My Faith Looks Up to Thee

My Faith Looks Up to Thee is an engraved motto at Evergreen Cemetery, where an angel stands near the grave of William Chester Minor. Its placement beside his small, unadorned headstone gives the expression a specific memorial setting; in the book’s closing account, that setting also sharpens the contrast between Minor’s enduring public legacy and the obscurity of George Merrett, his victim.

The inscription and its setting

Minor died on 26 March 1920, aged eighty-five years and nine months, after leaving the Hartford hospital where he had spent his final months. He was buried the following Monday in the family plot at Evergreen Cemetery, in his old hometown of New Haven. His reddish sandstone gravestone was small and undistinguished, bearing only his name. Nearby, an angel stood on a plinth, gazing skyward, with the motto My Faith Looks Up to Thee engraved on it.

The expression is not presented as words spoken by Minor or as a statement of his beliefs. The evidence identifies it as an inscription on the nearby angel’s plinth. The distinction matters: the words belong to the cemetery’s visible memorial arrangement, while the stone marking Minor’s own grave records no more than his name.

A modest memorial beside a lasting legacy

The book places this small grave marker against the scale of Minor’s contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary. The completed dictionary comprised twelve volumes, defined 414,825 words, and used 1,827,306 illustrative quotations; Minor alone had supplied tens of thousands. The work became a lasting public record of his scholarly labor, even as his burial place remained modest and little distinguished.

The contrast extends beyond the two memorial forms. A high chain-link fence surrounds Evergreen Cemetery, separating it from a troubled part of New Haven and from the more imposing surroundings of Yale. The narrator presents the fence and the unassuming grave as signs of Minor’s obscurity in death, despite his place among the dictionary’s greatest contributors. The motto’s upward-looking image belongs to this quiet memorial landscape, not to a grand public monument.

The memory of George Merrett

The book’s closing pages resist allowing the dictionary to become Minor’s only remembrance. His work may serve as a lasting memorial to him, but George Merrett, the man he killed, has no comparable monument: at Tooting Cemetery, the recorded place of Merrett’s grave is only a patch of discoloured grass and settled earth. The contrast is especially stark because Merrett’s death left his pregnant wife, Eliza, and six young children in hardship.

The account therefore sets the engraved motto within an uneasy memorial history. Minor’s name survives on a gravestone, and his labor survives in a monumental reference work; Merrett’s grave has lost even its marker. By ending with a dedication to Merrett, the book redirects attention from the more celebrated contributor toward the working-class victim whose death made the story possible. My Faith Looks Up to Thee remains a small inscription in that larger argument about what is remembered, and whose memory is allowed to endure.