The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The professor may get top billing, but make no mistake - this is the madman's story.

I had high hopes for this book...perhaps too high. I kept feeling like I was on the surface of it and wanting to go deeper. The description of how a dictionary gets made was fascinating, but perhaps too scattered to be a useful example of process-analysis. The description of Dr. Minor's youth kept offering tantalizing hints, but ultimately delivered only insinuations. The relationship between Minor and Murray is described with occasional foreshadowing...and those roads go no place, as if the author had some anecdote he planned to use but forgot.

All of this would have been fine but for much greater problems - first, Winchester admits that ascribing Minor's mental illness to a single episode of battlefield trauma is a risky proposition...and then does it and does it again and again. (He later tries this approach with an imagined connection between the murderous doctor and the widow of his victim, and it seems so hopeless it sputters away as you read it). But much more disturbing is the notion, entertained late in the book, that Minor's mental illness was somehow 'necessary' for his work on the dictionary. This kind romantic glorification of suffering as somehow essential to creative work is ugly and unwise. As someone who has struggled with depression, I don't think about how much it's helped my creative work so much...I wish it would just go away forever so I could just work.

A large part of the book is spent implicating the treatment of the mentally ill in 19th century England, making explicit comparisons to earlier cruelties and implicit comparisons to possible cruelties of modern medical treatments. But the allure of madness as a creative fuel is perhaps greater than the author's ability to remain objective. Is a dictionary - even a really good one - worth one man's death and another's misery? At the end of the day, I think the author would say it is. This is too bad - not just for his tale, but for readers who seek to understand the working of the mind in more than cliche terms...

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