Writer's Library: Married Women’s Property in England

by Susan Staves. 1990, Harvard University Press, 290 pages

Reviewed by Alice VonKannon

I really struck gold when I found this book. It was a topic that had always confused me, women’s property rights, but one you’ll get into in just about any Regency that touches on marriage contracts, widowhood, dowries or related subjects. And what Regency romance never touches on any of these?

 Yes, there’s some legalese in the writing, but it’s not unintelligible. The author jokes about this herself in the preface, that historians are not lawyers, and may have difficulty with some of the concepts. To illustrate this, she quotes from a Cambridge monograph on the subject: In attempting to explain the invalidity of a gift over of a remainder for the life of the tenant in tail in the conveyance of an entail, Coke argued that the remainder must be void.

Little wonder, as Staves says, that women of the period hated getting into the whole messy subject of their property settlement, and often, perhaps foolishly, left it to their father’s lawyers. You, however, don’t have to be a lawyer to understand it as explained in this book, though it’s not a popular history, and you may want to keep your dictionary at hand. Usually, with the avalanche of period money terms, from “pin money” to “jointure,” the author will explain the term before using it for the first time. And though you may wish to, it’s not really necessary to read the book in its entirety to get the info you need, since it’s arranged mostly by time period, and has an excellent index. Also, Ms. Staves often highlights attitudes from literature and plays of the period to make her point, making it more accessible.

It’s out of print, of course, which can be tougher when it’s an academic rather than a popular history. However, at the moment there are twenty-four copies of it on ABE Books, a good sign of general availability, and most are reasonably priced.

These are very confusing waters, choppy and changeable – what was true in 1780 might not be true at all in your story that takes place in 1812, and blithe blogs speaking in general can get it wrong. When I wrote a scene for my last book about dowry rights, with a character protecting a young girl from a potential intemperate husband, I felt much more confident having read this. A keeper.

Pride, Prejudice and Paper Knives

 

Lizzie isn't holding a cake knife. Or a letter opener.

Guys, this one is way cool.

Ever see the 1940 version of Pride and Prejudice with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier? Great MGM film, with a polished Aldous Huxley screenplay. I’d seen it about a dozen times. The last time it was on, I dropped what I was doing to enjoy a famous scene again, after Elizabeth has barged into Netherfield Park to care for her sister Jane, who’s ill. All and sundry, Darcy, the Bingleys and Elizabeth, are gathered in the Netherfield library. The dialog, I’m sure fans will remember, is charmingly acidic. (“I’m no longer surprised, Mr. Darcy, at your knowing only six accomplished women; I wonder at your knowing any.”) Greer Garson is very relaxed, about to read the book in her hand. What she does with it always escaped me - I was laughing too hard. But watch the scene carefully, as I finally did. 

She’s perusing the open book, and finds a funky page. Then she reaches for this flat thing on the desk, the size of a big feather, but solid. She slips it into the book and then flicks it smoothly up the page. I suddenly realized she wasn’t turning the page. She was cutting it.

Books used to be made by hand, full sheets of paper with two or four or eight pages printed on it that were then folded for binding, and it was common for some to accidentally remain uncut. They were like folded pamphlets before being gathered and bound, with names like quarto, octavo, or just folio. When I started collecting old books, I’d see this problem now and again, a dead giveaway that the book had never been read. One rainy weekend I was trying to get through a 1912 edition of The Ships and Sailors of Old Salem, and about every dozen or so pages I was coming across one that, to my annoyance, couldn’t be read because it hadn’t been cut. Cutting them with scissors was a nightmare. I kept accidentally slicing into pages, because I needed something much sharper.

Seeing this scene again set me on a quest, and I finally found the answer, in the only book ever published on the subject – Reading and Writing Accessories, by a very clever New Zealand gentleman named Ian Spellerberg. He set the antiques world on its ear in 2016, when dealers supposedly knowledgable about history were referring to these odd devices as “letter openers” for an age that didn’t use envelopes as a rule. Spellerberg properly identified them as “paper knives,” a large, flat, sharp-edged device that was a common part of a Regency desk set. You slipped it in between the pages, moved it to the fold, drew up and out, and easily razor cut those uncut pages. Brilliant! You can still find versions of them in online stationers, though they tend not to be so elegant. Most look more like X-acto knives.

