The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary. By Simon Winchester
New York: Harper Perennial, a Division of Harper Collins
Publishers, 1998.
A Book Review by Ted Odenwald
It took teams of editors and countless amateur, unpaid contributors seventy years to compile the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, (OED), clearly the greatest lexicographical effort in the English language. In the mid-nineteenth century, it was apparent that “English was on the verge of becoming a global language.” While several dictionaries already existed, there was no “full statement of the English tongue.” There was no work that “encompass[ed] the language in its entirety: the easy and popular words as well as the hard and obscure, the vocabulary of the common men as well as that of the learned house, the aristocrat, and the rarefied school. Everything should be included.” What was to set the OED apart was “its rigorous dependence on gathering quotations from published or otherwise recorded uses of English” in order to illustrate how each word was used throughout the centuries. Winchester focuses upon the forty-year period, beginning in 1878, in which Professor James Murray served as the Editor of the project. Most interesting to Winchester is the enormous contribution of an “…American soldier whose involvement in the making of… [the OED] was singular, astonishing, memorable, and laudable—and at the same time wretchedly sad.” Dr. William Chester Minor, former U.S. Army surgeon, made all of his contributions from his cell in Broadmoor, a hospital for the criminally insane.
The Delegates of the Oxford University Press appointed Murray to rescue the project, which had been floundering for more than twenty years due to a dearth of scholars capable of and willing to peruse the literature of their people, searching for specific words, while being ever watchful for unusual uses of any and all words. Shortly after his appointment, Murray appealed to the English public, asking for volunteers to glean key words from published works. The need for such laborers had been established by Dr. Richard Trench, who said that “…the heart of such a dictionary should be the history of the life span of each and every word. Some words are ancient and still exist. Others are new and vanish like mayflies. Still others emerge in one lifetime, continue to exist through the next and the next, and look set to endure forever.” Each word holds a valid place in the history of the language whether the word remains, disappears, or alters in meaning and usage. Volunteers would have to list each word and copy the sentence in which it appeared, noting the author, source and date of each example. After compiling many examples, the volunteers would send their findings to Murray’s editors, who would evaluate, authenticate, categorize and finally submit each finding to Murray, who himself worked on the definitions, in itself no small task.
Dr. Minor’s life following his service in the American Civil War was a history of delusions, hallucinations, and paranoid ravings. His abnormal behavior may have been triggered or brought to the surface by his experiences during the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia; he had to deal with amputations, filth, gangrene, infections, incredibly poor hygienic conditions, and epidemics of dysentery and cholera. In addition, he had been required to brand the face of a young Irish deserter. Minor’s Harvard education and aristocratic upbringing had in no way prepared him for such horrors. After years of wildly “eccentric and dissolute” behavior, he allowed himself to be institutionalized in the Government Hospital for the Insane in Washington, D.C. After his release, imagining himself being pursued by the Fenian friends of the Irishman he had branded, Minor felt that his only recourse was to flee to England. Unfortunately, in London, his delusions compounded until one evening he shot and killed an innocent worker who was walking to his late-night shift. Found innocent due to insanity, Dr. Minor was confined indefinitely as a “certified criminal lunatic.”
For a decade, Minor had “…languish[ed] in the dark Slough of imprisonment, intellectual isolation, and remove….” But when he discovered Murray’s appeal for contributors, the doctor felt “…that at last he was being hoisted back up into the sunlit uplands of scholarship.” He welcomed the challenge to “…find and note all and any words that seemed interesting, or that were quoted in interesting and signifying ways or in ways that were good, apt, or pithy.” Minor immediately took up the challenge, obsessively dedicating himself to his search for words and quotations in his books (for he did own a vast library, which he was allowed to keep in a second cell). The work became his therapy. “For the next twenty years he would do almost nothing at Broadmoor except enfold himself and his tortured brain in the world of his books, their writings, and their words.” Developing a methodical system by which he kept recorded words and quotations, Minor’s slips of paper became a primary source for the OED editors, especially when they were pressed for time to get sections of their work published. The OED editors found him to be a meticulous and prolific worker, “able to tap deep into well of knowledge and research.”
Murray did not learn about Minor’s situation until seven years into their “relationship.” Mr. Justin Winsor, the librarian of Harvard College, informed Murray of the doctor’s tragic situation in 1891. The professor and the doctor came to know each other quite well, meeting regularly for almost twenty years. Filled with gratitude and compassion, Murray did all he could to encourage the doctor in his scholarly pursuits. He also tried vainly for several years to arrange for Minor to be discharged to return to the U.S. Finally, after the doctor had mutilated himself horribly, and after two of his relatives back home had committed suicide, British authorities thought it best to release him on the condition that he not return to England. By the time of his departure, six volumes of the OED had been published, Minor’s having contributed “scores of thousands” of quotations to those publications as well as to future volumes.
The last of the twelve volumes of the OED’s first edition was published in 1927, five supplementary volumes appearing between 1933 and 1986. In 1989 a “fully integrated” second edition, incorporating all the changes and additions of the supplements” appeared in a twenty-volume set. Additionally, at much lower cost, the OED appeared in reduced print size in two volumes (complete with a magnifying glass). Additionally, a C-D Rom has been created, as has an adaptation for on-line use. Perhaps buried in all of these publications, are the enormous contributions of the Professor and the Doctor, two men who set the standard of workmanship and diligence that enabled such a project to prove successful.
Perhaps also lost is the “cruel irony,” that if there had not been something “wildly wrong with his brain” and if he had received proper treatment for his mental afflictions, he might never have felt inclined –or mandated—to attack this great project. “The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony….” He was truly one of the most productive contributors to the English language’s most wonderful dictionary.