The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words by Simon Winchester

Author:Simon Winchester
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Inmates of institutions, Murder, Reference, Lexicographers, Dictionaries, Psychiatric hospital patients, Criminally insane, English language, General, United States, True Crime, Talking books, New English dictionary on historical principles, Oxford English dictionary, Murderers
ISBN: 9780141942049
Publisher: Viking
Published: 1998-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Entering the Lists

catchword (’kæt∫w3ːd). [f. CATCH- 3 b + WORD.]

1. Printing. The first word of the following page inserted at the right-hand lower corner of each page of a book, below the last line. (Now rarely used.) Also in Manuscripts.

2. A word so placed as to catch the eye or attention; spec. a. the word standing at the head of each article in a dictionary or the like…

1879 Directions to Readers for Dict., Put the word as a catchword at the upper corner of the slip. 1884 Athenæum 26 Jan. 124/2 The arranging of the slips collected… and the development of the various senses of every Catchword.

The two small closely printed sheets that came as an addendum to Murray’s first letter turned out to be a set of meticulously worded instructions. When his morning mail was delivered by the ward staff that day, Minor must have fallen upon this one envelope eagerly, reading and rereading its contents. But it was not the content alone that fascinated him: a list of rules for Dictionary helpers was not the cause of his excitement.

It was the simple fact that they had been sent to him in the first place. The letter from James Murray must have represented, in Minor’s view, a token of further forgiveness and understanding, which Eliza Merrett’s visits to him had already suggested. The invitation seemed a long-sought membership badge of the society from which he had been so long estranged. By being sent these sheets of rules he was, he felt, being received back into a corner of the real world. A corner that, admittedly, was still housed in a pair of cells in an alien madhouse – but one that had firmly forged links to the world of learning, and connections with a more comfortable reality.

After a decade of languishing in the dark slough of imprisonment, intellectual isolation and remove, Minor felt that at last he was being hoisted back up on to the sunlit uplands of scholarship. And with what he saw as this re-enlistment in the ranks, so Minor’s self-worth began, at least marginally, to re-emerge, to begin seeping back. From the little evidence that survives in his medical records, he appears to have started recovering his confidence and even his contentment, both with every moment that he spent reading Murray’s acceptance letter, and then when he prepared to embark on his self-set task.

For a while at least he seemed truly happier. Even the sternly worded Victorian ward notes of the day hint that the temper of this usually suspicious, broody, prematurely elderly-looking middle-aged man (he was now coming up to his fiftieth birthday) had somehow started to turn. He was undergoing, even if only for a short while, a sea-change in his personality – and all because, at long last, he had something valuable to do.

Yet in its very value lay a problem, as Minor saw it. The doctor came swiftly to realize, and was daunted by the realization, that this great work’s immense

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