The Ark

An index of every word and phrase in the Old and New Testaments, Cruden's Bible Concordance has never been out of print since its publication in 1750.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: Every clergyman has one, and probably couldn't give a sermon without it. Not the Bible, but Cruden's Concordance to the Bible.

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and on The Ark today, the story of Alexander Cruden, the 18th century Scot who's been described as whimsical at best and stark raving mad at worst. Whatever the diagnosis, Cruden had the perfect disposition to compile the most sought after index of the Bible that had ever been published.

When the King James Version of the Bible appeared in 1611, it was a great boon for the people, but it was nerve wracking for the clergy. It meant they had to be more careful with their sermons. A little over a century later, Alexander Cruden provided them with the aid they needed. His biographer, Julia Keay, is speaking to me from Glasgow about the man and his concordance.

Julia Keay: To describe a concordance, probably it's easier to say it's like a dictionary of quotations. So if you want to find any reference in the Bible, I mean say you wanted to find out about lilies, a quote about lilies if you're a clergyman preparing a sermon, or if you're just having a family discussion, you can look up 'lilies' and it'll tell you every reference with chapter and verse in the Bible where lilies is mentioned, which is fair enough.

But it goes far, far further than that, Cruden's one. I think there's only about four words in the Bible that aren't included in the dictionary, and those are words like 'and', 'the', 'to'. Every single word in the Bible is listed, and over and over again cross-referenced, so that any word you want to find, you can look it up.

But it's far more than that, because Cruden was so keen that people should understand the Bible, any word he thought people wouldn't know, weren't familiar with, he would explain, he would define. So for example, if you look up 'synagogue', you don't just find the references in the Bible to synagogue, you find a 4,000 word article on synagogues and their architecture and services and things, so it's a thorough explanation really and guide to the Bible.

Rachael Kohn: And of course it's fairly large. I think you mentioned that it's quite a bit larger than the Bible.

Julia Keay: It's about 3-1/2 times the length of the Bible, yes.

Rachael Kohn: Well I know that mine is an abridged version, and certainly doesn't include those wonderful essays. But Alexander Cruden must have not only known his Bible backwards but had a formidable education.

Julia Keay: He did have a wonderful education. He was training to become a minister himself, he was born and brought up in Aberdeen in a very strict Calvinist family. His elder brother was an academic, and he was destined for the church, so he had a very thorough education. And he had a fantastic memory. But it wasn't really destined to be his life's work, he was destined to go into the church.

Rachael Kohn: And instead he became a publisher's corrector, is that why you've called him Alexander the Corrector?

Julia Keay: That's right. But when I first started trying to find out about his story, all I could find out about Alexander Cruden was that he was mad and had spent a lot of time in lunatic asylums.

By then I was fairly familiar with his Concordance, and I couldn't equate these two, I couldn't see how somebody who was mad could compile such an extraordinary reference work. So I went back and started investigating, went up to Aberdeen and had a wonderful time in their archives to find out why his reputation is that of a madman. And I find this a completely wonderful story.

There was this - first of all I found reference to a scandal when he was in his early 20s, that was so shocking no-one could talk about it, and had resulted in his not being ordained, and ending up in England, in London, as a tutor, and eventually as a corrector to the press, which every page, of every typeset from the printers had to be corrected, had to be checked and correctors. And that was what he did for most of his life, and he compiled the concordance in his spare time.

Rachael Kohn: Hard to imagine really when one thinks of the work that it entailed. But let's go to that story about him being considered mad. He was in fact put into what today might be called a loony bin or a madhouse, but for rather unusual reasons. Can you tell that story?

Julia Keay: Well yes, after a lot of digging I did discover - I mean nobody has written about Cruden for a long time, and when people did last write about him, it was still a shocking story, so it was quite hard to find the details. What I eventually discovered happened was that he'd fallen in love just months before his ordination with the daughter of his professor in Aberdeen. But it transpired that she was having an incestuous relationship with her brother and was expecting his baby. Now this in 1720s Aberdeen was unimaginably shocking.

