Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
September 1998

Perhaps the greatest character of this story is the dictionary itself: a complete history and definition of every word that ever existed in the English language. Originally envisioned as a ten-year project that would produce 6,400 pages spread through four volumes, the finished product took 70 years to complete and comprised some 15,490 pages over ten volumes. There are 414,800 words in the OED, defined and illustrated by 1,861,200 quotations from some 4,500 works of literature by 2,700 writers, all of it compiled by 2,000 contributors around the globe. The entire enterprise was overseen by a single editor.

The Editor
Though entrusted with the greatest literary project in the history of written English, James Murray (1837-1915) came from outside the establishment of London intellectual society and grew up in a world far removed from the rarified halls of Oxford University. A self-taught master of more than a dozen ancient and modern languages (his formal education ended at age 14), he developed a comprehensive knowledge of and driving passion for words. Murray's scholarly work brought him into the staid and prestigious London Philological Society. It was there that the dictionary project was launched and there, in 1879, that Murray was given control of it.

As the editor in chief, it was his job to ensure the absolutely accurate cataloguing of every word English writers have ever written. He oversaw a workshop of clerks and subeditors who received, sorted, and resorted the thousands of submissions pouring in weekly from hundreds of active contributors around the world. The readers' job was to find the earliest possible illustrative uses of every word, write them on slips of paper, and ship them off to Oxford. Some contributors were more trouble than use. Others distinguished themselves as invaluable researchers.

The Reader
One of the most prolific readers was Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired U.S. Army captain, a Yale graduate, and an inmate of England's Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Cogent, but deeply and dangerously delusional, Minor contributed some 10,000 quotations to the dictionary over two decades.

The Book
The Professor and the Madman interweaves the sagas of Murray, Minor, and the OED with all the fascination of a well-crafted mystery, compelling the reader to find out how two such remarkable men came to cooperate on such a ludicrously ambitious project. Simon Winchester's history celebrates the dictionary, the man who made it happen, and one of the project's most remarkable volunteers. Three great stories for the price of one.

--Greg Sewell

From the Publisher

Mysterious (mistîe · ries), a. [f. L. mystérium Mysteryi + ous. Cf. F. mystérieux.]
1. Full of or fraught with mystery; wrapt in mystery; hidden from human knowledge or understanding; impossible or difficult to explain, solve, or discover; of obscure origin, nature, or purpose.

It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took seventy years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story—a story of two remarkable men whose strange twenty-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking.

Professor James Murray, an astonishingly learned former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the distinguished editor of the OED project. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon from New Haven, Connecticut, who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. He was remarkably prolific, sending thousands of neat, handwritten quotations from his home in the small village of Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. On numerous occasions Murray invited Minor to visit Oxford and celebrate his work, but Murray's offer was regularly—and mysteriously—refused.

Thus the two men, for two decades, maintained a close relationship only through correspondence. Finally, in 1896, after Minor had sent nearly ten thousand definitions tothe dictionary but had still never traveled from his home, a puzzled Murray set out to visit him. It was then that Murray finally learned the truth about Minor—that, in addition to being a masterful wordsmith, Minor was also a murderer, clinically insane—and locked up in Broadmoor, England's harshest asylum for criminal lunatics.

The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius, and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a fascinating glimpse into one man's tortured mind and his contribution to another man's magnificent dictionary.

Globe and Mail

...It is one of the strengths of this book that it will, by its very sensationalism, attract and inform readers who might never normally lay down cold hard cash for the 'fascinating story of the history of English lexicography'....For those who know little of lexicography, this book is an entertaining, though not wholly reliable, introduction to the subject, particularly enlightening for those who labour under the delusion that the OED 's role is to prescribe what is 'proper' and 'improper' English.

Economist

An extraordinary tale, and Simon Winchester could not have told it better. . . . [He] has written a splendid book.

Wall Street Journal

Deftly weaves into a narrative full of suspense, pathos and humor.

USA Today

Droll and eloquent.

San Francisco Chronicle

Engaging, especially for readers who love words.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A literate, poignant story about extraordinary friendship and ordinary words.

Boston Globe

A fascinating tale of madness. . .a compelling slice of social and intellectual history.

New York Times Book Review

Elegant. . .imaginative. . .One of the strangest modern literary stories.

USA Today - Bob Minzesheimer

It's a story for readers who know the joy of words and can appreciate side trips through the history of dictionaries and marvel at the idea that when Shakespeare wrote, there were no dictionaries to consult.... Winchester, a British journalist who's written 12 other books, combines a reporter's eye for detail with a historian's sense of scale. His writing is droll and eloquent.

