Professor & The Madman [Paperback]

The compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, 70 years in the making, was an intellectually heroic feat with a twist worthy of the greatest mystery fiction: one of its most valuable contributors was a criminally insane American physician, locked up in an English asylum for murder. British stage actor Simon Jones leads us through this uncommon meeting of minds (the other belonging to self-educated dictionary editor James Murray) at full gallop. Ultimately, it's hard to say which is more remarkable: the facts of this amazingly well-researched story, or the sound of author Simon Winchester's erudite prose. Jones's reading smoothly transports listeners to the 19th century, reminding us why so many brilliant people obsessively set out to catalogue the English language. This unabridged version contains an interview between Winchester and John Simpson, editor of the Oxford dictionary. (Running time: 6.5 hours, 6 cassettes) --Lou Schuler --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help define its 414,825 words. Tens of thousands of those used in the first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor?all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat superficial work of historical journalism. Sketching Minor's childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871 and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Pronounced insane and confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s. Here on more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. J.A.H. Murray, who, as Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'etre, and looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Winchester fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word "art" and a sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. With his cheeky way with a tale ("It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy" he writes of Minor's self-mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task. Photos not seen by PW. Agent, Peter Matson. BOMC selection.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

YA-This unusual and exciting account centers on two men involved in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary-Professor James Murray, its editor, and Dr. William Chester Minor, a true Connecticut Yankee who was one of the resource's most prolific contributors. The most surprising aspect of this long and productive partnership was that Dr. Minor, probably a schizophrenic, was incarcerated in England's most notorious insane asylum during the whole of their working relationship. He was a scholar and medical doctor whose fragile mental condition was probably exacerbated by duty as a surgeon during the American Civil War. His imprisonment was not harsh and his devotion to the cause of the dictionary and his precise and prolific contributions probably helped him hold on to some sense of reality. Winchester's descriptions of Civil War battlefields and the search for definitions of words such as aardvark or elephant are intriguing and compelling. This is a fine tale for both word lovers and history buffs. The momentum of the beginning scenes of warfare and murder are followed, not disappointingly, by descriptions of the trials and tribulations of dictionary crafting. Readers will meet some extraordinary men and an unusual woman, and find themselves well and truly ensconced in the late 19th century.
Susan H. Woodcock, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

The Oxford English Dictionary still stands as the distinctive and definitive history of the English Language. First suggested in 1857, this work proposed to present the history of every word by quoting the passage from literature where each was first used. Nearly 22 years later, the stalled project finally got moving with the selection of Dr. James Murray as editor. Handbills were distributed requesting volunteer readers to locate quotations and begin assembling word lists. One such flyer found its way to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Crowthorne, Berkshire, where Dr. William C. Minor, who was committed in 1872 for murder, occupied two large cells. Minor would prove to be one of the most prolific contributors to the OED, submitting over 10,000 quotations. For nearly 20 years, Murray and Minor corresponded regularly regarding the finer points of their lexicographical endeavors. With the book nearly half completed, Murray felt it was important to personally meet and thank him. Winchester does a superb job of weaving the historical facts of murder, madness, and scholarly pursuit into a fitting tribute to the remarkable OED. As the reader of his own work, his voice perfectly evokes Victorian England. Highly recommended for all libraries.
-Gloria Maxwell, Penn Valley Community Coll., Kansas City, MO
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.

