George Merrett

George Merrett was an ordinary working man whose killing in Lambeth became the starting point of a story later dominated by the murderer’s illness and dictionary work. A farmer’s son from Wiltshire who had come to London to make his living, Merrett was shot by William Chester Minor on the night of 17 February 1872. He left a pregnant wife, Eliza, and six young children; the consequences of his death extended far beyond the scene of the crime, even as his own memory faded.

Background and family

Merrett came from Wiltshire to London in search of work and belonged to the working class. By the time of his death, he and his family were living in Lambeth, in severe poverty. His wife Eliza was pregnant, and they had six young children. The account presents him not as a public figure but as an ordinary man trying to support a family in one of Victorian London’s harshest districts.

The book gives only a few details of Merrett’s life before the killing. One of the clearest comes through his membership in the Ancient Order of Foresters, a Friendly Society that helped working people with pensions and other financial support at a time when such provision was otherwise lacking. That affiliation connected him to a wider network of mutual assistance, and shaped the public farewell his community would give him.

Death and the Foresters’ response

Merrett was killed in Lambeth by William Chester Minor shortly after two o’clock on the morning of Saturday, 17 February 1872. The shooting was heard as an exceptional disturbance in the neighbourhood; the account identifies Merrett as the innocent victim of the murder that would bring Minor before the courts. It was not a death that could be separated from its domestic consequences: Eliza was left pregnant, with six children to care for and already living in poverty.

On the night he died, Merrett had been relieving a shift-worker who was also a member of the Ancient Order of Foresters. The small act of assistance made the society especially bound to honour its late member. Its response turned his funeral into a public demonstration of collective sympathy: the Foresters’ Band led the procession, followed by members wearing their emblems, a horse-drawn hearse, and four mourning coaches carrying the bereaved. Eliza rode in the first carriage with her youngest baby in her arms. Brewery workers and thousands of members of the public followed, many wearing black mourning bands.

The procession lasted through the afternoon. It passed through Lambeth and by the place on Belvedere Road where Merrett had been killed, then went past Bethlem Royal Hospital before reaching Tooting Cemetery, where he was buried. The route joined the site of the violence to the place of burial, making the funeral both a farewell to Merrett and a public reckoning with the loss suffered by his family and neighbourhood.

Consequences for his family

The killing brought assistance from beyond Merrett’s immediate circle. Londoners raised money for Eliza and the children; Americans were asked to contribute through their Consul-General, and Lambeth’s vicars organized collections. Amateur entertainments elsewhere in the city also raised funds. The scale of these efforts reflected the shock provoked by the murder, but could not reverse the family’s poverty or restore the person they had lost.

The account records a long aftermath for Eliza. In William Chester Minor’s lucid periods he was contrite and appalled by what his delusion had led him to do, but Eliza never recovered from the shock of the murder. She took to drink and later died of liver failure; she has no grave. The lives of two of Merrett’s sons also ended in difficult circumstances. One received money from Minor’s stepmother, went to Monaco, won a considerable sum, and stayed there, styling himself the King of Monte Carlo, before dying in poverty in the south of France. His younger brother Frederick died by suicide in London; the reasons were never fully explained. These later tragedies deepen the account of the family’s losses without supplying a complete explanation for them.

Memory and narrative significance

Merrett’s burial was grand, but his later commemoration was meagre. The book contrasts his unmarked resting place at Tooting Cemetery, described as little more than a patch of grey grass, with Minor’s simple gravestone in New Haven and the lasting recognition Minor gained through the Oxford English Dictionary. The dictionary could serve as a memorial to its contributor, but did little to preserve the name of the man he killed. In this imbalance lies the book’s central corrective: Merrett was not merely the victim whose death enabled another man’s story to unfold, but a husband, father, worker, and member of a mutual-aid society whose loss affected an entire family.

The account therefore makes Merrett’s obscurity part of its subject. It offers the book itself as a modest testament to him, insisting that the story of Minor’s scholarship and illness begins with an unjustly neglected death. The grand funeral, the public collections, and the later absence of a durable memorial stand in tension: Merrett was mourned by thousands, yet became, in the book’s telling, an unsung man.