Publishers Weekly

The Oxford English Dictionary used 1,827,306 quotations to help define its 414,825 words. Tens of thousands of those used in the first edition came from the erudite, moneyed American Civil War veteran Dr. W.C. Minor -- all from a cell at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Vanity Fair contributor Winchester (River at the Center of the World) has told his story in an imaginative if somewhat superficial work of historical journalism. Sketching Minor's childhood as a missionary's son and his travails as a young field surgeon, Winchester speculates on what may have triggered the prodigious paranoia that led Minor to seek respite in England in 1871 and, once there, to kill an innocent man. Pronounced insane and confined at Broadmoor with his collection of rare books, Minor happened upon a call for OED volunteers in the early 1880s. Here on more solid ground, Winchester enthusiastically chronicles Minor's subsequent correspondence with editor Dr. J.A.H. Murray, who, as Winchester shows, understood that Minor's endless scavenging for the first or best uses of words became his saving raison d'etre, and looked out for the increasingly frail man's well-being. Winchester fills out the story with a well-researched mini-history of the OED, a wonderful demonstration of the lexicography of the word 'art' and a sympathetic account of Victorian attitudes toward insanity. With his cheeky way with a tale ('It is a brave and foolhardy and desperate man who will perform an autopeotomy' he writes of Minor's self-mutilation), Winchester celebrates a gloomy life brightened by devotion to a quietly noble, nearly anonymous task.

KLIATT

This engaging book has three primary "characters": Sir James Murray, the editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED); Dr. William Minor, a major contributor to that edition; and finally, the dictionary itself. Murray, a school dropout and a completely self-educated man, undertook the massive task of assembling the first complete dictionary in the English language. It was accomplished by many, many volunteers who read books from all periods of publishing and sent in quotations using the words needed. One of the volunteers was Dr. Minor, an American who murdered a man in London—the father of many children—and was sent to Broadmoor, a lunatic asylum. While there he read of the appeal for volunteers and applied himself to the exclusion of everything else in his life. For quite some time Murray knew nothing of Minor's background as the latter had not given the name of the institution with his return address. However, in time he did find out, went to visit Minor and they became fast friends in a most touching relationship. The third "character," the dictionary itself, is the background for Winchester's history of English lexicography, which he presents in a fascinating way. The dictionary took 70 years to complete (eight years beyond the death of Murray); it was published in 12 volumes, and defined 414,825 words. Minor contributed thousands and thousands of them. In considering the mammoth size of the task, remember that there were no dictionaries as we know them in the English language prior to this major undertaking. (Shakespeare had no dictionary.) Winchester calls it "the greatest effort since the invention of printing." The biographies of the two menrequired prodigious research on the part of Winchester, and the profiles of some of the minor figures, such as the murder victim, his wife, and the heads of the lunatic asylum, are interesting as well. This book may even send some students to the OED, which is now on CD-ROM. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2000, HarperPerennial, 242p, 21cm, bibliog, 98-10204, $13.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Doris Hiatt; May 2000 (Vol. 34 No. 3)

Library Journal

William C. Minor (1834-1920) was a Civil War surgeon whose war experience caused his personality to change. He became paranoid and was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic. After three years in an asylum, he went to Europe in 1871 in pursuit of rest, getting as far as London before his paranoia caught up with him and he killed George Merritt. An English court found him not guilty on the ground of insanity, and Minor was sent to Broadmoor. Coming across a leaflet for volunteers to help compile a history of the English language, Minor offered his services, remaining vague about his background. After 17 years of correspondence, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary came to meet Minor, who had submitted 10,000 definitions to the project, and was surprised that the genius was a patient at the Broadmoor Asylum. Finally released in 1910, Minor returned to the United States. Winchester's delightful, simply written book tells how a murderer made a huge contribution to what became a major reference source in the Western world. -- Michael Sawyer, Northwestern Regional Library, Elkin, North Carolina

School Library Journal

YA-This unusual and exciting account centers on two men involved in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary-Professor James Murray, its editor, and Dr. William Chester Minor, a true Connecticut Yankee who was one of the resource's most prolific contributors. The most surprising aspect of this long and productive partnership was that Dr. Minor, probably a schizophrenic, was incarcerated in England's most notorious insane asylum during the whole of their working relationship. He was a scholar and medical doctor whose fragile mental condition was probably exacerbated by duty as a surgeon during the American Civil War. His imprisonment was not harsh and his devotion to the cause of the dictionary and his precise and prolific contributions probably helped him hold on to some sense of reality. Winchester's descriptions of Civil War battlefields and the search for definitions of words such as aardvark or elephant are intriguing and compelling. This is a fine tale for both word lovers and history buffs. The momentum of the beginning scenes of warfare and murder are followed, not disappointingly, by descriptions of the trials and tribulations of dictionary crafting. Readers will meet some extraordinary men and an unusual woman, and find themselves well and truly ensconced in the late 19th century.-Susan H. Woodcock, Kings Park Library, Burke, VA

