To be fair, this is from 1998 and the internet wasn’t the vast treasure trove of knowledge that it is now, but Winchester goes even further than this to make some odd remarks about critics of the dictionary. However, it’s not made very clear that the OED is relevant enough today to deserve such praise. Winchester has a very high opinion of the OED and makes it known repeatedly throughout the book, even in the postscript and suggestions for further reading. Winchester does a superb job of communicating why we should care about these characters.Īll that said, the novel has some off-putting quirks. The book details Minor’s progressive mental deterioration, with his contributions to the dictionary being a major factor in keeping him occupied and happy, distracted from the delusions that he continued to suffer. On the other hand, Minor was an American Civil War veteran who, due to a paranoid delusion, fatally shot a man during a stay in England, and was committed to the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum as a result.
To help achieve this task, he recruited volunteer researchers who would submit descriptive quotations for words, in a similar fashion to how Wikipedia is formed through the work of volunteer editors who submit edits to articles. Murray’s project was of an unprecedented scale, as before the OED there were no dictionaries that could lay claim to defining every word in the English language. The book’s strong suit is in its convincing descriptions of the struggles that the two protagonists endured. Whenever I looked at the cover, an urge would well up within me to say the title out loud in a mocking tone before reading. We on the west side of the Atlantic received this book with the godawful title The Professor and the Madman it’s bad enough that it’s inaccurate (Murray wasn’t a professor) and overly reductive (Minor being the “madman”), but the title just seems more fitting for a silly cartoon than a biographical work.
William Chestor Minor, the former being the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary until his death, and the latter being one of the dictionary’s most prolific contributors. It describes the lives of Sir James Murray and Dr.
The Surgeon of Crowthorne is a book by Simon Winchester of The Guardian, published in 1998. I was given this book to read and so I figured I’d share some thoughts on it.
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