As far as I know I’ve never seen a paper knife being used in any other films, including the many versions of Jane Austen I’ve seen. MGM had great art directors on staff, but it helped that some of these guys were old enough to remember the 19th century. In the end, it’s amazing how quickly everyday things are forgotten as technology changes. Amazing how many things that were an ordinary part of my own life are now museum pieces. Go on YouTube and watch two teenage boys try to figure out how to use a rotary dial phone. It will make you feel very old.

Writer's Library: Learning Austenese

 


The Annotated 'Pride and Prejudice' 
by Jane Austen, Annotated by David M. Shapard
Reviewed by Alice VonKannon

Were you confused when Miss Bingley recommended to Elizabeth an express be sent to town for a doctor? Wonder what Austen meant when she said that, at Netherfield, Mr. Bingley had a good house and the liberty of a manor? Ever wonder what a coppice-wood is, or a mews, for that matter? Historian and Austen expert David M. Shapard explains it all, quickly and clearly in The Annotated Pride and Prejudice. He offers valuable insights into the subtleties of the language of the period, while giving delightful details on clothes, homes, food, shopping, money, travel, war, politics, social status and just about anything you can think of, all of it illuminated by wonderful, well-chosen period engravings and artwork.

Actually, there are five more of these annotated versions of Austen: Persuasion, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey, hitting all her major novels. And they’re not out of print! All are still available in oversize paperback editions on Amazon, for between fifteen and twenty dollars.

For an Austen newbie, these books might be a necessity. For a researcher into Regency life, they’re pure joy. Open the book and you’ll find the complete text on the left side, and on the right a treasure trove of notes, definitions, and helpful general information. I’m probably like a lot of people in that, the first time I read Pride and Prejudice, I was sixteen and tended to just skim over any term I didn’t understand, trying to judge its meaning by context in order to simply enjoy the story. Now, so many years later, I know a great deal about the period, but with Shapard, there’s always something new to learn.

Is there a downside? Okay, I’ll be honest; I prefer to read the book itself in a normal edition. It can drive you a little crazy, stopping every minute or so to look to the right and read the comments. And trust me, the comments are so good, they can’t be resisted. Me, I’ll read a few chapters, and while they’re still fresh, pull out the annotated version and scan the notes. That way you still have the proper rhythm of the read without its being interrupted, but you’ll get the insights, as well.

Letter From Mollie


One of my favorite pop history books is the 1981 Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People, a project so big Irving Wallace drafted the whole family in to help. It's an intelligent and wide-ranging book. But one thing ticks me off. So many famous people had such miserable sex lives that he added a short, charming final chapter highlighting some famously happy marriages, including Jack Benny, Robert E. Lee, Louis Pasteur and Walt Disney. And when I ordered a friend the new edition that came out in 2008, I found that this chapter had, for some incomprehensible reason, been axed. Why? My guess is that the original publishers, Delacorte Press, a division of the mighty Random House, had no interest in doing a new edition, and the politically-correct mavens at the ultra-hip Feral House Publishing had no interest in the subject of what makes a happy marriage. In fact, I’ve no doubt the whole idea of a happy marriage offended them.

The closer for this lost chapter was a postscript called Letter From Mollie. Most victims of a public education think all sex was missionary position and just plain lousy until 1968, despite ample evidence to the contrary. This sparkling bit of evidence was written around 1882, from a young newlywed named Mollie, who lived "back East." Having promised to let her cousin Julia in Northern Mines, California, know what to expect on her wedding night, she mailed a graphic and delightful description of her own. It made me feel so great, and I wanted to share it.

It is reproduced here as in the Wallace book, with most of its punctuation, or lack of it, in place. Spelling, too, was more a matter of opinion in those days. For me, it only adds to the charm of this remarkable billet doux. However, I did throw in a couple periods, as an aid to the first-time reader.

