The Professor & the Madman

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.

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.

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.

The story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (it took 70 years!!!) that is curiously entwined with the fate of William Minor, who suffered from delusions - later to be diagnosed with schizophrenia - which caused him to kill a man. The murder led to his arrest and confinement to a mental asylum for the following 40-50years of his life. As he was a man of high education, he found some solace and therapy in dedicating himself to supporting editor James Murray and the team of the OED, by meticulously supplying quotes for the creation of the dictionary. This intellectual stimulation kept him sane during the day, while the delusions came back to haunt him at night.

Good story, elegantly executed, i just wish there would have been more material to dig deeper into Minor and Murray, as I find educated Victorian men, lover of words, driven to systematise and capture each word's true history and meaning, very fascinating.

The parts of this book related to the creation of dictionaries and the OED are hugely interesting and the stories of the two men are somewhat interesting to a lesser extent, but the author's conjecture and rampant speculation was infuriating. He suggests reasons for people behaving as they do without any hint of evidence, at one point positing a theory for why Minor commits a horrific act, but then immediately states that there is absolutely no reason to believe this is true! Then why even introduce the bizarre idea? A lack of footnotes/end notes crediting the sources for quotes he uses was also off-putting.

I also couldn't help thinking throughout that Minor's contribution and relationship with Murray were being exaggerated by the author for the purposes of a good yarn. Minor was just one of hundreds (thousands?) of contributors, and I suspect Murray corresponded and met with many of them over the years, not just the murderer.