The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity

by Simon Winchester

  Perhaps it was an unusual genetic makeup that predisposed him to fall ill—two of his relations had killed themselves, after all, though we are not certain of the circumstances. Maybe his gentle temperament—he was a painter, a flutist, a collector of old books—made him unusually vulnerable to what he saw and felt on those blood-soaked fields in the South. Maybe his subsequent imprisonment in Broadmoor then left him unimproved, when a more compassionate and enlightened regime might have mitigated his darker feelings, might have helped him recover. One in a hundred people today suffer from schizophrenia: Nearly all of them, if treated with compassion and good chemistry, can have some kind of dignified life, of a kind that was denied, for much of his time, to Doctor Minor.

  Except, of course, that Minor had his dictionary work. And there is a cruel irony in this—that if he had been so treated, he might never have felt impelled to work on it as he did. By offering him mood-altering sedatives, as they would have done in Edwardian times, or treating him as today with such antipsy-chotic drugs as quetiapine or risperidone, many of his symptoms of madness might have gone away—but he might well have felt disinclined or unable to perform his work for Doctor Murray.

  In a sense doing all those dictionary slips was his medication; in a way they became his therapy. The routine of his quiet and cellbound intellectual stimulus, month upon month, year upon year, appears to have provided him with at least a measure of release from his paranoia. His sad situation only worsened when that stimulus was gone: when the great book ceased to function as his lodestone, when the one fixed point on which his remarkable but tortured brain was able to concentrate became detached, so then he began to spiral downward, and his life began to ebb.

  One must feel a sense of strange gratitude, then, that his treatment was never good enough to divert him from his work. The agonies that he must have suffered in those terrible asylum nights have granted us all a benefit, for all time. He was mad, and for that, we have reason to be glad. A truly savage irony, on which it is discomfiting to dwell.

  In November 1915, four months after Sir James had died, Doctor Minor wrote to Lady Murray in Oxford, offering her all the books that had been sent from Broadmoor to the Scriptorium, and that had been in Sir James’s possession when he died. He hoped they might eventually go off to the Bodleian Library. “I am glad…to know that you are well, as I must presume from your letter and occupations. You must be taking or giving a great deal of labour for Dict’y materials still…” He uses the English spellings of words: Clearly his years in Broadmoor had left their mark in more ways than the merely custodial.

  And his books do indeed rest in the great library to this day: They are registered as having been donated “By Dr. Minor through Lady Murray.”

  But by now he was failing steadily. An old colleague from Civil War days wrote from West Chester, Pa., to ask how his friend was—and the hospital superintendent replies that, considering his years, Captain Minor is in good health, and is in a “bright and cheerful ward, where he seems contented with his surroundings.”

  But the ward notes tell a different story, presenting as they do a litany of all the symptoms of the steady onset of senility and dementia. With increasing frequency the attendants write of Minor stumbling, injuring himself, getting lost, losing his temper, wandering, growing dizzy, tiring easily—and worst of all, beginning to forget, and knowing that he was forgetting. His mind, though tortured, had always been peculiarly acute: Now, by 1918 and the end of World War I, he seemed to know that his faculties were dimming, that his mind was at last becoming as weakened as his body, and that the sands were running out. For days at a time he would stay in bed, saying he needed “a good rest”: He would barricade the door with chairs, still certain he was being persecuted. It was more than forty-five years since the murder, fully half a century since the first signs of madness had been noticed, back at the Florida army fort. And yet still the symptoms remained the same—persistent, uncured, incurable.

  Still came the occasional querulous note, such as this, written in the summer of 1917:

  Dr. White—Dear Sir, There was a time when the meat—beef and ham—was very tough and dry. This has in a degree altered for the better since your note even, and I would not complain of that; and rice seemed to be the only vegetable with it.

  This is not much to complain of; and yet these trifles are much to us in this life.

  Thanking you for what you would wish to do.

  I am very truly yours

  W. C. Minor

  A year later—though his failing memory and eyesight cause him to date the letter 1819 rather than 1918—he shows another strange spurt of benevolence, similar to his contributing to James Murray’s adventure to the Cape. In this latest case he sent twenty-five dollars to the Belgian Relief Fund, and a further twenty-five to Yale University, his alma mater, as a donation to its military service fund. The president of Yale wrote back from Woodbridge Hall: “I have known much of Dr. Minor’s history,” he replied to the superintendent, “and am therefore doubly touched to receive this gift.”

  In 1919 his nephew Edward Minor applied to the army to have him released from St. Elizabeth’s and brought to a hospital for the elderly insane in Hartford, Conn., known as The Retreat. The army agreed—“I think if the Retreat fully understands the case we should let him go,” said a Doctor Duval at an October conference to discuss the matter. “He is getting so old now he will probably not do much harm.” The hospital board agreed too, and in November, in a snowstorm, the frail old gentleman left Washington, and the strange world of insane asylums—a world that he had inhabited since 1872—for good and for ever.

