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The Professor and the Madman
Matt Karamazov
March 22, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 15 minutes
Read on The Reading Life.com | Read Time: ~7 Minutes
📚 Hey, let’s talk about dictionaries, psychoses, and murder!
Oh man, I had forgotten about this book until I was going through my notes while preparing for the next Patreon Book Notes update.
Coming soon, I promise.
Ideally, by Saturday, but I’ve also kinda backed myself into a corner with podcast editing, YouTube editing, Instagram Reel editing…sooo much editing.
But today’s book, The Professor and the Madman, made a big impression on me a few years ago when I first read it.
Which is weird, because it’s about the making of the original Oxford English Dictionary, which should be boring, right?
But apparently, when the Oxford people were soliciting help from readers all over the world who were invited to contribute words and definitions, they got tens of thousands of submissions from this guy named W.C. Minor.
(This is a true story, by the way)
Anyway, so the head of the project gets curious about who this “Minor” character is, he looks him up, and he discovers that Minor’s actually an inmate at this insane asylum in the U.S.A.
You could argue that all of America is now an insane asylum, but back then, this was kinda unusual.
Anyway.
Below, I share a short summary of The Professor and the Madman as well as my best book notes, along with some additional recommended reading.
If you’re looking to read a wild true story, full of fascinating literary history but also likeable, if unlucky, unfortunate “main characters,” then I highly recommend reading…
This is a book about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary – Wait! Don’t go! – and, no shit, it’s also a Mel Gibson movie now.
The angle here though has to do with the fact that one member of the gigantic effort to compile the dictionary had submitted more than ten thousand entries before anyone knew much of anything about who he was.
He never visited the main office where most of the work was taking place because, well, he couldn’t travel; he was an inmate at an institution for the criminally insane.
This is a wild story, and true, as far as the records go; and even though it involves murder and madness and mayhem, you don’t end up with the sense that there’s a “bad guy” here.
W.C. Minor (the inmate and prolific reader/contributor to the dictionary) looks to have suffered some horrific PTSD during the American Civil War and ends up killing a stranger in the early hours of the morning after his mind had been taken over by paranoid delusions. He chases this man, George Merrett, into the street, and mistakenly shoots him in the neck.
Obviously, he’s guilty of murder, but the story of Minor’s particular madness, and the parallel effort to construct the Oxford English Dictionary with Minor’s help is just fascinating and incredible.
You feel sorry for Minor, you feel sorry for Merrett, and you’re just swept up in all the unlikeliness of the whole thing – and, speaking for myself, you end up feeling grateful that events unfolded as they did, and that a writer as talented as Simon Winchester came along to write everything down.
“The ‘English dictionary,’ in the sense that we commonly use the phrase today – as an alphabetically arranged list of English words, together with an explanation of their meanings – is a relatively new invention.
Four hundred years ago there was no such convenience available on any English bookshelf. There was none available, for instance, when William Shakespeare was writing his plays.
Whenever he came to use an unusual word, or to set a word in what seemed an unusual context – and his plays are extraordinarily rich with examples – he had almost no way of checking the propriety of what he was about to do.
He was not able to reach into his bookshelves and select any one volume to help: He would not be able 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.
Shakespeare was not even able to perform a function that we consider today as perfectly ordinary a function as reading itself. He could not, as the saying goes, ‘look something up.’”
The wife of the man W.C. Minor shot in error as the result of his paranoid delusions became a regular visitor of his at the institution, and even brought him books. It was within one of these books that Murray’s written appeal for help on the new dictionary made its way to Minor.
Minor also gave money to George Merret’s wife to help her deal financially with the loss of her husband.
“The packages would come in each morning, a thousand or so slips a day.
One reader would check quickly to see if the quotation was full and all words were spelled properly; then a second – often one of Murray’s children, each of whom was employed almost as soon as he or she was literate, paid sixpence a week for half an hour a day and rendered precociously crossword capable – would sort the contents of each bundle into the catchwords’ alphabetical order.”
Ironically, if W.C. Minor had ever received proper treatment for his mental illness, he never would have set in motion the chain of events which was to culminate in his being instrumental to the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.
“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.”
“Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.”
“The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, stingy affairs.
William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London.
Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all.
George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung man. Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does.
And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.”
“St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., is no longer a federal institution but is run by the government of the District of Columbia – a government that has experienced some well-publicized troubles in recent years.
And at first, perhaps because of this, the hospital refused point-blank to release any of its files, and went so far as to suggest, quite seriously, that I engage a lawyer and sue in order to obtain them.
However, some while later, a cursory search I made one day of the National Archives pages on the World Wide Web suggested to me that the papers relating to Doctor Minor – who had been a patient at St. Elizabeth’s between 1910 and 1919, when the institution was undeniably under federal jurisdiction – might well actually be in federal custody, and not within the Kafkaesque embrace of the District. And indeed, as it turned out, they were.
A couple of requests through the Internet, a happy conversation with the extremely helpful archivist Bill Breach, and suddenly more than seven hundred pages of case notes and other fascinating miscellanea arrived in a FedEx package.
It was more than gratifying to be able to telephone St. Elizabeth’s the next day and tell the unhelpful officials there which file I then had sitting before me on my desk. They were not best pleased.”
Currently, I don’t have a complete breakdown of The Professor and the Madman published on the Stairway to Wisdom (my library of expert book breakdowns), but below I’ve listed some similar breakdowns that you may enjoy instead.
When you become a member of the Stairway to Wisdom, you’ll gain access to more than 120+ book breakdowns like these ones here.
Human beings were never meant to read. Instead, the human brain had to REARRANGE ITSELF to be able to understand written symbols, and the successful completion of this fragile process is never guaranteed. Pick up this book if you want to learn more about the awesome miracle of reading.
This is a phenomenal, fascinating biography of the ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates. It’s pieced together from original sources by a brilliant scholar of classical history, and it’s also unbelievably entertaining for a whole lot of reasons. I loved this book and I hope you do too!
A history of libraries! What more could you want? Well it’s actually much more than that, because the author tells the wild story of the 1986 LA Central Library fire and the man accused of setting fire to the historic building. But it’s also the story of all libraries, what they’ve meant to people all over the world, and what they’ve been through.
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But that’s it for today.
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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