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Summary and Analysis of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Based on the Book Simon Winchester
By Worth Books OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4423-3
CHAPTER 1
Summary
Preface
According to a popular myth, one of the strangest meetings in lexicographical history occurred in 1896. Dr. James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, traveled to Crowthorne, England, to meet one of the dictionary's most prolific volunteer contributors, a man named Dr. W. C. Minor. Murray and Minor had corresponded for twenty years, but they had never met in person. Murray arrived at a large red brick mansion, which he assumed was Minor's house. He soon found out that it was, in fact, the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor. Minor had been an inmate there for more than twenty years.
Need to Know: The true tale of Murray and Minor was contained in secret government files that had been locked away for more than one hundred years. The Professor and the Madman tells their story.
1. The Dead of Night in Lambeth Marsh
On February 18, 1872, three shots rang out in the moonlit streets of Lambeth Marsh, London. Firearms were uncommon in Victorian England, but perhaps rarer still were the circumstances that occasioned these particular gunshots: US Army surgeon W. C. Minor had murdered a British worker named George Merrett for no apparent reason.
Minor, who descended from a wealthy New England family, had arrived in England the previous year after serving during the Civil War. He suffered from severe paranoid delusions. At his murder trial, he told the court that an Irish nationalist group was hunting him and that he shot George Merrett out of what he thought was self-defense.
The murder trial concluded with a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. In a decision that would greatly affect the English literary world, the court sent Minor to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor.
Need to Know: The American Civil War resulted in the most casualties of any US war in history. Often unmentioned, however, is the psychological harm it caused. Shell shock — what we now call posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — was common, and many conscripts suffered in asylums once the war was over. W. C. Minor was not a unique case, which makes the impact he ended up having on history even more astounding.
2. The Man Who Taught Latin to Cattle
Unlike other English dictionaries, the OED includes not just definitions of more than 500,000 words, but quotations that illustrate their various uses and nuances. The OED tells the "life story" of every term, from its first publication to its more recent uses. There are some disagreements, of course. For instance, take protagonist, which some dictionaries say can only refer to one character in a tale, while the OED states may be used in the plural.
Interestingly, The Professor and the Madman has two protagonists: W. C. Minor and a Scottish man named James Augustus Henry Murray.
Murray was born to a poor family, and he educated himself after leaving school at age fourteen. A curious and ambitious young man, he taught his younger brothers about the stars, spoke Latin to livestock, and participated in archaeological digs. He acquired an incredible range of knowledge and was particularly skillful in the realm of philology, the study of language. Murray was prevented from pursuing a career in academia by unfortunate family circumstances: the illness of his first wife, Maggie, and the death of their child when he was twenty-seven. He took a job in a bank, but resumed his studies on the side.
Need to Know: After the passing of his wife, Murray married Ada Ruthven, a woman described as "his social and intellectual equal." Murray eventually gained the friendship of several scholars who invited him to join the prestigious Philological Society. Around this time, he published The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, which elevated his scholarly status.
3. The Madness of War
Seventh-generation American Eastman Strong Minor and his wife, Lucy, were aristocratic, pious New Englanders living as Congregationalist missionaries in Ceylon in 1834 when their son William was born. In his teenage years, William traveled to America and earned his medical degree from the Yale College of Medicine.
Minor served as a US Army surgeon during the Civil War. While serving, he was once forced to brand the face of a young Irish deserter with the letter D — an event that may have led to his delusional fear of the Irish in later years.
After the war, Minor's mental health deteriorated. Genteel, intelligent, and educated, he began suffering from paranoid delusions in his early thirties.
He became sexually promiscuous — his behavior would shame and torment him throughout his life — suspicious, and paranoid. He spent some time at St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the Insane in Washington, DC, but did not fully recover. Discharged from the army, William C. Minor left America for London, where he hoped to rest and recuperate.
Need to Know: The story of Minor's history couldn't be more different than that of Murray's. Murray was privileged and upper-crust, working in mainstream society, while Minor, although well-educated, suffered the impact of a major war and fell into obscurity.
4. Gathering Earth's Daughters
Four hundred years ago, there were no dictionaries of the English language. When Shakespeare was writing, he had no reference to consult for spelling, usage, or word origins. The language was not fixed; English words were not codified by any recognized or standard set of written rules.