  He liked his new home, a mansion set in acres of woods and gardens on the banks of the Connecticut River. His nephew wrote in the early winter of 1920 of how the change seemed to have done him some good; and yet at the same time how incapable he was of looking after himself. Furthermore, he was fast going blind and for some months had been unable to read. With this one overarching source of joy now denied to him, there must have seemed to him little left to live for. No one was surprised when, after a walk on a blustery early spring day in that same year, he caught a cold that turned into bronchopneumonia, and died peacefully in his sleep. It was Friday, March 26, 1920. He had lived for eighty-five years and nine months. He might have been mad, but like Doctor Johnson’s dictionary elephant, he had been “extremely long lifed.”

  There were no obituaries: just two lines in the Deaths columns of the New Haven Register. He was taken down to his old hometown and buried in the Evergreen Cemetery on the afternoon of the following Monday, in the family plot that had been established by his missionary father, Eastman Strong Minor. The gravestone is small and undistinguished, made of reddish sandstone, and bears only his name, William Chester Minor. An angel stands on a plinth nearby, gazing skyward, with the engraved motto, My Faith Looks Up to Thee.

  Around the Evergreen Cemetery a high chain-link fence keeps out an angry part of New Haven, well away from the stern elegance of Yale. The simple existence of the fence underlines a sad and ironic reality: Dr. William Minor, who was among the greatest of contributors to the finest dictionary in all the English language, died forgotten in obscurity, and is buried beside a slum.

  The Oxford English Dictionary itself took another eight years to finish, the announcement of its completion made on New Year’s Eve, 1927. The New York Times put the fact on the front page the next morning, a Sunday—that with the inclusion of the Old Kentish word zyxt—the second indicative present tense, in local argot, of the verb to see—the work was done, the alphabet was exhausted, and the full text was now wholly in the printers’ hands. The making of the great book, declared the newspaper roundly and generously, was “one of the great romances of English literature.”

  The Americans did indeed love the story of its making. H. L. Mencken—no mean lexicographer himself—wrote that he fully expected Oxford to celebrate the culmination of the seventy-year project with “military exercises, boxi
ng matches between the dons, orations in Latin, Greek, English and the Oxford dialect, yelling matches between the different Colleges and a series of medieval drinking bouts.” Considering that the final editor of the book was dividing his time between professorships at both Oxford and Chicago, there was more than good reason for Americans to take a keen interest in a creation that was now, at least partly, of their own making.

  The lonely drudgery of lexicography, the terrible undertow of words against which men like Murray and Minor had so ably struggled and stood, now had at last its great reward. Twelve mighty volumes; 414,825 words defined; 1,827,306 illustrative quotations used, to which William Minor alone had contributed scores of thousands.

  The total length of type—all hand-set, for the books were done by letterpress, still discernible in the delicately impressed feel of the inked-on paper—is 178 miles, the distance between London and the outskirts of Manchester. Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

  Other dictionaries in other languages took longer to make; but none was greater, grander, or had more authority than this. The greatest effort since the invention of printing. The longest sensational serial ever written.

  One word—and only one word—was ever actually lost: bondmaid, which appears in Johnson’s dictionary, was actually mislaid by Murray and was found, a stray without a home, long after the fascicle Battentlie-Bozzom had been published. It, and tens of thousands of words that had evolved or appeared during the forty-four years spent assembling the fascicles and their parent volumes, appeared in a supplement, which came out in 1933. Four further supplements appeared between 1972 and 1986. In 1989, using the new abilities of the computer, Oxford University Press issued its fully integrated second edition, incorporating all the changes and additions of the supplements in twenty rather more slender volumes. To help boost sales in the late seventies a two-volume set in a much-reduced typeface was issued, a powerful magnifying glass included in every slipcase. Then came a CD-ROM, and not long afterward the great work was further adapted for use on-line. A third edition, with a vast budget, was in the works.

  There is some occasional carping that the work reflects an elitist, male, British, Victorian tone. Yet even in the admission that, like so many achievements of the era, it did reflect a set of attitudes not wholly harmonic with those prevalent at the end of the twentieth century, none seem to suggest that any other dictionary has ever come close, or will ever come close, to the achievement that it offers. It was the heroic creation of a legion of interested and enthusiastic men and women of wide general knowledge and interest; and it lives on today, just as lives the language of which it rightly claims to be a portrait.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Memorial (), a. and sb. [a. OF. memorial (mod.F. mémorial) = Sp., Pg. memorial, It. memoriale, ad. L. memoriālis adj. (neut. memoriāle, used in late Latin as sb.), f. memoria MEMORY.] A. adj.

