The making of the Oxford English Dictionary was a monumental 50 year task requiring thousands of volunteers. One of the keenest volunteers was a W C Minor who astonished everyone by refusing to come to Oxford to receive his congratulations. In the end, James Murray, the OED's editor, went to Crowthorne in Berkshire to meet him. What he found was incredible - Minor was a millionaire American civil war surgeon turned lunatic, imprisoned in Broadmoor Asylum for murder and yet who dedicated his entire cell-bound life to work on the English language.
Review of 'The Professor and the Madman' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
An interesting tale behind the creation and legacy of the Oxford English Dictionary. I feel like the tale dragged a bit in the beginning while it set up the scene, but the middle and end of the book made up for it. I ultimately came away from the book feeling like Minor was treated terribly in his late years, both by the institution he spent much of his life in, and then later the institution he ended up in in the States. This is largely due to the misunderstanding of mental diseases in his era, but in some respects conditions haven't improved much today.
Review of 'The Professor and the Madman' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: "Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?" and "Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like 'typewriter' and 'schizophrenia'?" and "The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?"
The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning -- the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one …
I can tell when a book is a true masterpiece because when people ask what I'm reading I feel compelled to provide not just a title but also sentences like: "Did you know that the very first dictionary wasn't until the 1750's?" and "Did you know that the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary predated words like 'typewriter' and 'schizophrenia'?" and "The OED was published in installments like a Dickens novel, taking over 40 years to publish?"
The story is just fascinating. From the very beginning -- the question of how and why to make a dictionary. Like many of the standardizations that begun in the 16th and 17th century, the idea that words should have standard spellings and meanings is pretty intuitive once you've thought of it, but requires an almost unimaginable amount of work. It's hard from this side of the google revolution to imagine how one even conceives of doing this much work. The group asked volunteers to read books from specified centuries, note down the words they found, the sentence it was in and send it in with citations. It was the complaints of poor handwriting and water damage that really hit home to me the intense work required in this plan. These scrips of paper were then sorted by the few OED editorial employees, selected, and set to the printing press(!) I was equally fascinated that a dictionary came so late in human history and that they managed to have a comprehensive dictionary so early.
Winchester intends for this to also be the story of Dr. Minor, who was one of the most important volunteer contributors, from where he sat incarcerated in an insane asylum, diagnosed with "monomacy" for his paranoid delusions. I found the story of a learned doctor, insane, but with preserved cognitive function, obsessively cultivating entries for the OED fascinating, but the story definitely lost steam when it deviated from being about the OED. In particular, the chapters of Dr. Minor's backstory and the chapter of Dr. Minor's dotage dragged. But overall, the story was fascinating and I learned a lot from this slim and readable book.
Review of 'The Professor and the Madman' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
At first it seemed like a good idea to start this review with a definition, since that is how Simon Winchester started his chapters, but then I thought better of it, since that is not one of the features I enjoyed about this book. So, no gimmicky start to my short review.
The author introduces us to two very different men whose lives converge in an unlikely way, which involved the monumental task of creating The Oxford English Dictionary, The history of the work--and lack thereof-- that came before the OED was very interesting, and may have been my favorite part of the book. I still can't imagine how the OED was accomplished before word processors. Actually, the project started before typewriters.
The man that lead this operation was lexicographer and philologist James Murray, and work started in 1857. From 1884-1928, the dictionary was published in installments, or fascicles, which …
At first it seemed like a good idea to start this review with a definition, since that is how Simon Winchester started his chapters, but then I thought better of it, since that is not one of the features I enjoyed about this book. So, no gimmicky start to my short review.
The author introduces us to two very different men whose lives converge in an unlikely way, which involved the monumental task of creating The Oxford English Dictionary, The history of the work--and lack thereof-- that came before the OED was very interesting, and may have been my favorite part of the book. I still can't imagine how the OED was accomplished before word processors. Actually, the project started before typewriters.
The man that lead this operation was lexicographer and philologist James Murray, and work started in 1857. From 1884-1928, the dictionary was published in installments, or fascicles, which is the more technical term. (A new word for me). Seventy years of work! Murray died before it was completed, something he had not foreseen.
Before the reader gets to the part about the making of this amazing dictionary, however, she is presented with a teaser, of sorts: The Dead of Night in Lambeth Marsh, and the words mystery and murder. It's not mysterious at all; a delusional American guns down an innocent man as he makes his way to his menial, graveyard-shift job. The murder is committed by William Minor because of a paranoid fantasy about the other man trying to break and enter into his room. The murdered man was George Merrett, a man with a wife and several children. (I did admire the way the author paid respect to the victim.)
My interest flickered on and off during the accounts of Minor's life and treatment. The fact that many men came away from the American Civil War with profound troubles, both physically and mentally, is a topic that does interest me, but there is not enough known about Minor's case to really speak of. Also, by the way, he received better care than most. In the end, I felt that I'd read more about Minor than Murray, or anything else.
I'm glad to have finally read this, it is another interesting part of history that I did not know existed, and gave me more of an appreciation for all who wrote at a time when there were no references to guide the way.
Review of 'The Professor and the Madman' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
Great story, but overall it felt... hollow. The author had a daunting task: digging up scant historical records, then writing a book-length tale while remaining true to fact. Not quite history, not quite historical fiction. For the most part it worked: the book was well organized, readable, gripping, informative, even beautiful. Every so often, though, a small hiccup that popped me out of the book. And so many unanswered questions, so many incomplete pictures. Kudos to Winchester for not making things up, but it gives this reader a sense of loss.
4 stars is unfair. I would give 4.5 stars if I could. And I'm glad Winchester wrote it this way, glad that it's book length instead of a blog post or an article in Smithsonian magazine. This is very much worth reading; I just don't know what mindset to go into it with.
