In 2011 I was able to hear Simon Winchester speak at the Carter Center in Atlanta about his most recent book, The Atlantic. He even signed my copy! I had read the book over the summer while on a trip to France, and was enamored with Winchester’s tales of the open sea and the fact that I could look out of the plane window and see the very waters I was reading about below. I quickly became a fan. Winchester is an excellent mix of the professorial and the accessible, and it’s clear from his writing, and the stories he uncovers, that he is a serious and dedicated researcher who has a knack for uncovering the absurd historical narrative.
The Professor and the Madman is just such a story, and I waded through it in just a few days. Winchester tells the story of a Dr. Murray and a Dr. Morris who come to work together on one of the greatest undertakings in Victorian philology, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Dr. Morris is an American Civil War veteran who, though clinically diagnosed with a mental disorder and convicted of a crime, attributes thousands upon thousands of references to the completion of the first exhaustive English language dictionary. It takes Dr. Murray and his team several years to discover that the man who is mailing thousands of word references a year lives in an asylum for the criminally insane just a few miles away from Oxford.
When I finished The Professor and the Madman, I wondered why this story was so appealing to Winchester, and why I could not put it down. What is it about this story that Winchester would dedicate several months (years?) of his professional career to tracing out the minutia and composing the prose? I expected Winchester to provide an answer to this question once he completed his story, but the most he offers are a few lines about society’s view of mental illness and juxtaposes the lives of Dr. Murray and Dr. Morris as being strangely similar. One labors on the dictionary from a hastily constructed study behind his house and the other from a plush cell in an asylum.
Perhaps Winchester chose this story because it leaves the reader with questions. Was Dr. Morris’ life in the asylum tragic or was it somehow providential? Did his work on the OED offer him a form of redemption in this life? Or was his role as a medical doctor in the Civil War, murder, and work on the dictionary merely coincidental?
History has several functions, but it appears that Winchester has found a way to uncover historical narratives that ask us to probe at classical questions that have stood just out of reach of mankind for millennia. In Victorian England, when so much of the world was thought to be understood, and within a project seeking to define, classify and deconstruct every English word, lies a tale asking us to reconsider questions at the core of humanity.
douglaskwilliams.com 