The Professor and the Madman, a Review

The Professor and the MadmanThis book is not just the story of a dictionary; it is the story of how two men’s lives, both on completely divergent paths, became intertwined by the love of something much greater than almost anything on earth.  Although human beings give meaning to words, the ironic twist is that it wasn’t until we as a species were able to communicate that we were able to evolve into what we now are: modern man.  In a sense, it was words (or their precursors) that gave us meaning.  And it was the power of words that gave one man, who was completely insane, the ability to have as much of what we might call a “normal” life as the man with which he communicated.  Now, however boring one may find a subject such as the formation of a dictionary to be, each and every person who decides to pick up The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester will be pleasantly surprised to find that the tale of this dictionary is nothing short of amazing.

Dr. William Chester Minor was a surgeon for the Union during the American Civil War.  If we knew then what we know now about the effects of war on the human psyche, he would have quickly been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder.  After the war he moved to New York City and began frequenting prostitutes, and his behavior eventually led to his being discharged from the Army.  At this point he had already been showing signs of deep paranoia, and his move to London, England, a move intended to improve his condition, proved to be his undoing.  After suffering from a particularly bad delusion, Dr. Minor shot a man whom he believed had broken into his room.  He was declared insane and moved to a mental institution in 1872.  He spent most of the remainder of his life sending entries into the Oxford English Dictionary from his double cell in the lunatic asylum at Broadmoor.

James Murray, a Scottish man obsessed with language (indeed, he spoke something like 20 languages, or at least had a working knowledge of nearly that number and could read them efficiently), almost fell into the job of editing what was to be a new dictionary of the English language.  Sadly, he died before the dictionary was completed, but when all was said and done was responsible for the compilation of about half of the dictionary.  The way in which he came to meet Dr. Minor and the process by which Dr. Minor became one of the greatest contributors to the dictionary is something I don’t want to say too much about, in part because I am quite sick of the spoiler culture and in part because the joy of reading this book lies in the oddity of this tale.

The project of compiling a comprehensive dictionary of the English language was initially to take only a few years and began well before Murray was on board.  In the end the process ended up taking no less than 30 years before the first volume was released and nearly 70 years before all volumes were bound together.  Murray was obviously one of several editors, but the impression he made upon the process with which the dictionary was compiled was so great that hardly any other editor is now mentioned with respect to the dictionary.

While Winchester’s astonishing tale tells the complete story of the dictionary, its focus is the story of Dr. Minor and James Murray, and that is where it should be.  Sometimes tragic, sometimes quite happy, this is a story that even those most averse to scholarly work cannot help but find both exciting and intellectually rewarding.  In a way we are quite lucky to have such an important historical event for English speakers highlighted by such a fantastic and bizarre tale.  Perhaps a couple of those students I once taught in college writing courses will pick this up and realize that, indeed, reading and writing does not always “suck.”  Perhaps a few of them, and others like them, will be inspired to give the Oxford English Dictionary a look over.