The Preface to The Professor and the Madman, describes a popular myth, “one of the most remarkable conversations in modern literary history” (xi)—a meeting that supposedly took place in 1896 between Dr. James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Dr. William Chester Minor, an inmate at the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in Crowthorne, Berkshire. Murray and Minor had corresponded regularly for nearly 20 years, but had never met because Minor never seemed willing or able. Legend has it that Murray arranged the meeting to thank Dr. Minor in person for his years of invaluable work as an unpaid contributor to the creation of the dictionary. Upon arriving at the asylum, Murray supposedly learned for the first time that Minor was an inmate at Broadmoor rather than one of its doctors. 

Every chapter in the book opens with an actual dictionary entry from the OED. For Chapter 1, the entry is “Murder.” On February 17, 1872 in Lambeth Marsh, one of the seedier areas of London at the time, George Merrett, a stoker at the Red Lion Brewery, was on his way to work when a “tall, well-dressed man of […] ‘military appearance,’ with an erect bearing and a haughty air” shot him three times (11).