The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of The Oxford English Dictionary

Rating:
Summary: I have Mixed Feelings About This Book
Review: The present book was written in approximately 1998, but now it has a competitor. "The Meaning of Everything" was just recently published in 2003 by the same author Simon Winchester. So Winchester now has two books on the subject, and the newer book is much better than the book being reviewed here.

Simon Winchester is a gifted writer. The first book "Professor and the Madman" reads like a fast paced novel and that is why it has been popular and got a 5 star rating. Having said that it was just an introduction to the writing of the monumental work of the original Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The original OED is not to be confused with an Oxford dictionary found at a modern bookstore. The original OED is a series of volumes that gives many quotes for each and every word to show how the word is used. Starting with the letter "A" it took a remarkable 70 years to complete the final volume that included the letter "Z". It was started from first concept in 1857 and went on until it was completed with the final tenth volume in 1928.

One of the prime movers of that book was James Murray who started at the beginning in 1878. Prior to that date, nothing of practical value was done between 1857 and 1878. He was in essence the first editor (technically the thrird), and he edited the dictionary up to the volume ending with the letter T - the degree of the progress of the dictionary at his death in 1915.

When Murray started his work around 1878-79 the group at Oxford sent out advertisements to solicit readers who might be able to send words with accompanying quotations - the basic format of the dictionary. They knew they needed help from the public and that was their technique to speed up the work. The group at Oxford largely concentrated on editing, checking and compiling the quotes and words. Many people sent in quotes including one individual from an individual in a home for the criminally insane - who happened to collect and read old books.

This first book by Winchester largely deals with this interesting character who had responded to these advertisements in 1879-80 and sent in words and quotations. He was an American Dr. William Minor (MD) from Connecticut who had been committed to a mental hospital located in Sandhurst, Berkshire, one hour by train from Oxford. In some ways it is too much information about this man - my opinion. It is interesting to a point but again I think there is too much information on this person - which I will not repeat here. Some of it is to say the least - unsettling - to know the grimy details of his mental illness - schizophrenia.

The first book was written in approximately 1998. The span of time has given the author the opportunity to present a better package of ideas.

I bought both books by Winchester but in retrospect would have skipped the first book and just bought the newer book. The newer book has one chapter on Dr. Minor - which for me is enough.

So skip this book just by the new one.

My humble opinion.

Jack in Toronto

Rating:
Summary: A great snack
Review: This is a great book in so many senses. It's the story of the man who most contibuted to creating the first English dictionary by way of sending in thousands of word references, only come to find that he was fit for the asylum. The books is just right for a short trip or a quick fix; and it's plesant to know that it has not only an intersting story line that gets you invested in the experience, but you know in the end that you are learning something of historical significance at the same time. Truely a joy to read.

Rating:
Summary: All ingredients of a best seller; a very challenging book
Review: "The Professor and the Madman" is a book about maniacs of all kinds: word maniacs, literary maniacs, ego maniacs, sculling maniacs, Irishman paranoid maniacs and many other types of cataloged or not derangements and lunacies. It is a good book indeed and the maniacs are its principal characters, its protagonists as we learn when we read it (you will learn about the debate that raged for decades on the plural of this very special word protagonist). The Madman of the title is the American war surgeon W.C.Minor, the most secretive and prolific word voluntary individual contributor to the work of Mr.James Murray, the Professor of the title and a linguist who worked almost a quarter of a century in the design and in the making of one of the most important human literary achievements of all times, The Oxford English Dictionary, a project so complex that it took seven decades to be fully completed and to be known to posterity as a watershed event in the field of English literature. The numbers involved are astounding and there is also a good book by Simon Winchester, called The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, with every relevant aspect involved in its completion.

The Professor was an extremely humble man of very poor rural extraction, fundamentally religious in all aspects of his family life, deeply attached to the women he married (his first wife died soon after marrying him) and to his children, and a real giant in the field of linguistics, already polylinguist when a 15 year old boy, asking cows and oxen questions in Latin, knowing more than 25 different languages in his adult life and always eager to learn more and more, and to become famous trough his masterwork; he was a real polymath, a man of many different aptitudes in Mineralogy, Botanic and Geology, just to name a few, with an impressive personal network of acquaintances throughout the Victorian world he lived in, including the father of the notorious American inventor Graham Bell. His participation in the making of the most important dictionary of the English language was an watershed event both for him as to the dictionary itself, and, in the end, all of them both made a lot of difference to solidify English as a world language.