My dear cousin Julia
I am now with much pleasure about to fulfill my promise of writeing to you after the consumation of my marriage with Albert so you may have some Idea of the thing when you and Harry are united which I hope will be soon. You will please remember this is strictly confidential if we were not so intimate I would not write so plain but you know when we were together what one did the other knew so I will keep nothing back from you. Albert and I where married day before yesterday our minister E. Hodge performed the ceremony. All of our folks were present and nothing occured to mar the pleasures of the day all went off as weddings generaly do with fun frolicking cackes & wine &c. 
But oh dear Julia you can but faintly comprehend the felicity I have experienced since that ever to be remembered night. I thought I had some Idea of the enjoyment of married life but I was a novice in the mystries I will now endevor to give you a faint description of our married life. The first night I lay with my dear Albert a thrilling sensation shot with the rapidity of lightning through my entire system. Oh-the bliss of that moment So sensitively alive it excelled any thing I had ever experienced it was superlatively nice. We lay a few moments enfolded in each others embrace our naked bodies in close contact for by some unaccountiable means my night clothes had all slipped above my waist. My blood boiled and rushed through my frame like molten lava my prespiration ceased entirely at entervals and my head throbed almost to bursting. A dizziness amounting almost to stupeifeication over came me a felcitiy not to be expressed in words. My breath seemed to leave my body I felt paralysed and lay motionless and calm as some southern sea on a still summer morn. When as to test the utmost tension of my nerves Albert took my hand and by degrees (I did not resist I suspected his intentions) in tremulous excitement conveyed it down his body until it came in contact with his-0! Heavens the thrilling sensation of that moment you know what I mean. It was swollen to an enormous size my hand immediatley and tenaciously grasped it though I declare it was as much as I could do to fairly span it. The soft velvet like feeling of its head gave additional impulse to my already excited feelings When to cap the climax of my felicity he gently raised himself on one knee and with the other between my thighs he separated my legs so as to admit his body between them and then in a moment he was gently heaving up and down with an undulating motion when I felt it enter my person. When the head entered it appeared to me that I was attacked with a spasm for I raised with sudden emotion as he bore down on me and this mutualy kept up had the effect of driving it quite into my person and then a shock suddenly passed through me as if from a galvanic battery a dizziness overcame me my eyes closed my bosom heaved my arms relaxed my perspiration ceased I was actually gone for I fainted. 
When conciousness returned Albert was hugging & kissing me clasping me in his arms in the estacy of the moment I forgot all the world except my dear Albert we lay quite exhausted for about twenty minutes when he again conveyed my hand to that Dear member that had given me so much pleasure. It was some what less in size but as soon as it felt the pressure of my hand it resumed its original proportion. Albert made another attempt to raise himself upon me but I begged him more from delicacy than disinclination to desist wich kind soul as he is he did but I could not long resist for he thrust in between my thighs and kissed me so that longer resistance was impossible and I once more yeilded to his solicitation. I did not faint this time though the pleasurable sensations were more acute than the first. I would sooner have risked my soul's salvation than to have had Albert withdraw from his embrace. I was some what sore and stiff in my parts next day but at present I feel as chirp as a squirrel. I think he has done the work for me I think I am pregnant. Now dear Julia the day is coming to a close and I must conclude this letter for I expect Albert at any moment and I would not for the world have him know what I have been writing to you so good bye for the present and in my next I will tell you more of the pleasures of married life. Give my love to Anna T Uncle and inquiring friends. 
I remain your affectionate cousin Mollie

Upcoming Novel Wins 'Hearts Through History' Contest for Best Character!




I'm so excited! The upcoming third book my the 'Unbound Sea' trilogy, A Price Above Rubies, has just won the Legend Award Category of the Hearts Through History: Romance Through the Ages 2024 Contest! The Legend Award is given for the best character in a pre-publication historical romance, and was awarded for my lead character, Major Ashton DeWare!

This award means so much to me because I work so hard to create complex and memorable characters, and the judges for the Hearts Through History group in the Romance Writers of America are  fellow authors and publishers.

When I Grow Up I Wanna Be On TV!


It was like old home week the other night, watching Chris in another Masonic Magical Mystery Hour on the History network, this one being about the supposed treasure buried on Oak Island. (Curse of Oak Island Drilling Down: Founding Fathers S7/E6)

I thought that Chris looked both adorable and intelligent; Chris kept saying how good Akram Elias was.  Neither one of us really enjoys seeing ourselves on television.  In my case, I have gone to war each and every time with the video DP, all of them determined to drench me with enough light to illuminate a football stadium.  It’s always the same battle cry – “Will you please pull back?”  It gets me nowhere.  On one of them, Chris stood behind the camera and checked to make certain they weren’t getting a surgical close-up of my nose hair.  So the little bastard did what they all do; he fixed it in post, doing a cheesy optical zoom that put the camera right back up my nostrils where he clearly felt it belonged, my round, over-lit face glowing like the rising harvest moon.    

