The Professor And The Madman

James Augustus Henry Murray was a British lexicographer and philologist born in the Scottish Borders in 1837. As a child, Murray taught himself several languages, geology, and botany, and even attempted to teach local cattle to respond to calls in Latin. At 17, Murray had already become an assistant headmaster and a full headmaster by age 20.

Murray was a serious scholar of philology and a member of the Philological Society of London, publishing works like The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland and an essay for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Murray’s philological work led him to become a protégé of Frederick Furnivall, the editor of the prospective OED. After Murray succeeded Furnivall, the Oxford University Press agreed to publish the OED, estimating that the project would be completed in 10 years.

Murray renewed the Society’s appeal for volunteer contributors to the OED. Dr. William Chester Minor, an American surgeon and Civil War veteran who been confined there since murdering a man in 1872, became the project’s most prolific and valuable contributor. Murray thought of Minor as a fine scholar with plenty of free time; eventually, the men met and developed a unique friendship based around their intellectual interests. 

Frederick Furnivall was an English philologist born in 1925. Known as a brilliant scholar, he is most commonly associated with the Philological Society of London. An agnostic, socialist, vegetarian, teetotaler, and a keen athlete obsessed with rowing, he was a controversial figure during the Victorian Era because of his unconventional marriages. 

Winchester refers to Furnivall as a “half-mad scholar-gypsy,” but also points out that he was “a natural choice, as the country’s leading philologist, to take a dominant role in the making of the great new dictionary that was then in the process of being constructed” (39). Following Herbert Coleridge’s death, Furnivall served as the second editor of the OED from 1861-to-1870. However, he failed to keep the volunteer contributors engaged and the project nearly died. Furnivall was a significant figure in James Murray’s life and their association led directly to Murray becoming the OED’s third and longest-serving editor. 

Born in 1709, Samuel Johnson was an English writer, poet, playwright, and lexicographer. One of his many celebrated works across many genres and forms is his lexicographical masterpiece, A Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755. Completed single-handedly over nine years, the extraordinary work contains 43,500 chosen headwords and 118,000 illustrative quotations.

Richard Chenevix Trench was an Irish cleric and philologist born in 1807. In 1856, he became Dean of Westminster and in 1864 he advanced to the post of Archbishop of Dublin. Trench, along with Furnivall and Coleridge, was one of the three founders of the OED based on colonialist and proselytizing ideas about spreading English around the globe. Trench also developed the novel idea of recruiting a team of hundreds of unpaid amateurs to contribute to the creation of the OED. 

Born in 1830, Herbert Coleridge was the grandson of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and was an English philologist who served as the first editor of the OED before dying of tuberculosis two years into his work.