The Professor And The Madman

Chapter 9 opens with the OED entry for the word “Denouement,” a final unraveling of the complications of a plot. Winchester describes the literary myth of the great dictionary dinner held October 12, 1897. As the myth goes, although everyone connected to the OED project was invited to celebrate the project’s progress and the publication of Volume 3, dedicated to Queen Victoria in her Jubilee Year, Dr. Minor failed to make the very short trip to Oxford. Puzzled, Murray instead proposed to travel to Crowthorne to meet him. Minor agreed and when Murray made the trip to Broadmoor, he learned for the first time of Minor’s mental illness and confinement. However charming, “the story of this first meeting is, however, no more than an amusing and romantic fiction” (171).

In reality, Murray knew that the packages of paper were coming from the lunatic asylum in Crowthorne as early as 1880 or 1881, but he still suspected that Minor was practicing at the institution. Murray learned the truth about Minor in the 1880s from Justin Winsor, a visiting American librarian. In 1891, Murray visited Minor for the first time, and regular meeting between them continued for nearly 20 years. The romanticized version of the story comes from a 1915 account published in England and the US by American journalist Hayden Church.