Kathryn's Reviews > The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

The Oxford English Dictionary (first edition) was a monumental undertaking, with some seventy years elapsing between its conception and its completion in 1927. The compiling of all the definitions, and of the quotations that were included in the definitions, was the work of paid editors and unpaid volunteer readers; and this book is the story of one of those editors, one of those readers, and of the history of the Oxford English Dictionary as a whole. And this is a fascinating little book, one that I enjoyed reading.

The author gives us a history of English dictionaries, with particular attention paid to Samuel Johnson’s great Dictionary of 1755 (and no mention whatsoever of Noah Webster, on this side of the Atlantic). In 1857 what became the Oxford English Dictionary was begun, with the novel idea of making it a committee effort, with hundreds and thousands of readers submitting slips containing target words and annotated quotations highlighting the words to the editors. After some initial success, followed by a stalling of effort, the third Editor came on board, Professor James Murray; he revitalized the project and made a fresh call for volunteer readers. A Doctor W. C. Minor, of Broadmoor, Crowthorne, Berks, was one reader who answered the call; and it was some years before the Professor found that Dr. Minor, who had submitted thousands of definitions, was an inmate at the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

The book tells the history of Professor Murray and of the unfortunate Dr. Minor, who was without doubt insane (with what we now would call paranoid schizophrenia) but who was also quite educated and literate, and how the collaboration between them for better than twenty years was instrumental in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. The author never lets us lose sight of precisely why Dr. Minor was incarcerated; the book is dedicated “To the memory of G. M.”, George Merrett, the innocent workingman who was shot in cold blood by Dr. Minor in 1872. And I am most happy to have this book for my bookshelves.