Alexander the Corrector – the Tormented Genius Who
Unwrote the Bible
by Julia Keay
HarperCollins, 2004. pp 269.

Reviewed by Alan Dwight

“Strong’s for the strong’uns, Youngs’ for the
young’uns and Cruden’s for the crude’uns.”
   Despite such a summing-up of diff erent Bible
concordances, my well-worn 1934 Cruden’s
remains an indispensable companion, along with
my equally well-worn Authorised Version of the
Bible.
   Yet Julia Keay has set me thinking for the fi rst
time about the man, Alexander Cruden, behind the
colossal task long before the computer age – 2.5
million words, four times the Bible’s length.
   He was a Scotsman at a time when Scots were much in demand in England because of a thorough system of education that emphasised much repetition and required long hours of childhood immersed in Latin, Greek and French, as well as theology, philosophy, history etc. And for Calvinist Presbyterians the Bible was the sine qua non of living.
   At times the account of his life reads as the diary
of a madman – to borrow a title from Nikolay
Gogol (1835) and Lu Hsun (1918).
   Cruden was the victim of unjust accusations
which led to terrible sufferings. In diaries he
asserted his sanity and we believe him – especially
because of these rational accounts. His experiences in madhouses are a horrifying indictment of the treatment of the ‘mad’ in 18th Century Britain, even when perfectly sane. In one case he was ‘put away’ to get rid of a rival in love.

   Early in his life Cruden spent time in an Aberdeen
lunatic asylum. His love for a young woman was
the cause, but it appeared that the woman’s brother, not Cruden, had made her pregnant. The asylum experience put a cloud over the rest of his life. Cruden and later biographers refused to name the woman, but Julia Keay’s detective work named her. In this fascinating story Keay tells how Cruden later met the femme fatale in London – to the shock of both.
   His alleged lunacy led Cruden to abandon a
vocation to ministry in his church but his belief in
the sacredness of every word of the Bible led him,

 

in his spare time as a proof-corrector, to work on
a Bible concordance. His apartment fi lled with a
multitude of long strips of paper fi lled with Bible
texts. While others used large teams to compile
dictionaries, he worked alone in the belief that a
concordance would aid “the means of propagating
… the knowledge of God”.
   After twelve years of hard work the First Edition
of 1,200 leather-bound copies appeared in 1737. It has been estimated that in today’s money it would altogether have cost him $34,000 – but there were many pre-publication subscribers aware of the work’s value to them.
   Later he was pleased that the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge honoured him for his great
achievement.
   Julia Keay tells her story exceedingly well, having
accumulated much detail of the dramatis personae of the story. She illuminates more than just Cruden’s life, especially life in madhouses and prisons.
   The subtitle is intriguing – Alexander Cruden was
certainly “a tormented genius” but how was it he
‘’unwrote the Bible?” Does it mean he pulled it apart?
He is revealed as a man who suff ered, but also a man of great charity. Over the years millions have found cause to bless him for his concordance. And now we can thank Julia Keay for doing him justice.

 

 

 

 

 

The Revd Alan Dwight, distinguished historian of
Chinese and Japanese culture, died on February
20. He was 85. A veteran writer and art critic, Alan
Dwight had been a contributor and subscriber to
Common Theology since its inception in 2002. He is survived by his wife Florence.
In a recent letter to the Editor Alan Dwight wrote
“I’ve seen many examples of the Circle of Infinity
calligraphy. Thanks to the Chinese brush and ink
there’s an infinite variety”. He enclosed a copy of
Sengai’s extension to Triangle and Square (above).