Rachael Kohn: Pretty terrible today, too.

Julia Keay: Even today. Incest is one of the few kind of relationships that even today is unacceptable, so you can imagine what a scandal it caused then, and because her father was a very reputable clergyman and academic, he couldn't risk this story coming out about what his daughter and his son had been up to, so he arranged as a powerful man, that Cruden should be locked away in the lunatic asylum, so that thereafter, no-one would ever believe a word he said, so even if he did let slip that this scandal had happened, no-one would believe it.

So it was a pretty dire action, but because of that, Cruden for the rest of his life had this reputation as being mad, and having been mad since he was in his 20s.

Rachael Kohn: Well surprisingly, he would land once again in a madhouse in London for similar reasons, that is, for reasons to do with love.

Julia Keay: That's right. And the trouble with madness, with allegations of madness, they're very difficult to refute. If somebody once has the label mad attached to them, if someone's actually been locked in the lunatic asylum, the charge of madness is taken much more seriously.

So anything you do that's strange, they quickly lock you up again, or they did in those days, in case you're completely irrational. And also the great scandal in those days was that madhouses were not regulated in any way at all. There was only one officially run lunatic asylum in the whole country and that was the Bethlehem Hospital, which is better known as Bedlam. And that was regulated to a certain extent, in that you had to have medical certificates to get someone admitted.

So there was a scandalous lack of regulation and in fact Cruden was put in the madhouse by a rival. He was courting this lady, a widow, and a rival for her hand discovered that he'd been locked up as a young man, so just paid for him to be put in the madhouse again.

Rachael Kohn: It's an astonishing scenario that you paint when Cruden is chained up in this madhouse and in a straitjacket with absolutely no-one to come and save him. But he does eventually escape, which is pretty amazing.

Julia Keay: He was a pretty determined man, as is evidenced by his Concordance. So his determination stood him in good stead, and he did, he managed out of a window with a chain still tied round his leg.

Rachael Kohn: But is it determination, or is it his faith that sees him through these abominable situations which don't break him.

Julia Keay: I'm sure it was his faith. He got tremendous strength from his faith. Because he hadn't been ordained, because he was thwarted in his lifetime's ambition to become a minister, his determination to serve God gave him the patience and the endurance to compile his Concordance. Because this was his alternative work for the Lord, if you like. And that was a very strong part of his character, that he's been described as an obsessive and I think that's unnecessarily cruel, but he had that tenacity, I think born in large measure, from his faith, that saw him through extraordinary difficulties.

He wrote a diary during his imprisonment in the madhouse, and he published it. And it's an extraordinary document. It's been snapped up by psychiatric historians and he has been used as a wonderful example of mad writing.

People have hung labels on him, but I didn't find any evidence at all of a personality disorder. He comes across in his writings, he wrote a lot because he was a bookseller, and a publisher, he published quite a lot of his own writings. He had a few strange ideas but we're talking about the early and middle 18th century here. Strange ideas were current, he wasn't at all unusual in that. When he tried to have himself appointed Corrector of the Morals of the Nation, he was only one amongst hundreds of moral reformers who set themselves up to try and improve things, and it's only because of his reputation that he has been singled out as being odder than any of the others. I'm sure he wasn't.

Rachael Kohn: Well he was certainly a practical man, and you tell a touching story about him saving a young sailor from the gallows.

Julia Keay: Yes, that was a very touching story. He became quite a campaigner for, initially, madhouse reform, and by extension, of prison reform. And in that capacity he came across this sailor who'd been condemned to death for signing somebody else's pay slip and trying to claim 30 shillings wages. This guy was condemned to death for that, which seemed to Cruden pretty atrocious. So he set about trying to save his life, which he did, by campaigning, by trailing around every person in authority he could think of and government ministers and so on.

