empire at that time, appeared in at least three separate articles in three different papers. News of U. S. troops being moved from New York to the border to thwart the offensive also made headlines. That Minor would have been selected to assist in the battlefield action against the Fenians is not unlikely.

This attack never took place; however, less than a year before, the Fenians had staged an assault on Canada from New York State. Eight hundred Irishmen crossed the Niagara River and captured Fort Erie. They were subsequently defeated by U.S. troops, and about 700 Fenians were arrested. Minor would have known of this.

Winchester mentions the American vice-consul-general and quotes a letter of his to the Medical Superintendent of Broadmoor, but neglects to cite his name, which is Joshua Nunn. Winchester also failed to locate a series of twenty-two letters by Joshua Nunn, an important source of information regarding Minor. The letters to Minor's family and friends in America contain particulars that conflict with some of Winchester's assumptions regarding Minor's life at Broadmoor and his relations with his family.

Joshua Nunn clearly went beyond the call of duty in his assistance to, and profound concern for, Minor. Nunn was the man who handled all the details of Minor's legal situation as well as Minor's living conditions at Broadmoor. He was also very involved in the press accounts. Nunn not only corresponded and met with Minor and his family but also visited Minor at Broadmoor.

According to the Nunn letters, the family did not want Minor returned to an asylum in the U.S. They were satisfied to let him remain at Broadmoor. This information contradicts Winchester's indication that the family would have rejoiced at Minor's return. Nunn was surprised at the family's neglect of Minor and at their refusal, at one point, to send Minor any more money at Broadmoor.

Nunn makes very clear that Minor's mail was heavily censored. This conflicts with Winchester's implication.

Winchester makes a mystifying observation at the end of his book. He states that it was only at the completion of the "Oxford English Dictionary," in 1927, that Americans could say that the Dictionary "was now, at least partly, of their own making." From the very beginning Americans had the right to claim that the Dictionary was, to a significant extent, a creation of their own making. In Murray's first years of editing the "O.E.D.," fully one half of the 800 volunteer readers with whom he worked were American. James Murray felt that his most avid support came from the United States. He said, "...it is Americans upon whom I depend above all." He called Americans "the most reliable and trustworthy volunteers." In 1883 Murray wrote, "I truly believe that the future of English scholarship lies in the United States, where the language is studied with an enthusiasm unknown here and which will soon leave us far behind."

"The Surgeon of Crowthorne" focuses on some of the same fascinating aspects of the collaboration of Murray and Minor that first inspired me to dramatize the story. It is important, however, to look beyond the surface of material Winchester presents as truth.