The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (31 page)

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.

They were the discarded letterpress printing plates from which the
Oxford English Dictionary
had been made. The original lead-fronted, steel-and-antimony-backed plates, cast in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from which all the many printings of the
OED
—from the individual fascicles made as the books were being edited, to the final twelve-volume masterpiece of 1928—had been made.

The press, my friend explained, had recently adopted more modern methods: computer typesetting, photolithography, and the like. The old ways of the letterpress men—with their slugs of lead and their typesticks, their em-quads and their brasses and coppers, their tympan paper and their platen brushes and their uncanny ability to read backward and upside down at speed—were at long last being abandoned. The plates, and all the job-cases of type for hand-setting, were now being tossed away, melted down, carried off.

Would I perhaps like one or two of the plates, he asked me—just to keep as souvenirs of something that had once been rather marvelous?

I chose three of them, reading the backward type as best I could in the dim and dusty light. Two of them I later gave away. But I kept one: It was the complete page 452 of the great dictionary’s volume 5: It encompassed the words
humoral
to
humour
, it had been edited in 1901 or so, and set in type in 1902.

For years I took the strange, dirty-looking old plate around with me. It was a kind of talisman. I would squirrel it away in cupboards in the various flats and houses in the various cities and villages in which I came to live. I was rather proud of it—boringly so, I dare say—and every so often I would find it hidden behind other, more important things, and I would bring it out, blow off the dust, and show it off to friends, a small and fascinating item of lexicographic history.

I am sure at first they thought I was a little mad—though in truth I fancy they seemed after a while to understand my odd affection for the blackened—and
so heavy
!—little thing. I would watch as they rubbed their fingers gently over its raised lead, and nod in mute agreement: The plate seemed to offer them some kind of tactile pleasure, as well as a simpler intellectual amusement.

When I came to live in the United States in the midnineties, I met a letterpress printer, a woman who lived in western Massachusetts. I told her about the plate, and she became visibly excited. She had a great enthusiasm for the story of the making of the dictionary, she said, as well as a tremendous fondness for its design—for the elegant and clever mix of typography and font sizes the stern old Victorian editors had employed. She asked to see my plate, and when I brought it to her, she asked if she might borrow it for a while.

That while turned into two long years, during which time she took on as much other work as a hand printer gets these days. She embarked on a series of broadsides for John Updike, made chapbooks for a couple of other New England poets, published a collection or two of short stories and plays, all of which she had printed on handmade paper. She was very much the craftswoman, all her work meticulous, slow, perfect. And she kept my dictionary plate standing on a windowsill all the while, wondering what best to do with it.

Finally she decided. She knew that I had a great liking for China and had lived there for many years; and that I was also fonder of Oxford than any other English city. So she took down the plate; washed it carefully in a range of solvents to purge it of its accumulated dust, grease, and ink; mounted it on her Vandercook proof printer; and carefully pressed, on the finest handwoven paper, two editions of the page—one inked in Oxford blue, the other in China red.

She then mounted the three items side by side—the metal plate in the middle, the red page to the left, the other, blue page to the right—and set them inside a slender gold frame behind nonreflecting glass. She left the completed picture, with wire and bracket for hanging it on the wall, in a small café in her hometown, and then wrote a postcard telling me to pick it up whenever I could, and at the same time to take care to enjoy the café owner’s strawberry-rhubarb pie and her cappuccino. There was no bill, and I have never seen the printer since.

But the plate and its proof sheets hang on my wall still, above a small lamp that illuminates an open volume of the great dictionary on the desk below. It is volume 5, and I keep it open to the same page that was once printed from the actual piece of metal that hangs suspended just above it. It is what Victorians would have called a grand conjunction, and it serves as a small shrine to the pleasures of bookmaking and printing, and to the joy of words.

Once my mother noticed that the dominant entry on the plate and the sheets and in the book below is the word
humorist
. It reminded her of a nicely droll coincidence, another conjunction, though one rather less grand.
Humorist
had been the name of a horse that ran in the Derby on June 1, 1921, the day my mother was born. Her father, so pleased at the news of the birth of a baby girl, had put ten guineas on the filly, rank outsider though she was. But she won, and a grandfather I never met made a thousand guineas, all because of a word that briefly took his fancy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgment
; also
acknowledgement
(a spelling more in accordance with Eng. values of letters). [f. A
CKNOWLEDGE
v.
+ -
MENT.
An early instance of -
ment
added to an orig. Eng. vb.]

1.
The act of acknowledging, confessing, admitting, or owning; confession, avowal.