The Professor And The Madman

Author Simon Winchester does an excellent job in his book, The Professor and The Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, of portraying the details of the making of the OED. However, more than just a history of the dictionary, The Professor and The Madman is as its subtitle says, “a tale of murder, insanity, and the making of the Oxford English Dictionary.” The Professor and The Madman reads almost like a thriller crime novel. As Salon book reviewer, Charles Taylor points out,

If the initial sections of his tale have the appeal of a gaslight Victorian thriller, Winchester doesn't leave it at that. He's a superb historian because he's a superb storyteller. Nothing he includes here -- whether it's an examination of the section of London where Minor committed his crime, the genealogy of the two protagonists (usually the dullest part of any history or biography) or a brief history of the very notion of dictionaries -- feels like it's impeding his story. The strange richness of it all is enhanced by the flawless clarity of Winchester's prose. His Victorian style, far from being a pastiche or postmodernist game-playing, is his natural mode of expression.

Winchester successfully incorporates mystery, crime, murder, history, and even linguistics into his work all, as Taylor says, without interrupting the flow of his story. The book draws the reader in like a novel but includes all of the facts of a textbook in an interesting and informative way. While parts of the novel are undoubtedly added for narrative reasons, the hard facts are all correct and the story is interesting. The book would have been fascinating on its own, but it can tell us even more when examined in conjunction with the Oxford English Dictionary itself. Therefore, in this paper I will make a broad sweep of The Professor and the Madman, analyzing Winchester’s narrative devices and what they can tell us about the story of the OED. I will then turn to the OED itself and draw on specific examples to analyze how its unique structure allows its readers to get a full picture of the English language- what words mean, the intricate shades of meaning of every word, and how the dictionary presents the evolution of a word from its beginning, and predictions of how it may evolve in the future.