Tooting Cemetery

Tooting Cemetery was the final destination of the long public procession that accompanied George Merrett to burial. The funeral brought thousands of mourners to the cemetery, but the grave later became almost impossible to distinguish: the account finds no marker, only a small patch of discoloured, settled earth. That contrast makes the cemetery a central setting for the book’s account of how public mourning can give way to obscurity.

The Funeral Procession

The cortège began in Lambeth and wound through the city for the entire afternoon before reaching Tooting Cemetery. Its route passed the place on Belvedere Road where Merrett had been killed and went by Bethlem Royal Hospital before continuing to the cemetery. The journey thus connected the scene of his death with the place of his burial, turning the passage between them into a public act of remembrance.

The procession was half a mile long. The Foresters’ Band led, playing the Funeral March from Saul, followed by scores of members wearing their emblems, a horse-drawn hearse, and four black mourning coaches carrying the bereaved. Eliza Merrett rode in the leading carriage with her youngest baby in her arms. Hundreds of brewery workers and thousands of members of the public followed, many wearing black crêpe bands on their arms or hats. The scale of the cortege made Merrett’s burial a conspicuous communal event, not a private farewell.

The Grave and Its Disappearance

At the cemetery, Merrett was finally buried. The account allows that his grave may once have had a marker, but none remains. Its recorded location is reduced to a patch of discoloured grass, a small area of settled earth among a broad expanse of more prominent and newer monuments. The cemetery preserves the fact of his burial in its records while offering little visible sign by which visitors might remember him.

A Place in the Story of Remembrance

The near-erasure of Merrett’s grave acquires particular force beside the modest memorial to William Chester Minor. Minor, who killed Merrett, has a small gravestone at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven; the book also presents the dictionary to which Minor contributed as a possible, far more lasting memorial to him. Merrett, by contrast, is left with no marker and no comparable public legacy. The contrast does not diminish the funeral that once brought mourners in their thousands to Tooting Cemetery; it shows how dramatically commemoration can recede with time.

The book’s final appeal is to remember Merrett as more than the victim whose death set other events in motion. By tracing the funeral route to Tooting and then returning to the unmarked grave, its account makes the cemetery evidence of an imbalance in public memory: the man killed is almost forgotten, while the killer’s association with a celebrated dictionary endures.