The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998)
CSPAN Booknotes
This is an extremely interesting story, so much so that you can see why anyone who heard about it would feel compelled to share it. But it's pretty slender and just barely worthy of a book length treatment. It seems like it would work better as a long magazine article or even as a novel and it will make a terrific movie.
In the latter portion of the 19th century, when James A. H. Murray faced the monumental task of compiling the initial version of the Oxford English Dictionary, he sent out a call for contributors. One of the most reliable and thorough volunteers proved to be Dr. William Chester Minor. But Minor resisted entreaties to visit the operations of the OED and to partake in the celebrations as volumes were completed. The reason for his reticence turned out to be his incarceration in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum.
Minor, an American, was profoundly disturbed and a murderer to boot. After some disquieting years of service in a medical unit during the Civil War, he fixed upon an obsession that Irishmen wanted to kill him. His psychoses finally led him to gun down a complete stranger on a British street and he was institutionalized. He eventually spent about 50 of his over 80 years in some form of state care, where he was continually plagued by delusions that he was being spied upon and his food poisoned, and at one point he mutilated himself in a fashion which will have male readers cringing in horror. Meanwhile, his incarceration and his educational attainment made him uniquely well suited to contribute to the mammoth undertaking that was the OED.
Winchester does a creditable job of showing how two very different men
were united by their love of language and learning. But, there are
pretty obvious dramatic limitations to a true life story that involves
one subject who's institutionalized and another who's writing a dictionary.
Like I said, it's a pretty slim tale, but it is fascinating.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (B+)