In any case, the days of tracking Chris' illness by the way he looked in various shows are now past.  I thought he looked glowingly plump and healthy, and about thirty-two years old. 



As for the unexplainable presence of William Shatner, I can take it, I guess.  He’s obviously signed himself into indentured servitude with History (you’re still not supposed to add “Channel”) where he has another show called The UnXplained.  Am I spelling that right?  They’re obviously going to use him as Spook Host in a bevy of crossover stuff, including this Season Seven episode of Curse of Oak Island.  (Season Seven?)  Shatner isn’t as bad an actor as people say.  Calling him a lousy actor, for awhile there, was this huge national bromide, a cliché as worn as “Wanna buy a duck?”  But he can be good, especially when he’s got a director to sit on him and knock some of the hot air out of him.  When Shatner went head to head with Stanley Kramer, the result was his subtle and easygoing performance in Judgment at Nuremberg.  He’s so laid back you hardly recognize him. 

The Professor and the Madman and the Mystery of the Funky Little Cap




Read on, but be warned - semantics will drive you nuts. 

Last night, Chris and I watched a film I didn’t even know was in production, The Professor and the Madman, with Mel Gibson and Sean Penn.  It was based on the book of the same name by Simon Winchester, called The Surgeon of Crowthorne in Britain, Crowthorne being the village where Broadmoor is located.  It’s the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the part played in it by two men – Professor James Murray, a great linguist, and Dr. W.C. Minor, a volunteer who played an important role in crafting it, and who also happened to be an inmate at Broadmoor, an asylum for the criminally insane, a thing Murray didn’t know for a decade.  Chris and I are now part of a select group, those who actually saw the film. 

I’m a writer.  The 20-volume Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary sits on a pier table behind my desk, and I use it nearly every day.  One of the things that makes it so remarkable is that it attempts to track every single word to its earliest known usage, then to move forward from there through important changes in spelling and usage reflected in quotes from the works where it appears, a monumental task.  On my old historical-word blog, Historiograpy, I never used those initials, OED, without their being followed by Praised Be Its Name.  For anyone who loves English, it’s a master work, an essential, and something of a miracle. 

I bought Winchester’s book over twenty years ago when it was published, and I always thought it would make a terrific film, as with so many other books of what the trade contemptuously calls “popular history.”  Most are ignored by filmmakers.  Apparently, I wasn’t alone in understanding how cinematic a story it is. 

Quite often when a film goes off the rails the reason is all over the trades, but tracking down the complicated story of what happened to this one was a bit tougher.  Apparently, Mel Gibson had dreamed of doing this story for two decades, and it had been in pre-production since at least 2001, when John Boorman and Todd Komarnicki wrote the first screenplay.  To save time, let’s flash forward to 2016, when Gibson’s co-worker on the film Apocalypto, Iranian writer/director Farhad Safina, was brought in to do a fresh version of the screenplay, for a film that was now on the front burner.  Gibson and his Australian partner Bruce Davey have a company, Icon Productions, and as a rule they raise the money on their own for their films and keep creative control.  But this time, tragically, they brought in another company as a production partner, Voltage Productions, headed by French-born Nicolas Chartier, doubtless for the sake of financing.  Chartier is a talented writer/producer and a bit of a hustler.  Maybe Gibson had a lousy lawyer for this one, but it does seem that Voltage, clearly afraid of losing money, stepped in and took over all sorts of things that Gibson claimed had been forbidden them in the original partnership contract, and he promptly sued to have it nullified, and to take back his own film.  This was the case that he lost.  The judge’s public statements sounded confused by it all.  What’s tragic is that the film only cost 25 million.  I know, I know, but in the film business nowadays, that’s practically a low-budget indie.  The film, as it stands now, was, according to Gibson, “a bitter disappointment to me.” 

It began shooting in Dublin back in 2016, but disorder in the court kept it from any release, such as it was, until summer of 2019.  In finding out what really happened, it doesn’t help that, after a long court wrangle between all parties, lawsuits and counter-suits, much of the matter was put under seal.  The director, Farhad Safina, had his name removed from the credits, always an ugly bit of business.  The film’s distributer, Vertical Entertainment, pretty much took it directly to DVD and the small screen, with a limited theatrical release, the hallmark of a disaster in which no one has any confidence, treatment generally reserved for films like Howard the Duck. 