Distinguished journalist Winchester tells a marvelous, true story that few readers will have heard about. His narrative is based on official government files locked away for more than a century. As everyone knows, the Oxford English Dictionary is an essential library reference tool. The 12-volume OED took more than 70 years to produce, and one of its most distinguishing features is the copious quotations from published works to illustrate every shade of word usage. By the late 1890s the huge project was nearly half done, and the editor at the time, Professor James Murray, felt the need to meet and personally thank Dr. William Minor, with whom he had been in lengthy contact and who had contributed a lion's share of the quotations. As it turned out, Dr. Minor was an American surgeon who many years before had been found not guilty of murder by reason of insanity but had been incarcerated in an English asylum ever since. The tale of their affiliation and friendship reads like a creatively conceived novel. Brad Hooper --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity. Manchester Guardian journalist Winchester (The River at the Center of the World, 1996; Pacific Rising, 1991) turns from Asia toward that most British of topics: the Oxford English Dictionary. His account is studded with odd persons and unexpected drama. To wit: When O.E.D. editor Professor James Murray headed off to meet a major contributor (of more than 10,000 entries) to his epochal reference work, he discovered that this distinguished philologist, Dr. William Chester Minor, was incarcerated for life in an asylum for the criminally insane. Minor, apparently a paranoiac killer, had committed murder in 1872; to his lasting travail, hed witnessed atrocities in the American Civil War. Latterly ailing (and sexually repressed), he clung to his lexicographic efforts for dear life and the sake of his sanityor what remained of it. All those Dictionary slips, opines Winchester, were [Minors] medication, [and] became his therapy. When he describes the original O.E.D.s ``twelve tombstone-sized volumes,'' we get a whiff of the grueling mental task exacted from its servants by the work, reminiscent of the labors involved in Melville's classic ``Bartleby the Scrivener''in a book that is similarly a psychological masterwork. In praising the achievement of the work, Winchester rejoices, ``It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone.'' Winchesters own tone and his prose are wonderfully Victorian, an apt mirror for his subject. The author begins each chapter with an entry from the original O.E.D. as an appropriate heading, such as ``murder,'' ``lunatic,'' ``polymath'' (``a person of much or varied learning'') and, eventually, ``acknowledgment.'' First-rate writing: well-crafted, incisive, abundantly playful. (b&w photos, not seen) (Book- of-the-Month Club selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Like Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded (2003)-an account of the volcanic eruption of 1883 and its geological, political, artistic and religious reverberations in the present day-Simon Winchester’s earlier success The Professor and the Madman (1999) might be described as a book on subterranean forces. Even though the human scale and its tale of small individual endeavours is dwarfed by seismic shifts, rifts and the greatest explosion in recorded human history, there is perhaps something more compelling about the smaller intimacies of this earlier story.
Set in the late 1900s, The Professor and the Madman, according to the blurb, is a ‘literary history’ on the false starts, interruptions and some seventy years it took to make the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Yet it might more accurately be described as an interweaving of biographies and fantasies. For it is a revelation of the lives of James Murry, general editor of the OED, Dr. W.C. Minor, one of its major contributors, and words themselves.
Born in 1837, Murry was a poor, self-educated Scot and a member of the Congregationalist Church. As a child he seems to have been a kind of Hardyesque Jude figure. He was a voracious learner, taking an interest in maps, archaeology and astronomy. But it was his appetite for language that led him out of teaching and into his role as the general editor of the ‘big dictionary’, at Oxford. It was there he set up his ‘Scriptorium’ and with ‘military efficiency’ and a sense of ‘monkish asceticism’ set about the task. From there, Murry enlisted the help of thousands of volunteers and one of the most prolific and exacting contributors was William Chester Minor.
Like Murry, Minor was from a pious Congregationalist background. But his upbringing was altogether more exotic. Born on the tropical island of Ceylon, in 1834, the “Minors were first-line American aristocracy.” When he was thirteen William was sent back to the United States to be given a formal education, before beginning his studies at Yale Medical School in 1861. Shortly after graduation he joined The Union Army, just four days before the Battle of Gettysburg. Confronted with horrific injuries, and though a gifted surgeon, the medicine he practised could only fumble in the wounds of casualities. And it must have gone against the very core of his being when, at one point, he was ordered to punish an Irish deserter by branding his face with the letter D.
Exposure to such brutality seems to have irrevocably disturbed Minor, leading to his discharge from the army and eventual hospitalisation. As one of the “walking wounded” he travelled to England to try to recover his former self, like a kind of latter-day Hamlet. He took lodgings in the Lambeth part of Dickensian London and it was there he shot and killed George Merrett (to whom Winchester dedicates his book) believing him to be a Fenian who was planning to kill him. Convicted of murder, Minor was treated sympathetically and sent to Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Crowthorne. He brought with him all his books, easel, paints and flute and it was there, in his prison cell, that he began to contribute to the dictionary. And the first word he researched was Art.