When the Professor finally got to know the person with whom he corresponded for more than two decades, withouth personally one knowing each other for a long period of time, W.C. Minor being an always elusive correspondent as possible, James Murray ingeniously but naively anticipated he would meet an educated country nobleman with a cultured background, mild mannered and polite, an English gentleman in his own right. But the man he at last met was completely different from what he had anticipated and the venue of their their meeting was not a noble courtyard in the countryside as avidly expected, but a rather dark room in the most famous Asylum for worst case lunatics in rural England.

Dr.W.C.Minor, born in Ceylon to an American congregationist preaching family and later educated in the prestigious Yale Faculty of Medicine, was a totally crazy man, arrested years before for having murdered a British man he didn't know and mistook for a phantastic Irishman in a district near London, but acquited by the jury as inimputable due to his pretty bad mental condition; he was sentenced to end his final days in the most reclusive Asylum to the mentally deranged and the origin of his lunacy was never truly attested or certified but was most probably atributable to the hell years he voluntarily spent as a field surgeon in the American Civil War when, in this capacity, he was obliged, so goes the legend, to brand the letter D (for desertor) in the face of a Irishman he did not know, according to the terrible treatment dispensed to war desertors, specially of foreign extraction. This brutal episode had a lasting effect in his mind and from that moment on he began his descent into his personal hell, always paranoid about the impending danger of Irishmen chasing him to revenge the pain he inflicted in their comrade countryman. But W.C. Minor had among his virtues a kind of monomania, a deep attachment to every thing he did and liked, and among his many fields of interest, languages was of the utmost importance to him, who, raised in a very challenging environment for an American boy, learned many exotic languages when a child.

The book is a very good interplay of many human frailties and noble intentions and a good one indeed. It has all the ingredients of a good novel and the author ingeniously keeps the reader attentive to the end by means of a very ingenous narrative, sprinkled with many details about the epoch, the necessity of such a dictionary and the rationale, if any there is, behind the behavior of Mr.Minor.

Rating:
Summary: Suprisingly Interesting Story
Review: At first I was not terribly excited about this book my sister had recommended to me. After all it was about the writing of a dictionary. The book quickly grabbed me and I became engrossed with the idea of the study of words. How this task was accomplished (through voluntary researchers) and what was researched (the first appearance of a word in written English) gives the reader a wonderful understanding of the genealogy of the English language.
Add to this the background of two of the most influential voices in the editing of the Oxford dictionary, the madman and professor of the title, adds an engrossing layer to the book.
It is a quick read and surprisingly interesting despite its potentially dry subject matter.

Rating:
Summary: Spritely Told History
Review: The critical buzz on THE PROFESSOR AND THE MADMAN was highly positive. I too find it satisfying but no one said anything about its flaws.

First, reasons to read it: Winchester has a good story to tell in the seven-decade evolution of the Oxford English Dictionary and two people instrumental in its development. Overseeing the project is Dr. James Murray, the professor of the title. When he sends out a general appeal for volunteers to scrutinize English literature for language use, he receives an extraordinary response, but only one would steadfastly send work of high quality and quantity over the years, a Dr. William Minor of Broadmoor. Years after Dr. Minor established his value to the project, Murray learns that in fact his chief contributor is a long-term inmate in an insane asylum. Dominating the book is the case study of Dr. Minor, a wealthy American who may or may not have had a genetic disposition to mental illness, who went into the Civil War as a surgeon, the son of rigid missionaries, and who witnessed the brutal Battle of The Wilderness after which he was forced against his will to brand a deserter on the face. After the war, his behavior becomes noticeably unhinged and he is sent abroad for a "rest cure," the Victorian solution to a gentleman's problem. He kills a man in London while in a paranoid delusional state. This book's value is increased by its insight into pre-Freudian psychology and the Victorian social and intellectual outlook, not to mention the Civil War experience.

