Anyone interested in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary will be well acquainted with the tragic tale of Dr. William Chester Minor, but #EYACrime lets us take a deeper look at Minor’s work for the Dictionary.
It was on 17th February 1872 that William Minor, an American surgeon and soldier, shot and killed George Merritt in the early hours of the morning on a gloomy Lambeth street. Merritt was simply walking to work at the nearby Red Lion Brewery. William Minor had worked as an army surgeon during the American Civil War and his experiences on the battlefield led to paranoid delusions and an unstable mind. He had come to London to recuperate. Believing someone was trying to enter his rooms, Minor ran onto the street and shot Merritt twice. Minor was found not guilty of the crime on reasons of insanity but was given a life sentence at what was then called Broadmoor Asylum.
Minor went on to become one of the most important volunteer contributors to the OED. From his cell, he began to send in contributions to the Dictionary. He was a well-educated man and an avid reader with a collection of rare antiquarian books which Broadmoor allowed him to keep in a second cell. Scouring this literature for useful quotations came naturally to him and he worked in a very methodical manner. Upon reading a book, he would prepare a small pamphlet headed with the title of the book in question. He would then note interesting words or usages of words in an alphabetical list, followed by their relevant page number. He soon built up a collection of these word indexes, written in minute handwriting, which allowed him to supply the dictionary editors with quotations that were very relevant to the words they were working on. Over the course of his work on the Dictionary he contributed tens of thousands of quotations.
The OED archive contains 42 of Minor’s word indexes, covering titles from philosophy, economics, art, to medicine. What is interesting, however, is that almost half of them relate to aspects of travel or foreign lands. Minor was no stranger to travel – he was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) before moving to America and then on to England. But perhaps incarceration gave him a keener interest in researching distant countries.
A number of the books refer to Persia and the East Indies, understandable given Minor’s link to Ceylon. One such book was John Fryer’s snappily titled A New Account of East India and Persia in Eight Letters being Nine Years Travels begun 1672 and finished 1681. A slip written out by Minor from this book can be seen here – it concerns the word guz, an Indian measure of length. The book went on to provide quotations for almost 1000 entries in the OED. Several books cited in Minor’s indexes recount similar adventures, such as The Travels of Monsieur de Thevenot into the Levant (1687), Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), and A Relation of a Journey begun 1610 by George Sandys (1615). Others take a more historical view – Relations of the Most Famous Kingdoms and Commonweales thorough the World (1611) and Geographical Historie of Africa (1600). Voyage Around the World (George Anson, 1748) was something Minor could only dream of.
Another area of interest to Minor was satirical writings about city life. These works take a witty and sometimes acerbic view of the customs and manners of urban living. One example is Jonathan Swift writing as Simon Wagstaff in A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation (1738). In it, he studies the supposed pleasantries of social intercourse, which he felt were often laced with malicious undertones. Another is Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town (1673), a sardonic look at London social life written by ‘a person of quality’.
One title resonates with the history of Oxford University Press. Amusements Serious and Comical for the Meridian of London was written by Tom Brown in 1700. Tom Brown was a translator and satirist who first found fame when studying at Oxford University. It was here that he met Dr. John Fell, the Dean of Christ Church College, and the man who set up Oxford University’s first print shop in the Sheldonian Theatre. Hugely influential in the history of the Press, he was known as a disciplinarian at college. When Brown got into trouble with Fell, it is said that he would be spared expulsion if he could translate a Latin epigram – Brown translated it thus: ‘I do not love thee, Dr Fell, the reason why I cannot tell, but this I know and know full well, I do not love thee Dr Fell.’ He went on to pen several famous writings, including the one Dr. Minor indexed and which eventually helped to illustrate more than 200 entries in the OED.
In his preface to the fifth volume of the dictionary, James Murray stated that ‘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 for words at which we are actually working.’ His tale was first publicly told in 1915 in an issue of the Strand Magazine, five years after Minor was allowed to return to America and five years before his death.