The very earliest of dictionaries were comprised of Latin and Latin-to-English translations. Robert Cawdrey produced a 2,500-word English dictionary at the turn of the seventeenth century. His work was meant to assist readers of scripture and religious texts.
As England expanded its political and economic influence, the English language was on the verge of becoming a global language, one that needed more study and dissemination. The first effort at a comprehensive English dictionary was made by Samuel Johnson, whose famous A Dictionary of the English Language was first published in 1755. His two-volume set was the pinnacle of English dictionaries — complete with quotations to illustrate the usage of more than 118,000 words — until the OED was published 150 years later.
Need to Know: Although some might say otherwise, most philologists and linguists would agree that any human language is constantly in a state of flux. The OED, then, is an attempt to codify something that resists codification. In fact, there is no "proper" English language, but there are many English dialects, and they influence and alter one another in complicated ways that far outstrip the resources of any dictionary.
5. The Big Dictionary Conceived
At the November 5, 1857, meeting of the Philological Society in London, a century after the publication of the first edition of Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language, Richard Chenevix Trench proposed a bold lexicographical undertaking: He suggested that a new dictionary be created, one that would include every single word in the English language — and not just the definition of every word, but the "life story" or recorded history of each word and its various nuances of meaning.
The sheer enormity and expense of the task hindered early efforts at enacting Trench's plan. But finally, almost twenty years later, the Oxford University Press agreed to publish the dictionary with James Murray as editor. Immediately, Murray sent out an international plea for volunteers. Distributed to journals and newspapers, as well as professionals and customers at bookstores and libraries, the call reached the far ends of the English-speaking world — including the Asylum of the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor.
Need to Know: The phenomenon of the OED stemmed from England's long history as a nation that spent enormous resources in the study of language and philology as well as its status as a global power with the implicit intention to present English as the "universal" language.
6. The Scholar in Cell Block Two
After being found guilty of murder, Minor was transported to the Broadmoor asylum. As a well-educated man who was earning a pension from the US Army, and not likely to do harm to himself or others, Minor moved into the low-security Block 2, where he lived in a comfortable double cell.
During the day, the gentleman convict read, painted, and played the flute. But Minor was also tormented by fearful delusions of tormentors who entered his cell at night. He developed extreme remorse for his crime and resolved to write to Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man he had murdered. She wrote back, and for a few months, she visited him regularly and brought him books. In one of these books, Minor discovered James Murray's call for volunteers for the new dictionary. Minor immediately signed up as a volunteer, addressing his letter simply from "Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berkshire."
Need to Know: An amazing string of odd circumstances put Minor in a position to influence the OED. Had he not been American, he might not have participated in war. Had he not been in war, he may not have become criminally insane as an adult. Had he not happened to be visiting England, he might not have murdered George Merrett. And had Eliza Merrett not handed him a particular collection of books and papers, he would never have come across the call for contributors to the OED.
7. Entering the Lists
Minor, invigorated and enthused by the task of volunteering for the dictionary, set to work on collecting and documenting quotations for the dictionary project. Having served almost a decade for his crime, the ability to contribute to the development of the prestigious OED must have felt like an invitation back into proper society.
All the would-be lexicographers were instructed to prepare their usage documentation for any single word on a piece of paper including the quotation, the book title from which the quote was sourced, the page number, and the date. Ultimately, citations were wanted for rare and obscure words as well as common ones.
Unlike many of Murray's volunteers, Minor understood perfectly the purpose of his task and, in a fit of inspiration, developed a unique and sophisticated method for identifying appropriate quotations. After making a selection from his own shelves — usually a travel or history book written in the seventeenth century — he would comb through it sentence-by-sentence with painstaking care. Every time a word piqued his interest, he wrote it and its page number down in a word list he created for each book.
Using his meticulous research, Minor could supply quotations for "catchwords" precisely when the dictionary's editors needed them. All Murray needed to do was tell Minor what word they were currently working on, and he would check his word lists and send an appropriate quotation and citation to Murray and his editors. The first word the editors asked Minor to look for in his lists was art.
Need to Know: Part of Minor's enthusiasm came from the fact that he had nothing but free time in his room at the Broadmoor. Had he been employed in mainstream society, he may have never had the time to put together his painstaking system and make the kind of enormous contributions he did to the OED.
