The Genius Behind the Modern Dictionary
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Here is another one of those great Winchester-style historical stories that proves that improbable ideas often happen when obsessively brilliant people come together on a mission to change the world around them. In this particular work, Simon Winchester, a prominent British biographer, provides a very colorful description of what one of those unlikely ideas was - the compilation of the modern Oxford dictionary - and who the cast of illustrious movers and shakers(the Group of 40) was that made it happen. Up until the mid-1800s, work on a comprehensive English dictionary had gone nowehere. It was either too big a task for the resources at hand or not lucrative enough to attract the big publishers of the day. This story is a compilation of the adventurous, the infamous, the heroic, and the downright bizarre. For this project to happen, certain factors had to make their presence felt: the sudden expansion of the English language through the rapid growth of the British Empire and the personal passion of gifted people to see it through. On this second score, how would anyone in their right mind ever conceive of a medical doctor(Minor) doing a life sentence at Bradmoor Asylum for murder linking up with a linguistics professor(Murray) to spearhead the development of the world's most exhaustive and authoritative lexicon. Of the two, it is Dr. Minor, the certified lunatic, who comes in for the most attention because his path to fame was definitely the one `least traveled'. The reader gets to follow this polymathic character through the life-changing horrors of the American Civil War, his subsquent vagabond travels around England, before his eventual run-in with the law in the back streets of London. It is only when he was locked up in a home for the mentally insane did his true academic brilliance surface. Minor was a surgeon who had a passion for saving lives but, also, as an amateur philologist, had a passion for the study of literature and language. This book shares a lot about how the original Oxford dictionary was technically contrived and why it comes to us today as one of the ultimate authorities on the origin and use of English as a global language. An all-round fine read.
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Sensationalized Version of a Gripping History
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The Professor and the Madman is the yellow journalism version of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Sir James Murray, Dr. William Chester Minor, the treatment of the criminally insane during the Victorian period. I was particularly offended by the overly graphic details of Dr. Minor's self-mutilation (if you don't have a strong stomach, skip that section) and playing up of the fictionalized (and often repeated as fact) version of how Sir James and Dr. Minor first met. If the story weren't so interesting, I would encourage you to avoid the book.
Writing the first edition of the OED took 70 years and employed an unusual organizational method that has since become popular for monumental knowledge tasks -- relying on volunteers to do the bulk of the work of finding quotations that use each word in different ways over time. As someone who has always admired the OED, I enjoyed learning more about the process involved in its development. Unfortunately, that material is scattered throughout the book rather than concentrated where you can find it for a brief read through. The examples are good, however, if the material is needlessly diluted.
Thinking about that monumental effort will give you just the right foundation for appreciating how mental illness can affect parts of one's faculties while leaving others undisturbed, as the paranoid Dr. Minor employed his extensive free time in the Broadmoor Asylum for Criminally Insane and personal wealth to become of the most organized and helpful contributors to the OED.
Dr. Minor's story is the actual focus of the book. Unless you are quite interested in ironies, mental illness, and how the Victorians treated the criminally insane, you will probably find this book has more of Dr. Minor than you really care to know. It's a tragic story, but not one that I would have sought to read if the OED development process material hadn't been in the book. As background for that comment, you should know that I have a strong interest in criminal insanity and wrote my law school thesis on the subject. The book tells its story to make you feel the pain of being Dr. Minor quite well, but The Madman and the Professor won't advance your knowledge of mental illness or legal concepts of responsibility very much.
I was attracted to this book in part due to my work in leading the 400 Year Project, seeking ways to make improvements in everyone's lives at 20 times the normal rate between 2015 and 2035. I came away impressed that just a few people can make a remarkable contribution to an all-but-impossible project. I will redouble my efforts to locate such people for the 400 Year Project.
Tackle the impossible to find out what you can really do!
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interesting story
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This is a marvelous book about the Professor, James Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Madman, Dr. William C. Minor, one of the Dictionary's most prolific contributors, despite his incarceration in an asylum for the criminally insane after committing a senseless murder provoked by his delusions. The book tells the stories of each of these protagonists as well as the making of the OED itself, and nicely wraps up all of the connections, even to the point of showing what happened to the murdered man's family (whose widow visited Minor regularly
for months).
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Quick read for philologists, historians, and others.
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I like reading the occasional historical fact (rather than historical fiction) "novelette," and The Professor and the Madman was definitely easy to get through. One can learn much from books like this, particularly the way normal people lived their day-to-day lives in a certain time and place. A few things I liked about this book: 1. One will assuredly learn a thing or two about the English language, in reading it. You will learn some obsolete words, the origin of some words, and just get a refresher of other, more common words. Each chapter begins with a dictionary entry of a particular word, some very normal words, some more exotic words. 2. The parallel lives of the two main characters are interesting to follow. One feels real emotions for both. There are a few shocking moments in the book, which stand out quite a bit in front of the otherwise fairly tame narrative. 3. I grew up with the Oxford English Dictionary, and I always wondered how they compiled all the words. It was great learning about how they did that. 4. The book covers an array of themes and topics, and a fairly diverse geography. Mental illness, civil war, sexual propriety, crime and punishment, one can learn a little bit about a lot of issues in the reading of Simon Winchester's book. I wouldn't recommend the book to just anyone, though. It can be kind of slow, and sometimes one simply grows tired of bouncing back and forth between the two main characters. It is also fairly short; one sort of wishes for more detail on certain events. In some places, the book reads like a crime/detective novel from the 19th century, in others it is more like a biography. It sort of skips around from one style to the next, almost as if different parts were written at very different times by an author in very different states of mind. Overall, though, this book is a nice, quick read, a good plot, and you will learn a thing or two from it.
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A Fascinating Footnote to History
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Simon Winchester has written a very unusual book about a very strange series of events during the last century and the dawn of this one. First, we have various literary authorities in England deciding to compile and edit a massive dictionary (eventually it became the Oxford English Dictionary), which took 70 years to finish and filled multiple volumes. Then we have the editor of the project for most of its life discovering that one of his most valuable contributors was in a lunatic asylum because he murdered someone. The story goes from there. Winchester is a good writer, and he milks this story for everything it's worth. He spends a good deal of time talking about side issues, as is common with this sort of slice-of-life thing. He does a very good job with them, as far as I can tell. I'm pretty knowledgeable with regards to the American Civil War; the author must tell you of the Battle of the Wilderness to explain how the murderer went mad, and he does so skilfully. The writing of the OED and its contents are intelligently discussed and dissected, and the history of dictionaries themselves was fascinating. The other characters, namely the editor of the dictionary itself, James Murray, are interesting and well-drawn. I enjoyed this book a great deal. It is short, but it's fascinating, and I would recommend it pretty much universally.
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