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"I am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society and Editor of the New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honor and a pleasure to at long last make your acquaintance -- for you must be, kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr. W. C. Minor?"
Popular legend has it that a most remarkable conversation took place on a misty autumn afternoon in 1897, in the small English village of Crowthorne. One of the parties to the colloquy was the formidable James Murray, the then editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, or, as it was called in its early days, the New English Dictionary. On the day in question Murray had traveled 50 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 searches into word origins and meanings were crucial to the dictionary's creation. For very nearly 20 years these two men had corresponded regularly about the finer points of English lexicography. But, so the story goes, they had never met. Dr. Minor never seemed willing or able to leave his home at Crowthorne, never willing to come the 50 miles up to Oxford. He was unable to offer any kind of explanation, nor do more than offer his regrets.
Murray, who himself was rarely free from the burdens of his work at his dictionary headquarters, the famous Scriptorium in Oxford, had long wished to see and to thank his mysterious and intriguing helper, particularly so by the late 1890s when, with the dictionary well under way, official honors were being showered upon all its creators. Murray wanted to make sure that all those involved -- even one so apparently bashful as Dr. Minor -- were fully recognized for the demanding work they had put in. Murray decided that he would pay a visit. "If the mountain would not come to Mahomet, then Mahomet would go to the mountain."
Accordingly, he telegraphed his intentions to Dr. Minor, noting that he would find it most convenient to take a train that arrived at Crowthorne Station just after 2 o'clock on a certain Wednesday in November. By return wire, Dr. Minor said that would be fine; the great lexicographer was indeed expected and would be made most welcome.
At the railway station a polished brougham and a liveried coachman were waiting, and with James Murray aboard they clip-clopped back through the lanes of rural Berkshire and at last drew up outside a huge and rather forbidding red-brick mansion. A solemn servant showed him into a grand and book-lined study, where behind an immense mahogany desk stood a man of undoubted importance. Murray bowed gravely, and launched into the brief speech of greeting that he had so long rehearsed:
"A very good afternoon to you, sir. I am Dr. James Murray of the London Philological Society, and editor of the New English Dictionary. It is indeed an honor and a pleasure to at long last make your acquaintance -- for you must be, kind sir, my most assiduous helpmeet, Dr. W. C. Minor?"
There was a brief pause, an air of momentary mutual embarrassment. A clock ticked loudly. There were muffled footsteps in the hall. And then the man behind the desk cleared his throat, and spoke:
"I regret, kind sir, that I am not. It is not at all as you suppose. I am in fact the superintendent of the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Dr. Minor is most certainly here. But he is an inmate. He has been a patient here for more than 20 years." William Chester Minor, the man whom Murray visited at Crowthorne, was an American. In 1897 he was 63. Born of American missionary parents on the island of Ceylon, he had spent his teenage years in New Haven, Connecticut, gone to Yale, and later qualified as a surgeon. But a distinctly unkind fate eventually brought him to England and placed him in Broadmoor -- a grim place still standing today -- which had been built shortly before he arrived. It was then the pride and joy of those doctor-scientists who were still called "alienists," eventually to be restyled as clinical psychiatrists....
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