The Professor And The Madman – Simon Winchester, 1998 ★

Notes from an Asylum

There are good and bad kinds of crazy. This book features both.

The notion of capturing every word of the world’s dominant language from “aa” (an obsolete term used in the 1400s meaning “stream” or “watercourse”) to “zyxt” (Old Kentish for “to see”) with little more than a nib pen and foolscap paper has a germ of madness at its core. But there was more than sober, willful monomania in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. There was a certified lunatic at work as well.

Simon Winchester details the tragic life story of one Dr. William Chester Minor, a war veteran from New Haven, Connecticut committed to an English asylum after shooting to death an unarmed man in London.

Asked why he shot the man, Dr. Minor’s answer was brief: “You do not suppose I would be so cowardly as to shoot a woman!”

While useless to himself, Minor proved diligent and resourceful as a volunteer researcher for the new Oxford English Dictionary (or OED for short), an effort led by another man of learning, James Murray. The Professor And The Madman examines the friendly partnership between Murray the indefatigable word nerd and Minor the killer who imagined imps in the ceiling above his cell.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which encompassed 13 volumes when completed in 1933. Winchester writes: "Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this." 

Winchester notes the irony of how Minor’s imprisonment would provide the OED with one of its most tireless researchers:

The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

It’s an arresting concept for a book, with elements of true crime, highbrow learning, and a late-Victorian-period setting. “This was Dickensian London writ large,” Winchester notes. Unfortunately, like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, there’s not much there there.

Winchester writes in a frustratingly roundabout way, as if to conceal the absence of a fleshed-out story at its core. Little of Dr. Minor’s life has survived the years, he makes clear, whether it be his service in the American Civil War or for the OED. Winchester employs some imaginative reconstruction that becomes intrusive. Worse, he tends to stretch his narrative out, no doubt to fill out his book.

James Murray at work on the OED. Beside him are slips of paper in cubbyholes which were submitted by contributors and contained quotations using specific words. How many such quotations did he want? "As many as convenient," Winchester records him saying. Image from https://hubpages.com/literature/Who-Wrote-Dictionaries.

Take the opening. We start with Murray journeying by landau to this well-appointed residence outside London to meet his prize researcher for the first time. A door opens, and he is ushered into a room where an authoritative figure sits behind a desk.

Murray thinks its Dr. Minor, but the authority explains he is in fact the director of an insane asylum. Minor is his longest-staying resident.

That’s some kick-off. But it is also revealed by Winchester to be “an amusing and romantic fiction” a hundred pages on. The reality is that Murray had time to learn of Minor’s true situation, but when writing a book about words you get your grabs in where you can. So Winchester gives you the phony version first. That way he can fill in even more pages when he gets around to setting the record straight.

Mel Gibson played Murray and Sean Penn played Minor in a 2019 film adaptation. The film spent years being litigated as Gibson and the producers fell into a dispute. I enjoyed it more than the book, anyway. Image from https://wallpapersafari.com/the-professor-and-the-madman-wallpapers/.

A lot of the time, Winchester foregoes facts for suppositions:

The invitation seemed a long-sought badge of renewed membership in the society from which he had been so long estranged…

Grateful though they might have been, the Oxford team was also becoming, as time went on, very, very puzzled. And Murray was more puzzled than all of them…

To some who dined at Queen’s on that glorious autumn evening, Minor’s absence must have seemed a melancholy footnote to an otherwise glorious literary moment…

When you read words like “seemed” and “might,” it’s your tip-off Winchester is getting over his skis in regard to the facts of the story, facts he allows are both scant and scattered.

The Asylum For Criminal Lunatics at Broodmoor, Dr. Minor's home for 30 years and the place where he began sending citations to Murray in carefully-handwritten sheets. "Before long the gentle shower of paper had turned into a raging blizzard," Winchester writes. Image from https://notevenpast.org/the-professor-and-the-madman-by-simon-winchester-2005/.

Minor’s military background is hard to ascertain, Winchester agrees. Still, he lays into the horrors Minor must have witnessed during the Battle of the Wilderness despite no evidence Minor was there. Minor’s madness may have sprung from that, he writes, or else from inflicting tattoos on Irish deserters, though this is also admitted speculation.

Finally the author throws up his hands: “Can it ever be said that a major psychological illness like schizophrenia, with its severe disruption of the brain’s chemistry, appearance, and function, truly has a cause?” Maybe not, but it didn’t stop Winchester from spending a large part of his book writing about it.

Even the better parts of the book have a grindstone feel about them. Yes, it’s a book about murder and madness, but it is clear early on that what excites Winchester is the lexical stuff. He spends much time on the origin of the dictionary, how it helped not just define but refine the English language:

The English language was spoken and written – but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air – it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were – who knew?

Winchester spends a lot of time detailing various attempts at a dictionary, including a famous one by Samuel Johnson which gave its creator much fame but didn’t really nail down English the same way the OED would. A sprawling mother tongue needed something more comprehensive, the work of people who scoured miles of text for unusual uses of words both common and uncommon.

Author Simon Winchester, in a 2017 photo by Heather Bellow of The Berkshire Eagle. Image from https://www.berkshireeagle.com/stories/hard-times-for-the-professor-and-the-madman-mel-gibson-film-based-on-book-by-local-author-stuck,515954.

Dr. Minor was a good person for this because he had time and energy to burn. “So enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could easily illustrate the last 4 centuries [volumes] from his quotations alone,” Murray wrote.

Dr. Minor produced folded sheets, or quires, with neatly written explanations of multiple uses of a single word. Whereas other contributors sent in particular words found in their spare time, Dr. Minor dedicated himself to seeking out varied uses of specific words selected by Murray. To do this, he called upon his vast library of books, some bought for him by the widow of the man he murdered.

I know, that caught me short, too. Unfortunately, this is another of those places where Winchester doesn’t really have any facts nailed down. He floats instead an idea of some sexual activity between the lonely woman and the lusty Minor, but this comes off as more baseless supposition, and rather cheap at that.

The whole approach Winchester takes is a bit callous and smug. He makes the proper noises about Dr. Minor’s sad condition, yet when describing how Dr. Minor sliced off his own penis with a knife, he titles the chapter “The Unkindest Cut.” When he introduces a minister who has bad knees, he feels the need to tell us his condition was a result of an accident, and not excessive genuflecting.

The more I read, the more disappointed I became with this book. By the ending, when Winchester has left his narrative entirely to talk about an OED printing plate he owns and how it decorates his home, I was wondering where the editor was, or how this managed to become such a commercial success.