The Professor And The Madman

Every chapter in the book opens with an actual dictionary entry from the OED. For Chapter 1, the entry is “Murder.” On February 17, 1872 in Lambeth Marsh, one of the seedier areas of London at the time, George Merrett, a stoker at the Red Lion Brewery, was on his way to work when a “tall, well-dressed man of […] ‘military appearance,’ with an erect bearing and a haughty air” shot him three times (11). The assailant was William Chester Minor, a 37-year-old American from New Haven, Connecticut, who insisted that it was a terrible mistake. Minor claimed that he was simply defending himself, that someone had broken into his room and he had shot and killed the wrong man.

Minor had been a surgeon in America and had served in the Civil War. He had come to Britain a few months before, thinking that a trip to Europe could cure his mental illness. He now lived comfortably thanks to his U.S. Army commission and those who met him described him as “a gentleman of fine education and ability, but with eccentric and dissolute habits” (15). These “dissolute habits” were likely a reference to his “prodigious sexual appetite,” which might have been the reason that an affluent American was living in an area known for its “easy access to easy women” (15).

At Minor’s trial, his English landlady testified that Minor was a good tenant, but strange. Minor often claimed that people had been in his room while he was away, and he was terribly afraid of the Irish, demanding to know if any of the servants or other lodgers was Irish. Minor had also visited Scotland Yard three months earlier, complaining that members of the Fenian Brotherhood, militant Irish nationalists, were breaking into his room and attempting to poison him during the night. It became clear during his trial that Minor was mentally unwell, so the judge told the jury they must find him not guilty on grounds of insanity. The sentence was that Minor be detained in safe custody “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known” (21). He was now a “certified criminal lunatic” and would be confined at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire. 

Chapter 2 begins with two official OED definitions: “Polymath,” a person of much varied learning; and “Philology,” the study of literature, including grammar, literary criticism, and interpretation. These definitions introduce James Augustus Henry Murray, whom Winchester calls, along with Minor, one of the two protagonists of his book. Murray became editor of the OED in 1879 and would serve as such until his death in 1915. Chapter 2 also introduces the OED, “an awe-inspiring work, the most important reference book ever made, and, given the unending importance of the English language, probably the most important that is ever likely to be” (27).

Murray was born in humble circumstances in Scotland in 1837. Nevertheless, he would “become a towering figure in British scholarship” (32). Murray left school at 14, but his legendary quest for knowledge and learning continued. He even attempted to teach cattle to respond to calls in Latin. By the age of 20, Murray was a headmaster, but had to leave his intellectual pursuits to work in finance to support his family. Later in his 20s, Murray’s involvement in the Philological Society led him to become something of an apprentice to Frederick Furnivall, who took a dominant, early role in the creation of the OED and preceded Murray in the role of editor.

The official OED definition of the word “Lunatic,” a word once common in the medical field but no longer in technical use, begins Chapter 3. Minor was born to affluent Congregational Church missionaries in Ceylon, an island nation now known as Sri Lanka. Minor’s family sent him back to America at the age of 14, perhaps to keep him away from the island’s young women. In the US, Minor studied medicine at Yale, and then applied to join the Union Army as a surgeon; in the midst of the Civil War, the army was in desperate need of medical personnel.

Minor, “a sensitive man—courteous to a fault, somewhat academic, rather too gentle for the business of soldiering,” (52) was transferred to Northern Virginia, where he witnessed the incredibly bloody Battle of the Wilderness in May of 1864. Winchester suggests that one specific event there might have triggered Minor’s latent psychological problems: Minor was forced to use a hot iron to brand a war deserter with the letter D across his cheek. The deserter, one of the roughly 150,000 Irish soldiers fighting on the Union side, vowed to take revenge—something that may explain Minor’s later fear of the Irish.

Shortly after the Battle of the Wilderness, Minor was sent to Alexandria and later to New York, where, after the war was over, he was granted commission as an army officer. The first signs of Minor’s coming psychological disorder emerged in New York, where he began carrying a gun at all times, and “embarked on a career of startling promiscuity, sleeping night after night with whores” (67-68). The army sent him to Florida, where his behavior became even more erratic. In 1868, a doctor described Minor’s condition as delusional and suffering from monomania, “a form of insanity that involves a fierce obsession with a single topic” (69-70). The army determined that Minor should be retired and institutionalized, but he was released only 18 months later. Minor boarded a ship for London in 1871, planning to rest, read, paint, and recover from his illness in Europe over the next year.