Reviews

The Professor and the Madman

Ryszard Dubanski

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?

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