Booknews

A fine storyteller takes on a great story: American surgeon living in London kills a stranger, judged insane, incarcerated, connects with Jas. Murray the editor of the original OED, over decades contributes 10,000 examples of usage to the great dictionary. Good description of the creation of the OED. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknew.com)

John Banville

Madness, violence, arcane obsessions, weird learning, ghastly comedy, all set out in an atmosphere of. . .high neo-Gothic. The geographical span is wide, from Dickensian London to Florida's Pensacola Bay, from the beaches at Trincomalee to the Civil War battlefields of the United States. . . . It is a wonderful story. -- Literary Review

Will Self

This is almost my favorite kind of book: the work of social and intellectual history which through the oblique treatment of major developments manages to throw unusual light on humankind and its doings... Simon Winchester's effortlessly clear, spare prose is the perfect vehicle for the tale... absolutely riveting. -- The Times(London)

The Economist

An extraordinary tale, and Simon Wincheter could not have told it better.... [He] has written a splendid book.

Richard Bernstein

Artfully parallels the story of . . .two extraordinary men, the eccentric professor and the murderer with the sharp intellect. -- The New York Times

Time Out

[Winchester's]. . .casual and engaging prose makes the book appealing to lay readers of general history. . .the author can't seem to stop getting in the way of his story. . .psychological insights are often labored and conjectural. . . .an interesting read on the background of one of the most important books in the English language.

Chicago Tribune

Winchester's eye for fascinating detail and gritty historical perspective. . . .make the book a compelling read.

Wall Street Journal

Deftly weaves into a narrative full of suspense, pathos and humor.

USA Today

Droll and eloquent.

Time Out New York

[Winchester's]. . .casual and engaging prose makes the book appealing to lay readers of general history. . .the author can't seem to stop getting in the way of his story. . .psychological insights are often labored and conjectural. . . .an interesting read on the background of one of the most important books in the English language.

The Economist

An extraordinary tale, and Simon Winchester could not have told it better. . . . [He] has written a splendid book.

The Wall Street Journal

Deftly weaves into a narrative full of suspense, pathos and humor.

San Francisco Chronicle

Engaging, especially for readers who love words.

Cleveland Plain Dealer

A literate, poignant story about extraordinary friendship and ordinary words.

The Boston Globe

A fascinating tale of madness. . .a compelling slice of social and intellectual history.

Bob Minzesheimer

It's a story for readers who know the joy of words and can appreciate side trips through the history of dictionaries and marvel at the idea that when Shakespeare wrote, there were no dictionaries to consult.... Winchester, a British journalist who's written 12 other books, combines a reporter's eye for detail with a historian's sense of scale. His writing is droll and eloquent. -- USA Today

NY Times Book Review

Elegant. . .imaginative. . .One of the strangest modern literary stories.

Vanessa V. Friedman

. . .[T]he book has a certain old-fashioned sweetness. Think of it as a stocking stuffer for the literary set.
-- Entertainment Weekly

Mark Rozzo

Brisk and entertaining. -- Washington Post Book World

Charles Taylor

When we're children, the easiest way for writers and teachers and parents to hook us with a story is to begin with the words "Imagine a time when there was no ..." Simon Winchester, in his splendid, oddball slice of history The Professor and the Madman has come up with an irresistible hook. Imagine a time, Winchester asks us, when there were no dictionaries. That's such an unthinkable prospect to most readers (and writers) that Winchester needn't do any more to keep our interest. But he does. Winchester, a Salon contributor, uses this utterly fascinating account of how a combination of scholarship and nationalism begat what would become the "Oxford English Dictionary" (a project that would eventually take 70 years and 12 volumes to complete) to tell the story of the odd friendship the project sparked.

The project began in earnest in 1878 under the editorship of Professor James Murray, a philologist and school teacher. Handbills were distributed through bookstores and libraries asking for volunteer readers to begin assembling word lists and quotations that illustrated the meanings of those words. One of the most productive of the volunteers was Dr. William Charles Minor, an American Army surgeon who had served in the Civil War. Gratified, Murray repeatedly invited Minor to visit him, invitations Minor always turned down. Murray finally discovered why: Minor had been an inmate at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane since 1871, when, in a deluded state, he had killed a man.

