Madness or Brilliance? Book Talk on ‘The Professor and the Madman’

Finding out that the Oxford English Dictionary was crowd-sourced? Believable. It’s 20 volumes. How else would that have worked?

Finding out one of the OED’s most prolific contributors was confined to an institution for the criminally insane? I beg your finest pardon.

Simon Winchester’s 1997 “The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary” follows a tale about mental health, criminal justice, the horrors of war, and a shared obsession with the English language.

Yes, the OED was crowd-sourced

In the late 1870s, Professor James Murray took up the mantle of the OED’s editor to complete a revised and revamped version of the English dictionary. It was a project that started decades prior, in conversations and in practice, but it would take 80 years to finish. 

Murray asked the English-speaking public to contribute by way of reading significant works, hand-writing words (their definitions, origins, and citations), and submitting them to Murray’s team of lexicographers. 

One such contributor, Dr. William Chester Minor, an American and Civil War veteran, answered the call enthusiastically, making a meticulous system of word lists and personally submitting thousands of entries over decades. 

One man’s madness

It would be years before Murray (mad in his own academic pursuits) learned that Minor was confined to and contributing from the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane for the shooting death of George Merrett in 1872. 

The random act of gun violence so offended British sensibilities that the American Vice-Consul General, at the time, implored all Americans in England to help alleviate the widowed Eliza Merrett’s financial burdens. 

The South London Press described the incident as “the light estimation in which human life is held by Americans.” Another editorial wrote, “We in this country have no experience of the crime of ‘shooting down,’ so common in the United States.” 

It’s ironic, given England’s not-so-small history of violence, but as an American reader today, I can confidently say, 

“Yeah, that tracks.”

Minor’s defense claimed he was plagued by visions of aliens that would come up through his floorboards at night, torture him, force him to drink poison, steal or rearrange his personal belongings, and compel him to commit lewd atrocities. 

Minor was legally innocent of murder by a jury but found criminally insane nonetheless. He would claim these alien events occurred throughout his time at Broadmoor. By day, he was a painter and lexicographer in his own right — activities that briefly improved his symptoms — but was ultimately “profoundly and irreversibly mad.” 

Minor insisted on being weighed every morning to see if the poison supposedly in his system made him heavier. And his final act of self-harm, though not fatal, fully had me...

A one-sitting read and some final thoughts

At the end of the day, “The Professor and the Madman” is about the fragile differences between genius and madness, brilliance and insanity. And I highly recommend it to anyone who loves stories that exist at the intersection of academic research and journalistic storytelling. 

But as fascinating as this story was (I finished it in one sitting, which hasn’t happened in a long time), I have some lingering thoughts. 

This story needed more women

I have no doubt more women were involved in this story and likely the making of the OED. Yet we only see them in the form of Ada Ruthven, Murray’s second wife, and Eliza Merrett, the widow of Minor’s victim. 

As a firm believer in the Stranger Things Divorce Gate and that Hamilton is actually an ode to Elizabeth Schuyler, I’d bet that Ada did a lot more than just support her husband’s work, raise their 11 children, and arrange his train tickets.

Meanwhile, Eliza eventually came to visit Minor several times in his confinement. And whether by pity or forgiveness, she was partially responsible for growing the in-cell library he was allowed to use to contribute to the OED in the first place. 

Yet, Winchester’s closing paragraphs acknowledge the untimely death of her husband alone for making the OED possible. Tragic, yes, but in my opinion, both of the Merretts’ sacrifices and actions play a key role.

Thankfully (and maybe unsurprisingly), Winchester’s author note and acknowledgments recognized many women involved in the making of his book, from Elizabeth Knowles, a lexicographer at the Oxford University Press, whom Winchester praised as maybe the greatest authority on Minor, to editors, editorial assistants, and Broadmoor employees who provided access to hospital files. 

I couldn’t help but wonder how this story would have been interpreted from the perspective of, or with greater inclusion of, women.

What 2026 sensibilities would say about Minor’s case

I am not a mental health professional, so I can’t contribute much here. But the conclusions Winchester’s research drew in 1997 speculated that Minor suffered from early-onset dementia and/or schizophrenia spectrum disorder. 

Given how much more we seem to know now about mental and behavioral health today, I wondered if the conclusions written in 1997 would still hold up. As I was reading, I kept coming back to the notion that Minor’s confinement was a prison sentence, but shown to be a very leisurely one. And something about that didn’t seem believable. At times, it felt romanticized, something I found the 2019 movie trailer backs up. 

Broadmoor did house inmates in less cushy (see: more abusive) conditions, Winchester noted, but over 30 years in a cell block, even one covered in books, couldn’t have been comfortable all of the time. 

I kept waiting to hear more about Minor’s case from the notes and perspectives of doctors and attendants. Minor claimed his belongings were being moved or stolen. Did no one help him search his room or uncover the missing items? 

Did the attendants agree to weigh him every morning? Did no one observe him in the night to confirm, not that he was being abducted, but that he was sleepwalking or experiencing some other phenomena? What was actually happening?

The absence of answers or acknowledgment of answers not existing, too, made it seem like Winchester was also writing Minor off: He’s brilliant, but he’s crazy, case closed. After spending all that time with Minor’s story, as a reader and human being, that didn’t seem fair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESYU-bkmxuI

I didn’t know this book was adapted into a film before I started reading it.

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