Words are, of course, the other protagonists. As Winchester rightly suggests, a dictionary should “give the life story of each word”; it should”offer its biography” and record the register of its birth. To think of words as having a biography gives them a life and slipperiness that the authoritative language of etymology and lexicography seems to conceal. And one delightful aspect of this book is the way words, such as “murder”, “polymath”, “sesquipedalian” and “diagnosis” are defined at the beginning of each chapter, telling us something about its theme and the progression of the story. There are wonderful asides as well, such as Samuel Johnson’s charmingly eccentric and redundant definition of an elephant as being “The largest of all quadrupeds” who is “equipped with a trunk,” which, in turn, indicate why a dictionary was needed to modernise, simplify and standardise words, their spelling and their meaning. This was a mammoth task. And through the thousands of entries that Minor sent Murry they came to know one another. Before their first meeting, Murry had imagined that Minor was a medical man of literary tastes who had retired to the country to pursue his interest in books and language. He was astonished to learn of the American’s circumstances, yet nonetheless sympathetic and he continued to visit him over twenty years.
Like biography, fantasies are as much about what has been said as what has been left out. And Winchester’s tale is, in part, about the fantasies of an age and of an individual. There is the Victorian fantasy that a dictionary could fix the language, that it was a monumental work of complete authority and not an endless effort that attempts to keep apace with the evolution of words and their meanings. And then there are Minor’s perverse sexual imaginings and paranoid fear of the Irish. It is instructive, at this point, to refer to a moment in W. B Yeats’s Autobiographies, when he remembers his own childish and dreamy wish to die fighting the Fenians. This is not to suggest that Yeats should be our picture of mental health, but the shape the Irish poet put upon his own fantasies serves to highlight how Minor was governed by the limited repertoire of his own imaginings. In other words, Yeats was free to invent in a way that Minor was not.
Winchester’s accounts of Minor’s misery are clearly sympathetic. His madness is not glamorised, as so many accounts of madness are. And this book, in effect, gives us a case-history, charting Minor’s first sexual lustings as a young boy in Ceylon, his later fear that he would be murdered by Fenians, to his belief that he was being molested in his cell by men, and ultimately to his act of self-mutilation when he cut off his penis. Although the progress of the dictionary and Minor’s insanity makes for a compelling read, at times, Winchester’s style can be portentous. For instance, the first chapter, “The Dead of Night in Lambeth Marsh”, it might be said, owes less to the Dickensian prose that opens Great Expectations and perhaps more to what the Victorians called “penny dreadfuls”. He is perhaps too defensive about the OED project itself and should have been more inclusive, outlining the arguments of those academics that see the work as sexist, racist, fussy and imperial. For these shortcomings do not necessarily diminish the dictionary, but instead are reminders to each generation of the organic nature of such work-that it continually needs updating, that it is not monumental but fluid. There are some omissions. For instance, Minor’s barrister may have been Edward Clarke, who defended Oscar Wilde, which seems to be a coincidence full of possibility. Also, Winchester hints at, when he really should have engaged with, the homo-erotic qualities of Minor’s fantasies. And I would have liked Winchester to develop further his claim that “doing all those dictionary slips was [Minor’s] medication; in a way they became his therapy” and to explore what it might have meant for him to be researching the ‘biography’ of words rather than rehearsing his own fantasies. Yet, despite such criticism, the most engaging moments in The Professor and the Madman occur when Winchester moves beyond a well represented account and gets caught up in the momentum and risk of oversight, speculation and inventiveness.
Michael Kinsella (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

"a fascinating, spicy, learned tale" -- -- Richard Bernstein, New York Times

"elegant and scrupulous" -- --David Walton, New York Times Book Review

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary--and literary history. The compilation of the OED, begun in 1857, was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

 

Simon Winchester was a geologist at Oxford and worked in Africa and on offshore oil rigs before becoming a full-time globe-trotting foreign correspondent and writer. He currently lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, an apartment in New York's West Village and in the Western Isles of Scotland.

This is a fascinating true story well told about a murderous nutcase who contributed important entries to the original and monumental OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY*. The author has a listener-friendly voice, even though he seems to be fighting off a bug in his throat. He reads as if late for an appointment. Nonetheless, he gives us a satisfying listen. Y.R. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.