Winchester wisely doesn't try to explain Minor's madness, though he suggests that it may have had something to do with his wartime experiences (particularly one episode in which he was made to brand an Irish deserter). Winchester doesn't need to point up the irony that at Broadmoor, Minor found a more humane environment than he did in the Army. His cell consisted of two rooms, one large enough to house the books he used to pass what he probably knew would be a life sentence. Minor emerges as a learned, essentially decent man (even the widow of the man he killed was a regular visitor for a time), sadly caught in the grip of obsessive delusions.

If the initial sections of his tale have the appeal of a gaslight Victorian thriller, Winchester doesn't leave it at that. He's a superb historian because he's a superb storyteller. Nothing he includes here -- whether it's an examination of the section of London where Minor committed his crime, the genealogy of the two protagonists (usually the dullest part of any history or biography) or a brief history of the very notion of dictionaries -- feels like it's impeding his story. The strange richness of it all is enhanced by the flawless clarity of Winchester's prose. His Victorian style, far from being a pastiche or postmodernist game-playing, is his natural mode of expression. In this passage, he imagines Shakespeare composing Twelfth Night without aid of a dictionary: "Now what, exactly, did William Shakespeare know about elephants? Moreover, what did he know of Elephants as hotels? The name was one that was given to a number of lodging houses in various cities dotted around Europe ... But however many there were -- just why was this the case? Why name an inn after such a beast? And what was such a beast anyway? All of these are questions that, one would think, a writer should at least have been able to answer."

Minor's diligence as a contributor resulted in his being responsible for something like 10,000 words in the final OED. He hoped that focusing on this task would deliver him from his psychosis, but Minor was also following his curiosities. Winchester, investigating an odd bit of background trivia about the making of one of the world's great books, has the courage of his own curiosity. The elegant curio he has created is as enthralling as a good story can be and as informative as any history aspires to be. --Salon Sept. 3, 1998

Kirkus Reviews

Remarkably readable, this chronicle of lexicography roams from the great dictionary itself to hidden nooks in the human psyche that sometimes house the motives for murder, the sources for sanity, and the blueprint for creativity. Manchester Guardian journalist Winchester (The River at the Center of the World) turns from Asia toward that most British of topics: the Oxford English Dictionary. His account is studded with odd persons and unexpected drama. To wit: When O.E.D. editor Professor James Murray headed off to meet a major contributor (of more than 10,000 entries) to his epochal reference work, he discovered that this distinguished philologist, Dr. William Chester Minor, was incarcerated for life in an asylum for the criminally insane. Minor, apparently a paranoiac killer, had committed murder in 1872. . . Ailing (and sexually repressed), he clung to his lexicographic efforts for dear life and the sake of his sanity, or what remained of it. 'All those Dictionary slips,' opines Winchester, 'were [Minor's] medication, [and] became his therapy.' When he describes the original O.E.D.'s '12 tombstone-sized volumes," we get a whiff of the grueling mental task exacted from its servants by the work, reminiscent of the labors involved in Melville's classic Bartleby the Scrivener, a book that is similarly a psychological masterwork.

In praising the achievement of the work,Winchester rejoices, 'It wears its status with a magisterial self-assurance, not least by giving its half-million definitions a robustly Victorian certitude of tone.' Winchester's own tone and his prose are wonderfully Victorian, an apt mirror for his subject. The author begins each chapter with an entry from the original O.E.D. as an appropriate heading, such as 'murder,' 'lunatic,' 'polymath' ('a person of much or varied learning') and, eventually, 'acknowledgment.' First-rate writing: well-crafted, incisive, abundantly playful.

What People Are Saying

William Safire
"The Professor and the Madman...is the linguistic detective story of the decade.... Winchester does a superb job of historical research that should entice readers even more interested in deeds than words."

David Walton
"elegant and scrupulous"

Oliver Sacks, M.D.
I found The Professor and the Madman both enthralling and moving, in its brilliant reconstruction of a most improbable event: the major contributions made to the great Oxford English Dictionary by a deeply delusional, incarcerated "madman," and the development of a true friendship between him and the editor of the OED. One sees here the redemptive potential of work and love in even the most deeply, "hopelessly," psychotic."

Lithe Sebesta
Winchester has written a powerful account of the shifting foundations on which meaning is built, and the impoverishment of a language that could not describe or give peace to one of its makers.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
• Read an Excerpt
• Read a Sample Chapter

Table of Contents

Interviews & Essays

Simon Winchester: Tremendously well, thank you. It is actually so very good, after two weeks of talking about the book, to be writing about it instead -- very therapeutic and restful. I hope!