I have a lot of respect for Mel Gibson, which would startle most of my friends, who would invariably bring up what they call “the Jewish thing.”  Yes, I’ve got a thing about the Jews.  Since I was a teenager I’ve studied Hebrew and the Bible and Jewish history, ancient and modern, I’m a complete Zionist pig, and though I’m not fashionably looking for racists under the bed each night, I don’t much care for anti-Semites.  But if the conversation between them was properly recorded by the cop that arrested Gibson on a DUI that night in 2006, I think you’re dealing with a man who was, and perhaps is, in desperate need of help.  Aren’t they all nuts, you ask?  Yep.  Actors are flashfire people who can’t balance their own checkbook, as a rule, and artistic brilliance is often a bitch clawing at your back.  I think what Gibson has going for him as an artist is pathetically rare these days – a fairly good understanding of the sort of film people want to see.  People don’t want to sit through a film depicting Jesus as gay, which is not only complete rot historically, it’s clearly and deliberately provocative, a middle-finger held up in the face of the paying audience. 

The Professor and the Madman is the kind of film people are dying to see.  The reviews for it have been incredibly mixed – the professional trade reviews were savage, as if a vengeful Chartier slipped them cash under the table.  But the reviews from real people, though mixed, were far more positive, a 77% on Rotten Tomatoes.  Take a look at the ones on Amazon.  Many are glowing, and from obviously intelligent viewers.  I think one of the reasons for this is simple.  People are incredibly hungry for films that inspire, films that tell the story of dogged determination and courage, that show a positive view of the partnership of marriage, and that even, horror of horrors, while not being a “Christian” film, occasionally reference the Bible without its being in the hands of a tattoo-covered pederast and serial killer.  This film is all of the above, and so, even in its wounded form, it hit those nerves. 

Okay, let’s take a look at the wreckage, available for viewing on Amazon. 

As we watched, it was with an increasing blend of adoration and frustration.  The story itself is wonderful, begging to be told, and this alone kept it going.  The performances as well are solid, no matter what you might have heard.  Gibson is fine as Murray, the self-taught linguist who left school at 14, clearly making him a threat to academia.  Penn, as well, does a great job, and if he’s a bit over the top at times, the role calls for it.  If I had a minor complaint about the tech, it would be that the sound in many scenes is a bit muddy.  Between Penn’s ramblings and Gibson’s Scottish brogue, some key stuff was difficult to hear, especially when the two start trading off words at lightening speed, an incredibly good idea for a scene that gets hurt by it. 

The major complaint here is that the whole thing has a feel of being slapped together.  Not surprising, in light of its history. 

A director and his editor have what can only be described as a marital relationship.  One of the main bones of contention in the lawsuit is that Voltage claimed the right to control content and brought on a pair of editors to whack down the director’s original two hour-forty minute cut, a thing he was already doing himself.  Safina rightly demanded his original editor, who knew the project, be rehired, and lost this point – the judge, for some reason, found that Voltage had the right to hijack it. 

My Chris was a film editor for years, and he’s got a favorite rant.  Not surprising, to those who know him.  Americans are still the finest film artists on earth, but all through the late 1990s and into the millennium, Chris and I watched as film after film was sunk by two things – a lousy script and bad editing.  Editing was once a very different process.  Each shooting day you put together the rushes of that day’s filming, slowly knitting them together into a workprint.  Workprints were generally screened in a theatre, by a group of people who’d worked on it, in a way similar to what was to come, when the film was released.  Now, editing is one more thing that’s done on a computer, in a little room, quite often all alone.  I once thought this great leap forward was a godsend, and you would too if you’d ever dealt with miles of workprint.  But later, we both began to see something subtle happening.  Films were getting longer, as a rule, films that couldn’t carry two extra reels.  The days of the cleanly-cut 112-minute feature were passing.  Even Jaws, with its epic feel to the last half, came in at a relatively tight two hours under the flagship of the great Verna Fields.  But so many films we saw were coming in at a sloppier two hours twenty minutes, if not longer, and as a rule they weren’t the better for it.  Editors weren’t as good anymore at knowing where to flick off the fat.  Of course, epics were always longer – they had a bigger story to tell.  