8. Annulated, Art, Brick-Tea, Buckwheat
The dictionary's progress was slow and incredibly arduous, but in 1885, after more than five years of work, the Clarendon Press in Oxford published the first installment of the Oxford English Dictionary — from A to Ant. Murray left his teaching position and relocated his family and his work to Oxford, where, behind his house, he built his "Scriptorium," a corrugated metal shed in which he and his colleagues (and some of his children) would toil away at writing definitions and organizing the thousands of quotations they received from volunteer contributors every day. He suspected that the whole project would take eleven more years.
One of the most organized and prolific contributors was W. C. Minor. Minor wrote to Murray often; he was eager to feel that he was part of the dictionary's team — he wanted to work on the same words the editors were working on and delivered more than a hundred words in any given week.
Need to Know: Though there was initial improvement to his mood after working on the OED for a while, Minor was still prone to delusional thoughts. Murray was not aware of Minor's circumstances until, after many years of correspondence, he learned Minor's story from a friend.
9. The Meeting of Minds
In January 1897, Oxford University threw a party in honor of Queen Victoria's Jubilee Year. The most recent installation of the Oxford English Dictionary, which covered the letter C, was dedicated to the queen. Several top contributors were in attendance at the joyous affair, but one notable absence was that of W. C. Minor — only sixty minutes away from Oxford by train.
Murray found out about Minor's circumstances from a chance conversation with an American librarian friend of his who had seen Minor at Broadmoor. Murray learned that the incarcerated scholar would be pleased to meet in person, assuming that Murray had known of his story all along. And so Murray arranged to visit Minor in 1891, and over the next several years, he visited the Broadmoor several times.
Minor was becoming increasingly unwell. He'd been confined to Broadmoor for close to thirty years, and had collaborated on the Oxford English Dictionary for almost two decades, but still suffered from profound depression, paranoia, and other delusions.
He enjoyed privileges that other residents at Broadmoor did not: access to books from antiquarian booksellers in London; afternoon tea with the head of the asylum, Dr. Nicholson; and his own "part-time servant." But his request for parole was denied on the grounds that he was still quite a disturbed man.
Need to Know: The apocryphal story of Murray and Minor's first meeting — which incorrectly had it that Murray came to visit Minor unaware of his status as an inmate at the insane asylum — was passed along for many years by various writers and historians. The record was only permanently rectified with the publication of Winchester's book in 1999.
10. The Unkindest Cut
In December of 1902, Dr. W. C. Minor cut off his own penis with a penknife. He had become a Christian during his imprisonment and believed that severing his penis would purge him of his intense lust and redeem him for past lascivious behavior. It's possible that Minor may have been acting out of guilt for his relationship with Eliza Merrett, the widow of the man he had killed (he may have had a sexual encounter with Mrs. Merrett on one of her visits to the Broadmoor asylum).
Minor's mental and physical health worsened. In 1910, after thirty-eight years of imprisonment and at the insistence of his friends and his brother Alfred — a plea that made its way up to Home Secretary Winston Churchill — Minor was discharged from the Broadmoor and allowed to travel home to America in his Alfred's care. When he reached the United States, Minor was committed to St. Elizabeth's Asylum in Washington, DC.
Need to Know: Minor had been brought up as a devout Congregationalist and only lost his interest in religion when he attended Yale. His return to Christian belief while at Broadmoor may have been a factor in his disdain for his own sexual impulses, which led to his castrating himself.
11. Then Only the Monuments
Frederick Furnivall, one of the founders of the OED project, passed away in 1910; James Murray followed him into death in July of 1915, having partially completed the T section of the OED.
In America, Dr. W. C. Minor grew weaker and continued to suffer from paranoid delusions. If Minor were alive today, he would probably have been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and antipsychotic drugs might have alleviated his symptoms, but he never found effective treatment. However, if he had found relief from his delusions, he may not have been inclined or able to help Murray with the OED.
Minor died in his sleep in 1920. Eight years later, the first edition of Oxford English Dictionary was finally completed.
Need to Know: The OED is an ongoing project at least partly because the language is always changing. So, although the dictionary was not finished until 1928, after the deaths of both Murray and Minor, it could be argued that the OED remains incomplete and that the chaotic and tireless work of the two dedicated men continues in a different form.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Summary and Analysis of The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Worth Books. Copyright © 2017 Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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