Simon Winchester: I was, believe it or not, in the bath one day before breakfast, reading a book about lexicography (as one does). It was called Chasing The Sun by Jonathon Green, and in it, the author mentions, almost as an aside, how the lexicographical world was familiar with the tale of W. C. Minor, the lunatic murderer who was so important to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary. I remember sitting up in the bath, Archimedes-like, saying I had never heard of such a thing, and calling a friend of mine in Oxford (the phone being beside the bath). She said yes, she knew the tale -- and if I could get access to the files in Broadmoor asylum, then, she thought, I'd have a splendid yarn to tell.

Simon Winchester: Actually a New York playwright named Mitchell Redman has written a play about one rather sad aspect of W. C. Minor's life, but the play never found a producer (perhaps it might now, because of the renewed interest in the tale); and I haven't seen it because, quite understandably, Mitchell prefers to keep the play tightly guarded. But you're right -- it is surprising that it hasn't been told fully before. Surprising and, from my point of view, delightful!

Simon Winchester: It took an astonishing 70 years to complete (they thought it would take four). It cost about three million pounds in the money of the day, and everyone was paid (including Dr. Murray's children, who were paid sixpence a week to sort the slips into alphabetical order -- and became demon crossword solvers as a result). The editors also issued the dictionary in paperback parts, known as fascicles, so as to improve their cash flow. In the USA they cost about $2.50 each, and came out about once every three years.

Simon Winchester: The two crucial sources were the previously secret files at Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in England, and St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. Plus a lot of U.S. Army records, Civil War records, and the amazing archives at Oxford University Press (which preserve such things as the tail of a mouse found among the dictionary slips -- and filed under the letter T, not M, a matter that offended some linguistic pedants).

Simon Winchester: I think the lag came about in part because of the intellectual struggle going on in England over whether or not to try to "fix" the language, as the French tried to do, to establish a body that decided what was good and what was bad, what could be included and what could not. People like Jonathan Swift argued that English ought to be fixed like this; others -- happily, the majority, in the end -- reckoned that English was a forever changing language, living and extending itself, and that a proper dictionary, which would of necessity be a very large book, would reflect that constant shifting, that constant evolution.

Simon Winchester: It is always difficult to decide what event triggers madness. All we can say for sure about Minor was that he had a predisposition to madness, and that something tipped him over the edge into delusional paranoid schizophrenia, which is how he would be diagnosed today. He probably was tipped over the edge by being forced to brand the letter D with a red-hot branding iron onto the cheek of a deserter in the one Civil War battle in which he fought -- but then again, he may have been terribly sunburned during a long summer duty in south Florida, and there is some evidence that he was ordered to witness the execution of a Yale classmate. Whatever the cause, he was prodigiously and floridly mad for all the years that he wrote for the Oxford English Dictionary, and for long after. All his life, in fact.

Simon Winchester: It is being revised as we speak. A fully integrated second edition came out in 1989; there is now a pretty up-to-date CD-ROM, and they are doing a 3rd edition online (for all info on this, I'd recommend you visit the Oxford English Dictionary web page at www.Oxford English Dictionary.co.uk, I think.) In addition to that, a "New Additions" volume comes out every couple of years. There is a huge dictionary staff at Oxford, all beavering away like mad.

Simon Winchester: Sarah, you speak of "Winchester's madness" -- I hope you mean Minor's. Though there is a strong streak of insanity among many lexicographers, and those interested in them, I am told.

Simon Winchester: The research was not, in truth, terribly difficult -- although the people in the District of Columbia government refused point-blank to let me have any St. Elizabeth's records. However, I rather trumped their ace by finding that, since Minor was a federal patient when St. E's was a federal institution, all his records were in the National Archives and available merely by asking, over the Internet. The Broadmoor Archives became available after a lot of pleading -- Broadmoor is still home to a lot of very dangerously ill people, and the authorities are not frightfully keen to let strangers in.

Simon Winchester: Not very far. Broadmoor itself, Orange County, Virginia, South London, Washington, D.C., New Haven, and Sri Lanka. Actually, now that I come to think of it, quite far. But much less far than earlier books.

Simon Winchester: The old chestnut of "the very fine line" that supposedly divides pure genius from dementia and lunacy -- I think it can be very overrated, very romanticized. There are some cases, and this is one of them. Ezra Pound was another. Richard Dadd. But I am sorry to say that most of the patients at Broadmoor today, and in whom I became interested, did not seem to display an abundance of talent.

