The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (review)

garden when Mrs. Iveson falls asleep whUe watching her. In the resulting panic and desperate search, Thaddeus finaUy grasps the significance of the relationships in his life: to Georgina, to Letitia, to Mrs. Iveson and to a former lover, an older woman, the now invaUd Mrs. Ferry, whose subsequent death is the second of three referred to in the book's tiUe. The third death, the tragic resolution, is not so much inevitable as perfectly justified and artfuUy staged. Trevor is a master of his craft. Ifs no smaU feat to imbue a story with symboUc substance and moral heft whUe maintaining such an economy of characters , plot and pages. (ES) The Professor and the Madman: A Tale ofMurder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester HarperCollins, 1998, 242 pp., $22 This story of the birth of the Oxford English Dictionary traces the lives of two fasdnating men: James Murray, who spent over forty years working on the first OED and stiU did not see it finished in his Ufetime, and Dr WUliam C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran who spent much of his life incarcerated in the Broadmoor Criminal LunaticAsylum in England. These two Uves intersected through a practice, revived by Murray in the 1870s, of a lexicographer solidting scholars for quotations to be used as references in the dictionary. Murray received more than 10,000 contributions from Minor over several years and for most of this time beUeved him to be a country doctor with a love of reading. Little did he know that Minor was in fact a condemned murderer and paranoiac sentenced to life imprisonment. Winchester narrates the histories of both men, their eventual meeting upon Murray's investigation of Minor's absence from an OED dinner honoring contributors, and the friendship that survived the unveiling of Minor's criminal past. One of the most skillful facets of the book is the way these two men, each following vastly different paths, are shown to have been linked not only through the compilation of the OED but also through affinities in their personaUties . Minor, a violent character renowned for excesses with drink and women, and Murray, a slightly pedantic , well-educated family man, would seem like complete opposites. Yet Winchester describes two men more sinülar than not, both of whom were crudal to the massive undertaking of the OED, which he describes as "a project that . . . was eventuaUy to put James Murray on a collision course with a man whose interests and piety were curiously congruent with his own." As interesting as the relationship between Minor and Murray is the story ofhow the OED came intobeing and the many obstades it faced during the seventy years it took to complete it. The logistics of recording quotations that scholars such as Minor sent in are mind-boggling. Winchester so evidently enjoys describing this part of the project (which involved several employees and subeditors as weU as a drafty shed and numerous shelves and pigeonholes) that the reader is swept up in a joyful contemplation of the trivia of the OEUs making. In fact, The Missouri Review · 175 the deUghtful accounts of the day-today particulars of dictionary making almost overshadow the gory descriptions of Minor's murderous insanity and his QvU War traumas. Winchester's tone is playful and seU-consdously 'Victorian, as in his coyly euphemistic reference to the act of sexual intercourse as "the ultimate ." More disturbing is his tendency to speculate, sometimes wUdly. When relating Minor's arrival at the asylum, he writes, "He heard the outer gates open to let the carriage out, then close again. There was a resounding crash as the inner metal gates shut and were bolted and chained." Winchester's bent toward melodrama peaks in one of the last chapters of the book, where he proposes a lurid scenario in Minor's Ufe, the unlikelihood of which even he seems ashamed by, since he brackets the scene with disclaimers describing it as "a reason that some might think rather stretches creduUty" and "a possibiUty —not a probabUity to be sure." These forays into sensationalist fantasy detract from a story that is otherwise memorable...