The Professor and the Madman

Simon Winchester

HarperCollins

Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman (HarperCollins) is sub­ti­tled “A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary,” and is a thrilling, chill­ing yarn about lan­guage and a his­tory of lex­i­cog­ra­phy. Its bump­tious jour­nal­is­tic style is irri­tat­ing at times, but is made up for by fas­ci­nat­ing details of the mon­u­men­tal forty-year endeav­our spon­sored by Oxford University Press to divert any cur­mud­geonly word-lover from gas­tric malaise. The nar­ra­tive focusses on Dr. James Murray, the right­eous, Scottishly sane senior edi­tor, and on W.C. Minor, a sex-crazed, schiz­o­phrenic American med­ical doc­tor, who psycho-kills an inno­cent London bystander and then — from cozy book-lined asy­lum rooms — becomes the pre­em­i­nent vol­un­teer con­trib­u­tor to the OED project. A pro­fes­sional cor­re­spon­dence of many years leads to Murray’ s unset­tling dis­cov­ery that his prize col­lab­o­ra­tor is Broadmoor Special Hospital’s prime lunatic, and a beau­ti­ful friend­ship is begun. The two men are por­trayed as oppo­sites, so their union in the epic under­tak­ing is all the more intrigu­ing. Yet the cen­tral mys­tery in this quasi-metaphysical detec­tive story remains unre­solved: no light is shed on the nature of the men’s unique rela­tion­ship. Where, I won­dered, is the matrix of lan­guage and mad­ness, the joy and won­der of words, that could com­pel such oppo­sites to come together on com­mon cre­ative ground?