Simon Winchester: Actually Luc Besson, who has bought the movie rights, has told me that I am considered "too literary" to do the screenplay (which I and my chums think is a bit of a joke). So someone else has been asked to tinker around with the book, and I am awaiting results. Other than that, I know that Mel Gibson has expressed a keen interest in playing Dr. Murray, and talks are said to be going on between Besson and Gibson. We'll see. I'm not holding my breath. But Besson is an amazing director, and something rather extraordinary could come out of this.

Simon Winchester: Constant exhortation, I can only imagine. Some people, when set a challenge (such as "find the word 'web page' in sources earlier than 1987," say) set about it with fantastic enthusiasm. The Oxford English Dictionary Newsletter, also to be found on the Oxford English Dictionary web page I mentioned before, gives a half-yearly list of the editors desiderata, which include things like the example I gave above.

Simon Winchester: I'm certainly no expert. But within the walls of Broadmoor there are clearly a large number of people who would be a great danger to those outside; there are also a lot of very elderly criminals who might be harmless but unable to function, and would end up on the streets. So a place like Broadmoor ends up playing a dual role -- segregating abominably dangerous people from society and acting as an asylum, "a place of refuge," to give the dictionary definition, for those unable to function beyond the walls.

Simon Winchester: Thanks a lot. No, I'm neither a philologist nor a lexicographer. But like all writers, I love words, and this makes one a dabbler in both disciplines.

Simon Winchester: The Jonestown massacre. Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. President Nixon's resignation. Pol Pot's funeral. Getting thrown into prison for three months in Argentina on spying charges. Lots of odds and ends stick in the mind.

Simon Winchester: Almost the oddest aspect of the story, I think. I wonder how the film, if there is to be one, will treat the visits of this poor woman to the cell of a Minor who was clearly obsessed with sex. We will see. I await, I have to say, with some trepidation!

Simon Winchester: It was incredibly laborious -- after all, if there are 1,800,000 quotations in the finished Oxford English Dictionary, consider how many had to be collected in the first place. Millions upon millions. But they were crucially important because they demonstrated the way in which the meanings and senses of words evolved over the centuries; they showed the living language actually living, as it were.

Simon Winchester: Thanks a lot. I am now working on another very odd tale, about a failed Arctic expedition in the 1880s, in which there was a great deal of cannibalism, and in which reputations of great men were irreparably damaged by the yellow press reporting of the time (little worse then than now, frankly). I have just come back from a long trek in Northern Ellesmere Island to see the place where the expedition started; next summer I'll go back to where it ended so tragically.

Simon Winchester: As Murray was actually aware that Minor was mad, he was determined to be kindly during the first meeting. After taking tea and Dundee cake with him in his cell, Murray pronounced Minor "a fine Christian gentleman -- and seemingly as sane as myself," which many consider more a comment on Murray's own sanity than on Minor's mental state!

Simon Winchester: It was published last June under the title The Surgeon Of Crowthorne, and I'm happy to say it made number one on the bestseller list and remains hovering in the top ten. Considering that none of my other books has made it into the lists, nor even come close, this has been (and continues to be) a very pleasing experience.

Simon Winchester: I think the tragic and traumatic event that occurred on December 5, 1902, but which I don't think I would be permitted to tell you about online. It was a shock to read the file, and to imagine that a man could do such a thing.

Simon Winchester: Actually, no. I wanted it to have the British title, The Surgeon Of Crowthorne, but I was told this would ensure the book's early journey to the remainder table. So my agent, Jody Hotchkiss at Sterling Lord, came up with the idea, and I'm happy to record my gratitude to him.

Simon Winchester: I believe it was, and remains so. Mind you, there are critics: Read a book called Empire Of Words by a Princeton academic named Willinsky, and he will show you how the Oxford English Dictionary is an imperial contrivance of the minds of dead white English men, and so should be (at least to an extent) disregarded.

Simon Winchester: I'll pass the message on to the chap in London who drew them for us. I was at first a little dubious, but people seem to like them, and so I have since eaten a bit of humble pie, or crow, or whatever, for ever having questioned the wisdom of those at HarperCollins who argued for them.

Simon Winchester: It was a purely journalistic hunch -- the fact that a good old-fashioned story was out there to be told, the kind of thing that could take you into a crowded room, and have you say, "Shush a moment! I've got something extraordinary to tell you" -- and everyone would hush, and be amazed at the end.

Simon Winchester: That there certainly is redemption to be had -- that everyone can make a contribution, that all of us has a chance, in some way big or small, to make a difference. See how the deck was stacked against him -- and see what an astonishing thing he did, the benefits of which will last for always.