Pointing out the flaws could be called so-much nitpicking. Though a fluent writer, Winchester relishes dramatic foreshadowing a little too much. He refers to the paths of Murray and Minor as a "collision course" and every other turn of phrase like that. He discusses the distinction of whether "protagonist" can be pluralized and insists his story has two protagonists, but one receives far more attention-Minor. Winchester has a habit of inserting odd, unnecessary details: what does it matter that the sherry served at a meeting of the minds was "indifferent"? Though I am the first to complain about text log-jammed with footnotes, nowhere does he cite sources, even when he quotes one verbatim. My only other complaint is resolved in Winchester's new book: he has returned to the subject to shed more light on the evolution of the OED itself. I plan to read it; the flaws in this are not enough to stop me from reading more of the same.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting topic but poorly written...
Review: The author writes in disjointed paragraphs and tends to use the 'parlance of the time'; using sayings and words that do not translate into today's lexicon.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting little book, but not a great book
Review: This is the first book by Simon Winchester that I have read, and I was disappointed. There is an interesting story in here, but it doesn't really come to life. The book is short, and yet repetitious.

The title is inaccurate, it is the story of Dr WC Minor. But contrary to the flyleaf and other reviews, I didn't think we got that much about the compilation of the Dictionary itself, nor did we get an equivalent parallel biography of Dr James Murray.

Rating:
Summary: How did the OED ever get made??
Review: A brief and surprisingly interesting look into esoterica like the OED. It focuses on Murray, the dictionary's main editor, and Minor, his most important volunteer contributor, also a resident of Broadmoor. Valuable for glimpses into: English lexography; Broadmoor; the enormous hubris of the Victorian intelligensia; paranoia; the US civil war; the daily grind required to complete massive, ambitious projects like the OED. The story is slightly thin, but the book is a quick read.

Rating:
Summary: the best review ever
Review: The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. Simon Winchester. New York: Harper Collins, 1998. 242pp.

I find it amazing that despite the many years that the English language has existed, nobody had attempted the monumental task of cataloging the ocean of words that is English, until just a few hundred years ago. It is this "cataloging of words" (more specifically the Oxford English Dictionary) that is the subject of Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary. In Winchester's book, light is shed on the sheer volume of words in our language and the gross number of hours it takes to make an inventory of these terms. Also discussed is the fine line (if there even is a line) between genius and insanity. Winchester takes a rather strange route through the book "weaving" back and forth in time, and character yet in the end it is obvious why the author chose this "mobile" style of writing.

To help the reader understand the significance of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Winchester spends a considerable amount of time discussing previous lexicographical projects and their rather pathetic results. Another area that is overly stressed is that thte majority of the story is set in Victorian England and that many of the characters are "gentlemen and scholars. The last theme of the book gives the reader the author's repeated insight as to what the difference is between a person that is a genius and one that is insane. These three topics are discussed in a nearly cyclic pattern through-out the book. I understand that Winchester is just trying to keep these ideas fresh in the reader's mind but the almost predictable occurrence of these themes grew to be quite annoying as did the consistent interruption of the action.

The story begins with an American genius being committed to an asylum in London after killing a man in the street. Then before learning anything about this murderer a new character (James Murray)is introduced and discussed at great length. A third story line is then added when the author adds the construction of the OED. Slowly, very slowly, the three plots begin to twist together to form a rather interesting story. The action begins with James Murray sending out a call to the public for volunteers for his dictionary. His request is answered by W. C. Minor, who turns out to be one of the greatest contributors to the OED. The editor of the dictionary and this insane man begin writing letters to each other and develop a friendship. This friendship and more specifically the insane man begin to usurp the action of the dictionary's progress and eventually leave it in the dust. The book ends with the lunatic's struggle with the asylum, and eventually his death.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary is a good book. It is not something to rush out to your nearest bookstore to snatch before the other copies are gone, but it is certainly not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon. I found there to be too many plot lines to accurately follow and not enough action in each of the plots. This along with the constant swerving in and out of the various topics made for a sometimes confusing ride. However, there is much knowledge to be gained from this book and Winchester does a decent job in portraying his knowledge. If you are looking for a book with lots of information and with a unique topic this is the book for you. If you seek action or get confused easily, I recommend you steer clear of this piece of Winchester's work.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting stories about the characters behind OED
Review: I think this book is great if you want to read about the characters behind the creation of OED. The stories between the characters are quite intriguing.

However, if you are into the actual process of creating the dictionary, the author mentions it, but it is not the focus of this book.