Summary and Analysis of the Professor and the Madman by Worth Books

Author:Worth Books
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Worth Books
Published: 2017-03-01T15:37:12+00:00

Cast of Characters

Nathanial Bailey: The editor of the first attempt at a comprehensive English dictionary that included both difficult or obscure words as well as easy or common words; little is known about him except that he owned a boarding school in Stepney and belonged to the Seventh-Day Baptist Church.

Hayden Church: An American journalist who invented the story of Murray going to Crowthorne to visit Minor without any clue of Minor’s status as a mental patient; he published the story in the Sunday Star (Washington, DC) in 1915.

Alexander Ellis: A Trinity College, Cambridge, mathematician who befriended James Murray and helped him gain membership to the Philological Society.

Frederick Furnivall: Secretary of the exclusive and venerable Philological Society who passed on the editorship of the OED to James Murray after failing to gain ground on the project. Furnivall is infamous for his liberal political beliefs and womanizing behavior. He was the first of the OED’s founding fathers to die when he passed away in 1910.

Dr. Fitzedward Hall: A major volunteer contributor to the OED—second only to Minor—Hall was an American living in the Suffolk countryside and a reclusive former academic who, like Minor, corresponded with Murray for years about the dictionary but never met him in person.

Samuel Johnson: A schoolteacher, writer, and critic who spent six years creating the famous A Dictionary of the English Language, which would remain the definitive English dictionary for 150 years after its publication in 1755; one of the most venerated figures in English literary history, he was affectionately nicknamed “The Great Cham.”

Eliza Merrett: The widow of George Merrett and mother of seven children. She visited Minor at the Broadmoor asylum and began to see him regularly, bringing him books from London, but stopped visiting after a few months and took to drinking. Minor supported her and her family financially, sending her money from time to time.

George Merrett: The thirty-four-year-old man killed by Minor in Lambeth; father of seven children and husband of Eliza Merrett.

Alfred W. Minor: W. C. Minor’s brother; he came to England to transport his brother from the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor, and bring him back to the United States.

Dr. William Chester (W. C.) Minor: A former US Army surgeon who moved to England and killed an innocent man on the streets of Lambeth; Minor suffered from paranoid delusions and believed that strangers entered his Broadmoor asylum room at night to torment him. He was a scholarly, gentle man—aside from the manifestations of his mental illness—loved to read, and contributed thousands of quotations to the OED.

Dr. James Murray: A venerated scholar and the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary for more than three decades; born in Scotland and self-educated, he became a member and, eventually, the president of the Philological Society.

Henry Tarrant: The police constable in Lambeth who apprehended Minor at the scene of George Merrett’s murder.

Henry Sweet: A phonetician who befriended Murray; he was notoriously rude and was the basis for Professor Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Richard Chenevix Trench:

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