That’s why it was so odd, because with The Professor and the Madman, the problem was just the opposite; even at a bit over two hours, it felt too short.  There was a sensation that it had been hurriedly sewn together.  The passage of incredible amounts of time was never conveyed.  Too many story arcs weren’t followed, too many things were left unexplained, things you really wanted to know.  The crescendo moment, when Murray discovers that his long-time correspondent isn’t, perhaps, a doctor at Broadmoor, but rather a murderer and an inmate there, is pushed up way, way too fast, as if they just couldn’t wait to get to it.  The timing is lousy, and the moment loses some of its power for that reason. 


A great supporting cast is wasted – for example, the wonderful actor Ioan Gruffudd, who plays Henry Bradley, another brilliant, self-taught linguist who came on as an assistant and eventually became joint senior editor with Murray.  He’s literally thrown away.  Maybe he had a couple nice little scenes, but they ended up on the floor.  Jennifer Ehle is her usual wonderful as Murray’s wife, and Steve Coogan as his friend and co-worker, Frederick Furnivall, is also especially good.  

I’ll give only one example of the sort of storyline confusion that plagues it here and there, I think the most egregious one.  There were several physicians and “alienists,” doctors who treated lunatic patients, on staff in this period at Broadmoor.  They’re given more detailed treatment in the book, but the only one on film is a Dr. Richard Bayne, a late arrival in reality, thanklessly played by Stephen Dillane.  The character in the film seems to be a composite of all of them.  In the opener, when Minor arrives at Broadmoor, Bayne is played as a soft-spoken, kindly physician with a very modern attitude about madness.  He even points to a chair once used to tie down the insane, brushing it off as a relic of a sad past.  By the end, he’s portrayed as a complete bully and probable nutcase himself, subjecting Minor to some sort of horrid “treatment,” again never explained by anyone, in which Minor’s own hands, in rubber gloves, are forced down his throat until he vomits, while Bayne stands off madly snapping pictures of the whole thing.  In truth, I think the first physician was the kindly Dr. Nicholson, who retired in 1895, having never recovered after an attack from one of his patients, while Bayne was the one who took over for him, after Minor had been a patient for decades.  And yes it’s true, not only that Bayne was a little martinet despised by all, but that, after the grisly incident of Minor cutting off his own penis in the throes of a major breakdown, Bayne came down on him hard, taking away his many privileges and subjecting him to horrific treatment.  The separation of the two, played by two different actors, would have made this all clear, or at least some enlightening dialog.  As it is, it leaves you scratching your head.  It was after this that Murray campaigned for Minor’s release from Broadmoor, going to then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill, and he succeeded.  Minor went home to America, and died in 1920 in Hartford, Connecticut, in an elderly home for the mentally ill. 

Safina’s 2016 screenplay is available online, being Exhibit A in the court case, and I’d love to take the time to read it.  I find myself wondering if much of what I seek, what feels absent on film, is to be found there. 

One of the battles between the two production companies that got reported was that five more shooting days at Oxford were slated, and Voltage denied the funds to do this, or Oxford refused, or both, depending on the article you read.  Clearly Gibson and Safina were right.  It does lack a certain Oxford feel.  I think of the original miniseries of Brideshead Revisited, in which Oxford University is like another character, and, like the great country house of the title, a palpable presence throughout.  Since the OED is one of the ultimate achievements of the oldest university in the English-speaking world, it would have been nice if that were the case for this film. 

Critics often plead for the audience to read the book the film was based on, but in this case it may be your only chance to really get the whole story.  Simon Winchester is a good popular historian, and the book is a quick, fun read.  My only major complaint is that such a work should have no index.  The back of the book contains lots of goodies Winchester calls a “postscript,” but there’s no index, which has grown increasingly common, in the battle over who’s going to pony up the lousy three hundred bucks.  Traditionally, for reasons that pass all understanding, this cost was laid on the author rather than the publisher, and in an increasingly embittered battle between them, with advances at an all-time low, authors are commonly refusing to pay for it, while publishers won’t step into the breach as they damn well should. 

