Any lover of words cannot fail but be intrigued by this engrossing story of how the Oxford English Dictionary came into being--and how two very different men found their lives entwined by their mutual love of words, books, and language.
What is most striking about this story is that prior to 1692, English dictionaries did not exist. In Shakespeare's time, there was no source for definitions and spellings (which may account for the great variety of spellings during that time). Words were defined by their usage in books. Then, in the mid-eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson published A Dictionary of the English Language, which defined 43,500 selected headwords. It remained the standard for the next century.
In 1857, Dr. Richard Trench, a member of London's Philological Society, came up with a great plan: to collect in a "big dictionary" all the words in the English language, with their pronounciations, definitions, and usages. Each word was to be accompanied with quotations illustrating its various meanings and its first recorded use.
Trench proposed that an army of amateur volunteers be recruited to read certain books, looking for words, each of which they would write on a slip with a quotation (with page number) showing the word's meaning. It was an incredibly bold and ambitious venture. Originally estimated to take several years, the first edition of the dictionary was completed over 70 years after it had first been proposed. To this day, the OED, as it is familiarly called, remains the ultimate English-language word souce worldwide.
The Professor and the Madman focuses on two men who made the creation of this dictionary their life's work. Professor James Murray, the original editor, and Dr. W. C. Minor, a contributor of more than 10,000 of the book's well over half million entries. Although the two men worked as colleagues for over 20 years, they communicated primarily by post, and their shared interest in the dictionary belied the vast differences in their personal lives.
James Murray was an academician and a scholar. From a humble background, he distinguished himself as a man of letters, coming to the attention of the brilliant eccentric Frederick Furnivall (the model for the Water Rat in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows). Furnivall, who was secretary of the Philological Society and a member of the amusingly named "Unregistered Words Committee," recommended Murray as editor of the dictionary. Murray took the position in the spring of 1879, and immediately issued an appeal for volunteers, which was published in newspapers and distributed widely by booksellers. During his tenure as editor, Murray received more than six million small slips of papers with words from volunteers. He had the mammoth job of sorting through these many slips to select the best definitions and quotations illlustrating usage. He also faced a challenge Scrabblers can appreciate: Language is constantly changing, never "complete." Indeed, Murray's reluctant acceptance of that fact did not deter him. Were he alive today, he would undoubtedly revel in seeing the OED move from its twelve massive volumes in 1927, to a two-volume set with a magnifying glass in the late 1970s, to the online version available[...].
Although not the foremost contributing volunteer to the OED, Dr. William Chester Minor was certainly the strangest. An American, Yale-educated army surgeon imprisoned for murder at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Berkshire, Minor suffered from what is now called paranoid schizophrenia. Each night he imagined malevolent figures emerging from the floorboards or falling down from the ceiling and torturing him in bizarre ways. He ended up spending the majority of his adult life institutionalized. Responding to one of Professor Murray's nationwide pleas for dictionary volunteers, Minor found new purpose in his life, and his meticulous research and submissions earned him the highest praise from the editor. Minor worked on the project for twenty years, poring over books from the 17th century to find quotations illustrating meanings and the first documented use of a word. To this day, thousands of Minor's submissions remain in the OED, the majority appearing little changed from how they had been submitted.
While the stories of Murray and Minor make for fascinating reading, the true star of this book is the dictionary itself. During the course of seven decades, the "big dictionary" project sees various contributors lose interest or die, and yet the dictionary continues on. To give an idea of the amount of work involved, the T section of the dictionary alone took a full five years to complete. At one particularly poignant moment in the book, Murray offers his dying supporter Furnivall a glance at final "majestically long" entry for the word take. With the many dictionaries of our time and their frequent updates, it is amazing to read how this dictionary, the great-grandfather of them all, came to be.
Author Simon Winchester, who has written a dozen other books and is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair, gives readers a provoking look at the world of that era. From the battlefields of the American Civil War, where Dr. Minor tends dying soldiers, to the rough Lambeth Marsh section of Victorian London, where the delirious Minor kills an innocent laborer, to the rarified world of Oxford, where Professor Murray and his colleagues discuss the future of the English language, Winchester tells a compelling story. Our lexicon today owes much to Murray, Minor, and the thousands of other volunteers in Victorian England who contributed to the OED. The Professor and the Madman is a remarkable look at what is undoubtedly one of history's most phenomenal achievements.
The Professor and the Madman is available at Amazon.com. |
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