Simon Winchester: Seemingly not -- though people have recently written to me with offers of other papers, so who knows what I'll find out there. The challenge was really, Could I do this? I'm really a travel writer, and the idea of traveling in time, rather than in place, was strange for me. But it turned out to be truly the most enjoyable book to write.

Simon Winchester: Until the very end, when a brute named Dr. Brayn took away all his privileges and turfed him out of the two rooms he had occupied for 40 years. Brayn is the villain of the story, in my view. (Except he had the ideal name, I suppose, for someone running a lunatic asylum.)

Simon Winchester: I never want to see books as beautiful as the Oxford English Dictionary vanish. I am optimistic: Video didn't kill film, and I don't think what we are doing here will stop people producing, and reading, those wonderful confections of paper and ink we call books.

Simon Winchester: Just that this has been enormous fun. My typing fingers are hurting a bit (being a hunt-and-peck person), but I'd like it to go on and on. Anyway, thanks a lot, and farewell from here.

Reading Group Guide

Introduction

It is known as one of the greatest literary achievements in the history of English letters. The creation of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857, took 70 years to complete, drew from tens of thousands of brilliant minds, and organized the sprawling language into 414,825 precise definitions. But hidden within the rituals of its creation is a fascinating and mysterious story of a friendship -- an account of two remarkable men whose strange 20-year relationship lies at the core of this historic undertaking. Professor James Murray, a former schoolmaster and bank clerk, was the brilliant editor of the OED project. Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired American surgeon who had served in the Civil War, was one of thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotations of words to be used in the dictionary. But Minor was no ordinary contributor. Not only was he remarkably prolific, sending in as many as ten thousand definitions, but he was also a murderer, clinically insane, and locked up in Broadmoor, England's asylum for criminal lunatics.

The Professor and the Madman is an extraordinary tale of madness and genius and the incredible obsessions of two men at the heart of the Oxford English Dictionary and literary history. With riveting insight and detail, Simon Winchester crafts a fascinating glimpse into one man's tortured mind and his contribution to another man's magnificent dictionary.

Questions for Discussion

1. Who is Dr. W.C. Minor? How do you first come to know him at the beginning of The Professor and the Madman? What role does he play in the "Lambeth Tragedy?"


2. Who is James Murray? How would youcharacterize his early interest in philology? How does Murray come to work on the Oxford English Dictionary? What was the initial projection of how long the O.E.D. would take to complete?


3. How does Dr. Minor's madness first reveal itself? How do his experiences in Ceylon, at the Battle of the Wilderness, and in Florida relate to his condition? What are some of the symptoms of his illness? How would you describe his personality?


4. What did you think of the elaborate process of creating the Oxford English Dictionary? Was it easy to visualize? Did it surprise you to learn that in the end more than 6 million slips with definitions were submitted by volunteers?


5. How would you describe Dr. Minor's life at the asylum? How did he have access to books? What unusual visitor helped him in this respect? What aspects of his situation at the asylum did you find especially unusual? According to the author, how might Dr. Minor have learned of the creation of the O.E.D.?


6. How does his work on the O.E.D. change Dr. Minor's personality? How does it impact his madness? What are some of the ideas and rumors about Minor that float around the Scriptorium, where the O.E.D. is being written and edited?


7. How does Murray first learn of Dr. Minor's status as a criminally insane asylum inmate? How does Murray eventually come to know Minor? How would you describe their relationship? What aspects of their interaction lead you to this assessment?


8. How does Dr. Minor injure himself while he is at Broadmoor? How did you interpret this act? Do you agree with the author that his dismemberment was an attempt to purge himself of "unsavory" thoughts and deeds? How does the arrival of Dr. Brayn change the living conditions at Broadmoor for Dr. Minor?


9. What elements of this story did you find especially harrowing, fascinating, bewildering, surprising? Did you feel sympathetic toward Dr. Minor? Were you surprised at the strong bond that developed between him and James Murray?

About the Author

Simon Winchester was a geologist at Oxford and worked in Africa and on offshore oil rigs before becoming a full-time globe-trotting foreign correspondent and writer. He is the author of Krakatoa, The Map that Changed the World, The Professor and the Madman, and The Fracture Zone, among many other titles. He currently lives on a small farm in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.

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Chapter One

In Victorian London, even in a place as louche and notoriously crime-ridden as Lambeth Marsh, the sound of gunshots was a rare event indeed. The marsh was a sinister place, a jumble of slums and sin that crouched, dark and ogrelike, on the bank of the Thames just across from Westminster; few respectable Londoners would ever admit to venturing there. It was a robustly violent part of town as well -- the footpad lurked in Lambeth, there had once been an outbreak of garroting, and in every crowded alley were the roughest kinds of pickpocket. Fagin, Bill Sikes, and Oliver Twist would have all seemed quite at home in Victorian Lambeth: This was Dickensian London writ large.

