The Meaning of Madness

National Review, Dec 21, 1998 by Linda Bridges

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester (HarperCollins, 242 pp., $22)

AT first glance, a hard-driving journalist and traveler to dangerous places would not seem the obvious person to write about the workings of the Philological Society in Victorian London and Oxford-even with murder and insanity thrown in. But Simon Winchester (whose previous books include Prison Diary: Argentina and In Holy Terror, about the fighting in Northern Ireland) has always regarded the Oxford English Dictionary as not merely a tool but a joy. In reading about its making, he came across the story of "the madman" of his title "and saw . . . the possibilities that by telling the poignant and human tale of William Minor, I could perhaps create some kind of prism through which to view the greater and even more fascinating story of the history of English lexicography."

William Minor was born in Ceylon to a Congregationalist missionary couple from New Haven, Connecticut. William eventually returned to the United States and became a physician, just in time to join the Union Army as a surgeon during some of the bloodiest fighting of the Civil War-a war, as Winchester puts it, "fought with new and highly effective weapons, machines for the mowing down of men-and yet at a time when an era of poor and primitive medicine was just coming to an end. It was fought with the mortar and the musket and the minie ball, but not yet quite with anaesthesia or with sulphonamides and penicillin."

Winchester speculates at some length as to what drove Dr. Minor over the brink-some combination, it seems, of genetic predisposition, the horrors of battle, and guilt over the ravenous lust first awakened in him by naked Ceylonese girls on the beach at Manepay. But whatever the causes, Minor developed paranoid delusions that led him, on February 17, 1872, to shoot dead a harmless laborer and father of seven named George Merrett, having mistaken him for an Irish assassin.

What on earth does all this have to do with the OED? As Chesterton points out, madness-a disconnection from the real world-can co-exist with great intellect. Dr. Minor, confined to the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane, had one great consolation: his library. And when he learned that James Murray ("the professor") was recruiting volunteer readers to collect illustrative quotations for the gestating New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, he came to life. The story of how he became one of the dictionary's two most valuable volunteer readers-and arguably helped keep the project from foundering in despair-is too complex to rehearse here. But it justifies Mr. Winchester's musing: "One must feel a sense of strange gratitude, then, that his treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time."

One of the great strengths of this book is historical mise-en-scene, particularly for nineteenth-century America and England. The one time Winchester seems on shaky ground is when he carries his history of dictionary-making back before monolingual dictionaries and ponders the difficulties faced by Shakespeare, unable "to find any book that might tell him if the word he had chosen was properly spelled, whether he had selected it correctly, or had used it in the right way in the proper place." First, people had not yet started to worry about orthography; in books of the time we might find a word spelled three different ways on a single page. As to usage, of course they cared about style-although they disagreed about what constituted good style, and Shakespeare himself repeatedly satirized the Euphuists. But had dictionaries been thought of, one can well imagine Shakespeare, Marlowe, Nashe, Greene, and the rest saying in effect what NR senior editor Willmoore Kendall once said to managing editor Suzanne La Follette: "Suzanne, we're the people that the people who make dictionaries come to to find out what to put in them." Consider the number of words and usages that appear in lesser dictionaries with the notation Shak., or for which Shakespeare is the first citation in the OED.

A semi-related quibble: Winchester asserts that the type for the OED was "all hand-set." The making of so monumental a work would have taken much longer than it did had that been the case. In fact, much of it was set in Monotype, a more complex and flexible cousin of Linotype.

But these are truly quibbles when set against the whole of this marvelous work of historical and philological imagination.