He did get the death sentence commuted to transportation to America for 14 years I think. He just wanted to do good, he wanted to help, he wanted to save people from the suffering that he saw all around him.

Rachael Kohn: Well it was certainly a time when he was feeling much better about himself. He had triumphed over his adversity and he was now a very well-known man because of the Concordance. Didn't he do another one for Milton's Paradise Lost?

Julia Keay: Yes, he did. Part of his work, an extension of his work as the Corrector of the Press became, he was a compiler of indexes, and then an extension of that was a Concordance to the works of Milton, which of course he absolutely loved because it was all familiar territory to him. It's quite obscure to anyone who isn't a Biblical scholar who doesn't have that kind of knowledge. But he loved it, it was just food and drink to him. He was actually lionized by the clerical and to a certain extent academic establishment, so he did achieve recognition in his lifetime. So he was content.

Rachael Kohn: Julia, did you get any insights as to how he managed to compile the Concordance, given his straitened circumstances, and he certainly didn't have the aid of computer software programs.

Julia Keay: No, that was, I just had to imagine it, I had to pretend to myself that I was facing this task without a computer, and how would I do it. And he never wrote anything about how he'd actually worked. Somebody suggested he wrote everything on long strips of paper, but I worked out that even if he had a card index system, he would have had over 20,000 cards in his card index, which is quite a lot. And it just defies the imagination really, and did take him 12 years.

Rachael Kohn: And I think he updated it a few times?

Julia Keay: Yes, he had. There were two new editions in his lifetime, and since he died of course, there have been just countless editions, handy, portable, pocket sized, students editions, abridged editions, and the most recent one was in 1999, there was a wonderful Bible of the Bi-Millennium, published in America, which had his Concordance published with it. So it's never been out of print in more than 250 years.

Rachael Kohn: Now Julia, are you the only one of the biographers of Alexander Cruden who has championed his sanity as opposed to him being mad?

Julia Keay: I'm the only one who dared investigate the scandal. So no, his earliest biographer was called Alexander Chalmers, and Chalmers actually met Cruden when Chalmers was 10 years old and Cruden was nearly 70. And he didn't believe he was mad, but he could not, because he also knew the family of the girl who caused the scandal, he couldn't explain what had happened, because too many people would have been hurt.

So although he, Chalmers, never believed Cruden was mad, people since then have not been interested in that, they've been much more interested in the mad side of it. So I was really delighted to have a chance to rescue Cruden in a way. I think he certainly deserved it.

Rachael Kohn: Well yes, I think he'd be one of the few people whose books have been never out of print since it was published, when, in 1750?

Julia Keay: 1737 the first edition, and it's never been out of print since.

Rachael Kohn: Extraordinary. Now one last thing. I wondered about his death; it was picture-perfect, sort of, eerie.

Julia Keay: Well again it's been kind of played up. He was living in London in Lodgings, in Islington. He had a servant, actually a former prostitute who he'd rescued from the streets and who was devoted to him and looked after him, and had done for years and she just found him on his knees. He died while he was praying, but since I imagine he spent quite a lot of time praying, maybe that's not so surprising, and what a nice way to go.

Rachael Kohn: I suppose perfect for Alexander Cruden. Julia, it's been great speaking to you. Thank you so much for being on The Ark.

Julia Keay: It's been a pleasure.

Rachael Kohn: Julia Keay is the author of Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Who Un-Wrote the Bible. She was speaking to me from Glasgow.

Next week, the priest who discovered the Hobbit. Join me, Rachael Kohn for some palaeontological revelations, on The Ark.

Guests

Julia Keay
is a writer and broadcaster whose works include documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Scotland.

Publications

Title: Alexander the Corrector: The Tormented Genius Who Unwrote the Bible
Author : Julia Keay
Publisher: HarperCollins,2004

Title: Cruden's Complete Concordance to the Bible
Author : Alexander Cruden
Publisher: Toronto: G.R.Welch Co. Ltd, 1977