But it was not a place for men with guns. The armed criminal was a phenomenon little known in the Lambeth of Prime Minister Gladstone's day, and even less known in the entire metropolitan vastness of London. Guns were costly, cumbersome, difficult to use, hard to conceal. Then, as still today, the use of a firearm in the commission of a crime was thought of as somehow a very un-British act -- and as something to be written about and recorded as a rarity. "Happily," proclaimed a smug editorial in Lambeth's weekly newspaper, "we in this country have no experience of the crime of 'shooting down,' so common in the United States."

So when a brief fusillade of three revolver shots rang out shortly after two o'clock on the moonlit Saturday morning of February 17, 1872, the sound was unimagined, unprecedented, and shocking. The three cracks -- perhaps there were four -- were loud, very loud, and they echoed through the cold and smokily damp night air. They were heard -- and, considering their rarity, just by chance instantly recognized -- by a keen young police constable named Henry Tarrant, then attached to the Southwark Constabulary's L Division.

The clocks had only recently struck two, his notes said later; he was performing with routine languor the duties of the graveyard shift, walking slowly beneath the viaduct arches beside Waterloo Railway Station, rattling the locks of the shops and cursing the bone-numbing chill.

When he heard the shots, Tarrant blew his whistle to alert any colleagues who (he hoped) might be on patrol nearby, and he began to run. Within seconds he had raced through the warren of mean and slippery lanes that made up what in those days was still called a village, and had emerged into the wide riverside swath of Belvedere Road, from whence he was certain the sounds had come.

Another policeman, Henry Burton, who had heard the piercing whistle, as had a third, William Ward, rushed to the scene. According to Burton's notes, he dashed toward the echoing sound and came across his colleague Tarrant, who was by then holding a man, as if arresting him. "Quick!" cried Tarrant. "Go to the road -- a man has been shot!" Burton and Ward raced toward Belvedere Road and within seconds found the unmoving body of a dying man. They fell to their knees, and onlookers noted they had cast off their helmets and gloves and were hunched over the victim.

There was blood gushing onto the pavement -- blood staining a spot that would for many months afterward be described in London's more dramatically minded papers as the location of A HEINOUS CRIME, A TERRIBLE EVENT, AN ATROCIOUS OCCURRENCE, A VILE MURDER.

The Lambeth Tragedy, the papers eventually settled upon calling it -- as if the simple existence of Lambeth itself were not something of a tragedy. Yet this was a most unusual event, even by the diminished standards of the marsh dwellers. For though the place where the killing occurred had over the years been witness to many strange events, the kind eagerly chronicled in the penny dreadfuls, this particular drama was to trigger a chain of consequences that was quite without precedent. And while some aspects of this crime and its aftermath would turn out to be sad and barely believable, not all of them, as this account will show, were to be wholly tragic. Far from it, indeed.

Even today Lambeth is a singularly unlovely part of the British capital, jammed anonymously between the great fan of roads and railway lines that take commuters in and out of the city center from the southern counties. These days the Royal Festival Hall and the South Bank Centre stand there, built on the site of the 1951 fairgrounds where an entertainment was staged to help cheer up the rationed and threadbare Londoners. Otherwise it is an unlovely, characterless sort of place -- rows of prisonlike buildings that house lesser government ministries, the headquarters of an oil company around which winter winds whip bitterly, a few unmemorable pubs and newspaper shops, and the lowering presence of Waterloo Station -- lately expanded with the terminal for the Channel Tunnel express trains -- which exerts its dull magnetic pull over the neighborhood.

The railway chiefs of old never bothered to build a grand station hotel at Waterloo -- though they did build monster structures of great luxury at the other London stations, like Victoria and Paddington, and even St. Pancras and King's Cross. Lambeth has long been one of the nastier parts of London; until very recently, with the further development of the Festival Hall site, no one of any style and consequence has ever wanted to linger there, neither a passenger back in the days of the Victorian boat trains, nor anyone for any reason at all today. It is slowly improving; but its reputation dogs it.

A hundred years ago it was positively vile. It was still then low, marshy, and undrained, a swampy gyre of pathways where a sad little stream called the Neckinger seeped into the Thames. The land was jointly owned by the archbishop of Canterbury and the duke of Cornwall, landlords who, rich enough in their own right, never bothered to develop it in the manner of the great...