Mark Rozzo
THE SURGEON OF CROWTHORNE by Simon Winchester (Viking)
In 1879, James Murray, an expert on the dialects of his native Scotland and the recently appointed editor of The New Dictionary on Historical Principles, called for volunteers from Britain, the United States and the colonies to help create the first complete dictionary of the English language.
One of the many armchair lexicographers who responded to Murray’s appeal was WC Minor, an American physician living outside London, at Broadmoor, Crowthorne. Minor would go on to astonish the dictionary’s staff by sending in more than 10 000 quotations culled from some of the least- read books in the language.
Meanwhile, The New Dictionary on Historical Principles outgrew its original four-volume design, spreading out over 50 years (not counting the fruitless 20 that preceded Murray’s editorship) and into the 12 slab- like volumes we now recognize as The Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
The unlikely relationship between the tireless Scottish editor and his reclusive American helpmate is the focus of Simon Winchester’s book. It is as fun as it is frustrating, though one suspects it should be neither.
Murray discovered after years of correspondence that Minor was an inmate of the Asylum for the Criminally Insane at Broadmoor. Murray had envisioned the mysterious doctor as a lettered man of leisure; by the time the two finally met in 1896, Minor had been incarcerated at Broadmoor for 24 years, having spent most of that time combing through rare editions in his comfortably appointed suite.
The Yale-educated Minor came to London from New Haven in 1871, after a breakdown forced his retirement from the US Army. He had been a surgeon in the Civil War, a singularly gruesome job in a singularly gruesome war. His wartime experiences may have first got him unhinged, but it wasn’t until Minor settled in seedy Lambeth, South London’s “swampy gyre of pathways”, that he really lost it.
On one such pathway, shortly after 2am on February 17 1872, he shot and killed George Merritt, a labourer en route to his shift at the Red Lion Brewery. A swift trial followed, and Minor was sentenced to imprisonment at Broadmoor “until Her Majesty’s pleasure be known”.
It seems that Minor had suspected Merritt of being one of the Irish Fenians who, he insisted, had been stealing into his flat at night in order to poison and violate him. Minor had already complained to Scotland Yard about nocturnal disturbances, a continuation of the paranoia that had begun to envelop him in the US, where he said strange men tried to get him to eat poisonous, metallic biscuits.
The police investigation revealed that Minor had a strong affection for Lambeth’s plentiful brothels; Broadmoor authorities discovered that Minor had been bedevilled by sex ever since his boyhood in Ceylon, where his parents ran a mission and girls ran naked on the beaches.
Murray’s life, meanwhile, was consumed by happier, if less dramatic, obsessions. The elephantine project of getting the Big Dictionary together was making him a notable scholar, and, in 1908, a knight of the British Empire. Still, the sad lot of Minor continued to fill Murray with pity, and he made visits to Broadmoor to buck up his incarcerated colleague’s spirits.
Winchester’s history of the OED is brisk and entertaining, but his ear for American history could use some fine-tuning. He has a flood of immigrants “pouring in from Ellis Island” in 1866, when, in fact, Ellis Island opened to immigrants in 1892. But the bigger problem with the book is that, despite Winchester’s access to previously unseen material, we’re never sure when he is cleaving to facts and when he’s fictionalising.
Winchester finishes with a salute to Minor’s victim that could almost be a macabre Oscars-night speech: “to the late George Merritt … without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told”.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne is indeed a tale or, as Winchester elsewhere describes it, “an amusing little saga”. Beyond that, it never seems to know what it wants to be. – The Washington Post