The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Oxford English Dictionary

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The book tells their separate stories, how Murray rose to the prominence necessary to land this major position, how Minor emerged from a troubled, if well-to-do youth to commit a heinous and addled murder in London, and then to be institutionalized for the rest of his life. The book gives a vivid picture of the times (mid to late 19th century). Winchester has a gift for bringing history to life, and surprising us. He was accepted by the Union Army as a surgeon and may have served at the Battle of the Wilderness in May 1864, which was notable for the terrible casualties suffered by both sides. There is an unverified story of Minor also being given the task of punishing an Irish soldier in the Union Army by branding him on the face with a D for " deserter" [4] and that this incident later played a role in Minor's delusions. [4] Historians disagree as to whether the Union Army used branding as a punishment for desertion, [5] [6] which means that the story may be fabricated. Moreover, it is unlikely Minor was present at the Battle of the Wilderness, which took place May 5–7, 1864, since his military records place him at Knight USA Hospital in New Haven at that time and do not show him arriving at 2 Division Hospital USA at Alexandria, Virginia, until May 17. [7]

However, it wasn't perfect. Winchester performed some weird narrative experiments. For example, he started off with a really exciting scene, then er... repeated that scene word by word in the middle of the book. And then... a chapter or so later, he said it actually never happened. This is a non fiction book!! Dr Johnson made huge strides in lexicography, but the delight of his dictionary is its personal quirkiness, rather than scientific rigour and objectivity. A well-known example: “Oats: a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.” Murray put out a call for volunteers. Amateur philologists responded, but one, in particular, ended up proving particularly prolific: William Chester Minor. The madman, William Chester Minor The 1928 OED was 12 (or 10, if Wikipedia is correct) volumes, listing 414,825 headwords, with 1,827,306 illustrative quotes. The hand-set letterpress type was 178 miles (the distance from London to the outskirts of Manchester), comprising 227,779,589 letters and numerals - plus spaces and punctuation. For centuries, there were atlases, prayer books, histories, romances, and books of science and art, but no English dictionary as we think of one. Shakespeare probably had Cooper’s thesaurus, and word lists grouped by subject, but not a dictionary.Calling all bibliophiles! Have you ever wondered how that magnificent beast, the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED), came into being? Well, this is the book for you. Still, there is some real gold in the book. Even with the relatively scant attention paid to the actual production of the OED, there were a handful of highlights that make this book well worth perusing.

Barfield, Charles. " 'The Professor And The Madman' Trailer: Mel Gibson & Sean Penn Star In Film That Has Been Involved In Real-Life Legal Drama". ThePlaylist.com. Archived from the original on 9 February 2019 . Retrieved 8 February 2019. The Professor and the Madmanstarring Hollywood A-listers Mel Gibson and Sean Penn is among the new movies coming to Netflix in December 2020. (Specifically, you can start streaming it on Dec. 15 when it’s added to Netflix movies.) The completion of the project was noticed worldwide with the announcement of the final installment made New Year’s Eve, 1927 in The New York Times with the last word “zyxt, --the second indicative present tense, in local argot, of the very to see---…”-. It was big news in the English speaking world, the completion of the The Oxford English Dictionary. (Note, the final installment, was not yet printed though.) The undertaking of the scheme, he said, was beyond the ability of any one man. To peruse all of English literature – and to comb the London and New York newspapers, and the most literate of the magazines and journals – must be instead ‘the combined action of many’. It would be necessary to recruit a team – moreover, a huge team, one probably comprising hundreds and hundreds of unpaid amateurs, all of them working as volunteers.After the end of the Civil War, Minor saw duty in New York City. He was strongly attracted to the red-light district of the city and devoted much of his off-duty time to consorting with prostitutes. By 1867, his behavior had come to the attention of the army and he was transferred to a remote post in the Florida Panhandle. By 1868, his condition had progressed to the point that he was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital, a lunatic asylum (as mental hospitals were then called) in Washington, D.C. After 18 months he showed no improvement. Regrettably Minor's illness got worse as he aged. He became far less sociable, and contributed much less to the dictionary too. The situation at Broadmoor became more difficult as well, when a new person took over the role of governor, who was much more rule-bound, and less sympathetic towards Minor. He made him get rid of his room full of books. As he grew older Minor - who had always defined himself agnostic - became religious, declaring himself to be a deist. Perhaps in the light of his growing religious ideas, his nightly fantasies began causing him even more distress. This culminated in him castrating himself , about 30 years after entering Broadmoor. He survived, but this crisis aside, his general quality of life had gone downhill too. Compiling the OED took much, much longer than had initially been anticipated, and twenty-two years had already passed from the initial conception to Murray commencing work, and it was a further five years before the first volume (out of twelve) was published, featuring A through to Ant. It took another forty years for the work to be completed.

The discussion of the cooperative process of compiling the OED and the monumental undertaking that such creating the OED was fascinating. Tens of thousands of amateur philologists researching and sending Murray’s team slips with words and brief histories of their origin, which were then compiled and processed by the Oxford committee. This was terrific stuff. Move to England and the killing of Merrett [ edit ] The "Lion Brewery" where Minor shot George Merrett Lexicographers find the letter C “unusually filled with ambiguities and complexities, not least because of its frequent overlaps with the letters G, K, and S”, and the letter T took five years to compile.In the early 20th century his brother Arthur and James Murray's wife, (now a widow), pleaded for him to be allowed to return to America, and in 1910 this happened. He spent his time first in an asylum in Washington DC, and later in a hospital for the elderly insane in Hartford, Connecticut, known as The Retreat, dying on March 26, 1920. Winchester, Simon (2004). The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. OUP. p.201. AskOxford.com interview – Winchester speaking about the book to John Simpson (Chief Editor of the OED) An extraordinary tale of madness, genius and obsession, discover the true story of the two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary - and literary history!