He liked his new home, a mansion set in acres of woods and gardens on the banks of the Connecticut River. His nephew wrote in the early winter of 1920 of how the change seemed to have done him some good, and yet at the same time of how incapable he was of looking after himself. Furthermore, he was fast going blind, and for some months had been unable to read. With this one overarching source of joy now denied to him, there must have been little left to live for. No one was surprised when, after a walk on a blustery early spring day in that same year, he caught a cold that turned into bronchiopneumonia, and died peacefully in his sleep. It was Friday, 26 March 1920. He had lived for eighty-five years and nine months. He might have been mad, but, like Dr Johnson’s Dictionary elephant, he had been extremely long lifed.
There were no obituaries: just two lines in the Deaths columns of the New Haven Register. He was taken down to his old hometown and buried in the Evergreen Cemetery on the afternoon of the following Monday, in the family plot that had been established by his missionary father, Eastman Strong Minor. The gravestone is small and undistinguished, made of reddish sandstone, and bears only his name. An angel stands on a plinth near by, gazing skywards, with the engraved motto, My faith looks up to Thee.
Around the Evergreen Cemetery a high chain-link fence keeps out an angry part of New Haven, well away from the stern elegance of Yale. The simple existence of the fence underlines a sad and ironic reality: Dr William Chester Minor, who was among the greatest of contributors to the finest dictionary in all the English language, died forgotten in obscurity, and is buried near a slum.
The New English Dictionary itself took another eight years to finish, the announcement of its completion made on New Year’s Eve, 1927. The New York Times put the fact on the front page next New Year’s morning, a Sunday – that with the inclusion of the old Kentish word zyxt – the second singular indicative present tense, in local argot, of the verb to see – the work was done, the alphabet exhausted, and the full text now wholly in the printers’ hands. The making of the great book, declared the newspaper roundly and generously, was ‘one of the great romances of English literature’.
The Americans did indeed love the story of its making. H. L. Mencken – no mean lexicographer himself – wrote that he fully expected Oxford to celebrate the culmination of the seventy-year project with ‘military exercises, boxing matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling matches between the different Colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts’. Considering that the final editor of the book had held professorships at both Oxford and Chicago, there was more than good reason for Americans to take a keen interest in a creation that was now, at least partly, of their own making.
The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at last its great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.
The total length of type – all handset, for the books were done by letterpress, still discernible in the delicately impressed feel of the inked-on paper – is 178 miles, the distance between London and the outskirts of Manchester. Discounting every punctuation mark and every space – which any printer knows occupies just as much time to set as does a single letter – there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.
Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.
One word – and only one word – was ever actually lost: bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s Dictionary, was actually mislaid by Murray and found, a stray without a home, long after the fascicle Battentlie – Bozzom had been published. It, and tens of thousands of words that had evolved or appeared during the forty-four years spent assembling the fascicles and their parent volumes, appeared in a supplement, which came out in 1933. Four further supplements appeared between 1972 and 1986. In 1989, using the new abilities of the computer, Oxford University Press issued its fully integrated second edition, incorporating all the changes and additions of the supplements in twenty rather more slender volumes. Then came a CD-ROM, and not long afterwards the great work was further adapted for use on-line. A third edition, with a vast budget, is in hand.
There is some occasional carping that the work reflects an elitist, male, British and Victorian tone. Yet even in the admission that, like so many achievements of the era, it did reflect a series of attitudes that are not wholly harmonic with those at the end of the twentieth century, none seems to suggest that any other dictionary has ever come close, or will ever come close, to the achievement that it offers. It was the heroic creation of a host of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, as does the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.
Chapter Twelve
Postscript
memorial (mI’mɔərIəl), a. and sb. [a. OF. memorial (mod.F. mémorial) = Sp., Pg. memorial, It. memoriale, ad. L. memoriālis adj. (neut. memoriāle, used in late Latin as sb.), f. memoria MEMORY.] A. adj.
1. Preserving the memory of a person or thing…
3. Something by which the memory of a person, thing, or event is preserved, as a monumental erection…
This has been the story of an American soldier whose involvement in the making of the world’s greatest dictionary was singular, astonishing, memorable and laudable – and yet at the same time wretchedly sad. And in the telling, it is tempting to forget that the circumstances that placed William Chester Minor in the position from where he was able to contribute all his time and energy to the making of the OED began with his horrible and unforgivable commission of a murder.
George Merrett, who was his victim, was an ordinary, innocent working-class farmer’s son from Wiltshire, who came up to London to make his living, but who was shot dead, leaving a pregnant wife, Eliza, and six young children. The family were already living in the direst poverty, trying to maintain some semblance of their farm-country dignity among the squalor of one of the roughest and most unforgiving parts of the Victorian city. Matters now took a terrible turn for the worse.
All London was shocked and horrified by the killing, and funds were raised and money collected to help the widow and her brood. Americans in particular, stunned at the outrage committed by one of their own, were asked by their Consul-General to contribute to a diplomatic fund; the vicars in Lambeth banded together to make collections, ecumenically; a series of amateur entertainments – including one ‘of an unusually high-class character’ with readings of Longfellow and of a selection from Othello, and held at the Hercules Club – was staged across town to raise money; and the funeral itself was a splendid affair, as impressive as that of any grandee.
George Merrett had been a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters – one of the many so-called Friendly Societies that were once popular across Britain as a means, in the absence of any government or privately funded schemes, of providing cooperative pensions and other financial help for the working classes. On the night that he died Merrett had been relieving a shift-worker who was a brother Forester: this act of small benevolence made the Order doubly obliged to offer their late member a handsome farewell.