Book Description
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 to the 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.
