30 pages • 1 hour read
Simon WinchesterThe Professor And The Madman
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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The Thin Line Between Mental Illness and Genius
The book plays very strongly into the idea that mental instability and genius are two sides of the same coin by contrasting James Murray, the largely self-taught philologist and lexicographer who was the primary editor of the OED with William Chester Minor, a brilliant, mentally ill surgeon who became a valuable and prolific contributor to the creation of the OED. Winchester implies that the meticulous and intense nature of the work of producing the OED has something in common with the obsessive thoughts of paranoid delusions.
Some recent research has found some links between high levels of creativity and a propensity toward mental illnesses such as depression and psychosis. Minor’s intellect and creativity—particularly his astonishing accuracy and eye for detail—were hallmarks in his contributions to the OED, which were far superior to those of other contributors.
Nevertheless, Minor suffered from profound mental illness. His condition proved confusing to psychiatrists because of the almost unfathomable contradiction of his lucidity and his paranoid delusions. Throughout his time at Broadmoor, Minor was certain that his persecutors were breaking into his room at night to do unspeakable things to him. Yet, he filled his cell with scholarly literature, and supplies for his artistic pursuits of painting and music. Minor’s psychological disorder eventually led him to remove his own penis, but he was also so dedicated that the OED staff thought of him as “able to tap deep into wells of knowledge and research” (154).
The Enormous Mission of Creating the Oxford English Dictionary
The Professor and the Madman conveys the enormity of the mission of creating the OED, a reference work that “is the unrivaled cornerstone of any good library, an essential work for any reference collection” (26). The time, energy, and scholarship required to complete it is a central focus of Winchester’s work.
One way to understand the OED’s breadth and exhaustiveness is that the project required the work of hundreds of volunteer contributors—a revolutionary 19th century idea proposed by Richard Trench in 1857, and one that we today call crowdsourcing.
Another piece of evidence about the enormity of the OED is the time required to complete it. First, even commencing the project was a monumental task: After the plan for the OED was adopted in 1858, “it took 22 more years of sporadic and sometimes desultory activity before the new dictionary truly got off the ground” (107). Then, even once the work was underway in 1880, its first volume, covering all known English words from A to Ant, was only published in 1884. Murray predicted that the project would be completed in 11 years, but as actually took 44.
The first full 12 volumes of the OED consisted of 414,825 defined words and 1,827,306 illustrative quotations. The total length of hand-set type of the OED stretches 178 miles.
The Formation of Knowledge
The formation of knowledge is another theme in The Professor and the Madman. In this case, the new dictionary formed and made accessible knowledge about language. The OED offered instructions for how to use English words and an explanation as to the word’s history and usage. This was a novel idea—previous dictionaries had not been conceived as prescriptive, rule-making, and all-encompassing. The OED sought to remedy all of this because its goal was to spread English around the world, to further colonialist and Christian missionary ambitions.
The new dictionary “would demonstrate not merely meaning but the history of meaning, the life story of each word” (106). It would be a repository of past knowledge and a guide to future word use. Its purpose was to make knowledge accessible, but bound within rules; to educate and advance society, but specifically in the ways of British Empire; to facilitate communication, but through making English the world’s lingua franca.