  1. Preserving the memory of a person or thing;

  3. Something by which the memory of a person, thing, or event is preserved, as a monumental erection

  This has been the story of an American soldier whose involvement in the making of the world’s greatest dictionary was singular, astonishing, memorable, and laudable—and yet at the same time wretchedly sad. And in the telling, it is tempting to forget that the circumstances that placed William Chester Minor in the position in which he was able to contribute all his time and energy to the making of the OED began with his horrible and unforgivable commission of a murder.

  George Merrett, who was his victim, was an ordinary, innocent working-class farmer’s son from Wiltshire, who came up to London to make his living but who was shot dead, leaving a pregnant wife, Eliza, and seven young children. The family was already living in the direst poverty, trying to maintain some semblance of their farm-country dignity amid the squalor of one of the roughest and most unforgiving parts of the Victorian city. With Merrett’s murder matters took a terrible turn for the worse.

  All London was shocked and horrified by the killing, and funds were raised and money collected to help the widow and her brood. Americans in particular, stunned by the outrage committed by one of their own, were asked by their consul-general to contribute to a diplomatic fund; the vicars in Lambeth banded together to make collections, ecumenically; a series of amateur entertainments—including one “of an unusually high-class character” with readings of Longfellow and of a selection from Othello, and held at the Hercules Club—were staged across town to raise money; and the funeral itself was a splendid affair, as impressive as that of any grandee.

  George Merrett had been a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters—one of the many so-called friendly societies that were once popular across Britain—as a means, in the absence of any government or privately funded schemes, of providing cooperative pensions and other financial help for the working classes. On the night he died Merrett had been relieving a shift worker who was a brother Forester: This small act of benevolence doubly obliged the order to offer its late member a handsome farewell.

  The cortége was half a mile long: the Foresters’ band playing the Dead March from Saul came first, then scores of emblem-wearing members, then the horse-drawn hearse and four black mourning coaches to carry the bereaved. Eliza Merrett rode in the lead carriage, holding her youngest baby in her arms and sobbing. Hundreds of brewery workers followed, and then thousands of ordinary members of the public, all wearing black crepe bands around their arms or hats.

  For the entire afternoon the procession wound from Lambeth, past the spot on Belvedere Road where the tragedy had occurred, past the Bedlam Hospital, and up to the vast cemetery at Tooting, where George Merrett was finally buried.

  His grave may once have been marked, but it lacks a marker now, and where the records say George Merrett lies there is no more than a patch of discolored grass, a tiny patch of settled earth among a sea of more nobler and newer monuments.

  As we have seen, in his lucid moments William Minor was contrite, appalled by the consequences of his moment of mad delusion. From his cells at Broadmoor he saw to it that money was sent to the family to help them in their distress. His stepmother, Judith, had already arranged gifts for the children. Some seven years after the tragedy, when Minor wrote to express his remorse, Eliza Merrett said that she forgave him, and she made what now seems the extraordinary decision to visit him in Broadmoor—and indeed for some months came down to Crowthorne frequently and brought him packages of his beloved books. But she never really recovered from the shock of what had happened: Before long she had taken to drink, and when she died it was of liver failure.

  Two of her sons’ lives then unraveled most curiously: George, the second oldest boy, took Judith’s gift of money to Monaco, won a considerable sum, and remained there, styling himself the king of Monte Carlo, before dying in impoverished obscurity in the south of France. His younger brother Frederick shot himself dead in London, for reasons that have never been fully explained. The fact that two of Minor’s brothers also died by their own hand invests the entire story with almost more sadness than is bearable.

  But the principal tragic figure in this strange tale is the man who is the least well remembered—the one who was gunned down on the damp and cold cobblestones of Lambeth on that Saturday night in February 1872.

  The only public memorials ever raised to the two most tragically linked of this saga’s protagonists are miserable, niggardly affairs. William Minor has just a simple little gravestone in a New Haven cemetery, hemmed in between litter and slums. George Merrett has for years had nothing at all, except for a patch of grayish grass in a sprawling graveyard in South London. Minor does, however, have the advantage of the great dictionary, which some might say acts as his most lasting remembrance. But nothing else remains to suggest that the man he killed was ever worthy of any memory at all. George Merrett has become an absolutely unsung
man.

  Which is why it now seems fitting, more than a century and a quarter on, that this modest account begins with the dedication that it does. And why this book is offered as a small testament to the late George Merrett of Wiltshire and Lambeth, without whose untimely death these events would never have unfolded, and this tale could never have been told.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Coda (). Mus. [Ital.:-L. cauda tail.] A passage of more or less independent character introduced after the completion of the essential parts of a movement, so as to form a more definite and satisfactory conclusion.

  I first became intrigued by the central figure of this story, the dictionary itself, back in the early 1980s, when I was living in Oxford. One summer’s day a friend who worked at the university press invited me into a warehouse to look at a forgotten treasure. It was a jumbled pile of metal plates, each one measuring a little more than seven inches by ten, and—as I found when I picked one up—as heavy as the devil.