The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A detailed account, not only of the remarkable amount of work that went into creating the Oxford English Dictionary, the first of its kind and scale, but also the men who devoted their lives to its development. The depth of detail and intensity of time that it took to read through thousands of books and write down quotations to support every possible definition for a work is mind-boggling. Even thinking of trying to google all those quotes, in this day and age, would take way too much time and effort for my taste.

While I am intellectually grateful for the work that Minor put in to research for the dictionary, for me, more than anything else, his story highlights how incredibly privileged he was as a rich, white man from an affluent family. Minor was known to have dangerous delusions, while he was still in America and in the army, to the point that he was even hospitalized for a time. Despite this fact, and the fact he was basically forced to retire early (aka he still drew a government pension for the rest of his life), Minor was allowed to roam free, travel abroad, and bring his GUN to a place where there was very little gun violence.

After Minor murdered an innocent man, who is largely forgotten in history, he was confined to a hospital for the criminally insane, where he was given an extraordinary number of privileges. Minor had a suite of 2 rooms, his own furniture, as many books as he wanted, and the freedom to roam the grounds, hire fellow inmates as servants, and receive visitors.

I wonder how Minor would have been treated different if he had not been a rich, affluent white man. What if he had been a woman, or a person of color, or (God forbid) poor? Would he have been allowed to live out his days, for more than 40 years, in mansions in the countryside, with rooms to himself and relatively safety? Seems doubtful.

Minor's story is fascinating, and the excellent work and intense focus he put into the dictionary project was a productive use of his confinement. What I'm left with, though, is wondering about all the people from that time who weren't cared for quite so carefully, who were abandoned because their mental illness had become a bother (or injurious) to others. I also want appreciated the history on the evolution of our understanding of mental illness, and the ways Minor would likely have been treated had he been born in a different era.

I did enjoy the friendship between Murray and Minor. Of course, it was frustrating to read that the most commonly known story about their first meeting was essentially #FakeNews (apparently that's existed as long as the media has), but the false reports made me appreciate more the story of their true meeting. In addition to admiring the detailed work he contributed to the OED, Murray seemed to genuinely appreciate Minor's company and be distressed when he was "in a mood." Without Murray and his OED project, I'm not sure what kind of life Minor would have had, with nothing to focus his energy on. Murray gave him something to do with his time, and made sure he was remembered for his work.

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