Broadmoor asylum was only nine years old when William Chester Minor was sentenced to it in 1872.  Increasingly judges were sentencing the criminally insane to hospital rather than prison, and, as in America, these were open-ended sentences, with the inmate released at the King’s pleasure.  Minor had been a captain, a medical officer in the Civil War, an educated, well-born man from New Haven, Connecticut who’d been in London only a year when the murder occurred.  The case briefly became something of an international incident.  He’d fled to the Continent to escape his demons, and ended up obsessing on prostitutes and contracting gonorrhea, worsening his sexual fixations, if that was possible.  On the night of the crime he chased brewery worker George Merrett through the streets of Lambeth and gunned him down, admitting at once that he’d shot the wrong man – he was after one of “them.”  He was a paranoid schizophrenic, and in the daytime he could seem perfectly rational.  It was at night that the pixies came, to torture him and sexually abuse him.  Everyone involved knew he was mad as Moses.  Having a regular income, and being neither epileptic nor suicidal, Dr. Minor was sent to Block Two at Broadmoor, which was far nicer, the block for the “swells” in the lingo of the day.  (The way epileptics were treated in institutions is appalling.)  It seems odd to us that he was given so many privileges, but this wasn’t uncommon.  Broadmoor was, for its day, a progressive institution, especially compared to St. Mary of Bethlehem, the “Bedlam” of legend.  He had two rooms, with a paid servant to help keep them clean, all the books and art materials he wanted, even wine and tobacco.  He played the flute, and gave lessons to the other inmates.  The American consul in Britain kept track of his treatment. 

The American consul also put together funds for the widow of his victim, Mrs. Merrett, and her seven children.  Minor’s step-mother contributed to it, while Minor himself gave up part of his stipend from the American army.  Merrett and Minor did develop a relationship, perhaps not as romantic as the one portrayed in the film.  But she did bring him books over the course of many months, apart from the ones he bought himself, and this was how he found out about James Murray and his appeal for volunteers, on a paper tucked into one of them.   

But this is a story, as Winchester says, with two protagonists, and if for no other reason, buy this book to read the biography of James Murray; it will make you feel like a worm.  He was astonishingly brilliant and almost entirely self-educated, what was once called a polymath, a man with too many areas of knowledge to be listed.  But for Murray, language was the siren’s song.  He spoke dozens of them, studying everything from the sheep-counting numerology of the Wowenoc Indians of Maine to the Syriac Peshitta, and he raised himself from an impoverished bank clerk with a dying wife to arguably the most important scholar in the British Empire, taking on a project most had deemed impossible.  Many men worked over the course of seventy long years on the first edition of the OED, but Murray is the one who’s remembered.  The union of these two men, Murray and Minor, is a story worth reading. 

And the film The Professor and the Madman is one worth seeing.  It’s on Amazon Prime with an appallingly cheap price.  Right now, you can buy it for $4.99.  It’s certainly worth that much to screen it for yourself, and take from it all that is good, while you try to forgive what is bad.  In all, it was a noble effort. 




For my own part, I have only one question left, the Mystery of the Funky Little Cap they're both wearing.  It's like that hoary old gag about the pope, "I don't know who the guy in the beanie is, but the other one's Bernie Schwartz."  To my annoyance I can find no reference to it in Winchester’s book, but on the cover is a picture of Dr. Minor, in the garden at Broadmoor.  He’s wearing a funky little cap.  In several famous photographs of James Murray in his scriptorium, he, too, is wearing a similar cap, though his looks more like the four-sided Sir Thomas More cap, a probable precursor to our pasteboard graduation cap.  In More’s day it was some sort of master scholar’s cap that made bilious and silly headlines when Chief Justice Antonin Scalia wore one he’d been given by the Thomas More Society to swear in Obama.  Let the conspiracy theories fly.  Even the website of the Society has only a vague explanation of what the cap means, that it's definitely something academic.  Versions of it are called an Oxford cap or a Tudor cap.  Having never been matriculated by the British university system, I’m much in the dark about its meaning, but I suspect Minor’s cap may have been a gift from Murray.  I’ve spent hours searching, and it’s sort of outrageous that nobody anywhere is even mentioning it, much less explaining it.  Of course, in our present society, scholars don’t rate much ink anyway.  If you really want attention, you have to be a stripper who slept with the president. 


If anyone out there knows about it, I’d love to hear.  I hate hanging chads.