This ten-year-old best seller is a layered biography with a brief history of lexicography at its heart—the lives of two sorts of doctor entwined around the epic making of the Oxford English Dictionary. James Murray, a self-taught scholarly Scot who would be hired to edit the “big dictionary” by the Oxford University Press dons, is the professor of the title. William Minor, a Connecticut Yankee and doctor of the surgical kind who served briefly in the Civil War and later shot an innocent stranger in the mean streets of Victorian London, is the madman. Most likely suffering paranoid schizophrenia, Minor would ultimately contribute thousands of citations to the OED from his personal library within the confines of the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
With precise and breezy British prose, Winchester deftly navigates the scene of Minor’s crime, the circumstances of his youth as well as Murray’s, his traumatizing service at the Battle of the Wilderness, the OED’s conception and development, the popular myth of the two men’s first face-to-face encounter, their twenty-year-long relationship, and the sad decline of Minor’s post-dictionary life. All in just over 240 pages. It’s a fascinating multifaceted story with something for everyone—or at least for fans of true crime in Victorian London, Civil War buffs, mental health care history enthusiasts, and lexicography nerds! It’s especially not to be missed by the lexicography nerds: Woven so compellingly by a gleeful wordsmith and self-professed dictionary hugger, with nuggets of raw dictionary entries prefacing each chapter and the deliciousness of the author’s prose itself, it often approaches word porn.
Random awesome sentence (on the protagonists’ beards):
But both were magnificently fecund arrangements.
Random favorite moment of linguistic humor and British wit (on the changing of the guard at Broadmoor):
He was replaced by Doctor Brayn, a man selected (for more than his name alone, one trusts) by a Home Office that felt a stricter regime needed to be employed at the asylum.
Most shocking new vocabulary:
autopeotomy
Random, intriguing aside I might like to follow:
The great librarian—for Justin Winsor [of Harvard College] remains one of the grandest figures in all of nineteenth-century American librarianship, and a formidable historian to boot—then told the story, which Murray then retold to his friend in Boston.
