William Chester Minor’s murder of George Merrett was the violent event that joined two lives in radically unequal ways: Minor became a major contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary, while Merrett, the working man he killed, was largely lost to public memory. The book treats the dictionary story and its later romance as inseparable from the death that made it possible, and insists that the victim and his family remain at the center of the account.

The shooting in Lambeth

Shortly after two o’clock on Saturday morning, 17 February 1872, three revolver shots rang out in Lambeth; the account allows that there may have been four. Gunfire was unusual enough in the district that Henry Tarrant, a constable on the night patrol, immediately recognized the sound. He blew his whistle for other officers and ran toward Belvedere Road, where he believed the shots had come from. The account identifies the place as the scene of the killing, but does not supply a fuller reconstruction of how Minor encountered Merrett or the precise sequence of the shooting.

Merrett was an innocent working-class man from Wiltshire who had come to London to earn a living. He was the son of a farmer, and his family were already struggling in poverty in one of the city’s harshest districts. His wife, Eliza, was pregnant, and six young children depended on them. His death therefore did not end with the crime: it abruptly worsened the circumstances of a family that had little security to begin with.

Trial and the finding of insanity

The full extent of Minor’s illness became apparent at his trial in early April, held at Kingston Assizes, then within Surrey’s jurisdiction. Witnesses described a man who had already brought his fears to the police. He believed that people were entering his rooms, poisoning him, and plotting to kill him; he attributed the threats to Irish militants. The evidence also records that he had complained of being persecuted and poisoned. These statements document the beliefs surrounding the case, rather than establishing that the threats were real.

Minor, a surgeon of superior education, was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity. His subsequent case notes at Broadmoor classified him as dangerous to others and recorded his conviction that unknown people were trying to harm him with poison. The legal outcome recognized his insanity, but it did not undo Merrett’s death or the consequences for his family. The episode thus stands both as a criminal case and as the beginning of Minor’s long confinement in asylums.

The cost to Merrett’s family

Public sympathy followed the killing. Collections were organized in Lambeth and elsewhere to help Eliza and her children, and the funeral drew an immense procession. Merrett had belonged to the Ancient Order of Foresters, a friendly society that provided cooperative financial support to working people. His funeral procession began with the society’s band and members, followed by the hearse and mourning carriages; Eliza rode in the first carriage holding her youngest baby. The procession passed the place where he had been killed and continued to Tooting Cemetery, where he was buried.

The later record of the family remains painful. In moments of clarity, Minor was appalled by what his delusion had brought about. He gave a large part of his income to support Merrett’s widow, and Eliza regularly visited him. Yet the book also records that she never recovered from the shock, later died of liver failure, and has no grave. Merrett’s own grave has no marker now: the recorded burial place is only a small patch of discoloured grass among newer monuments. These details resist a version of the story in which the killer’s illness and scholarship eclipse the lasting loss borne by the people he harmed.

Dictionary, legend, and remembrance

Minor’s confinement did not prevent him from becoming one of the Oxford English Dictionary’s most productive contributors. He supplied scores of thousands of illustrative quotations, and his later relationship with James Murray grew from their shared work with words. Murray’s first visit to Minor took place in January 1891, after years of correspondence. A sensational story published by Hayden Church in 1915 recast their meeting as a dramatic discovery of a murderer contributing to the dictionary; the account was fiction, and the documented meeting came years earlier than the version later repeated. Correcting that legend restores the real chronology, but cannot make the collaboration independent of the killing that preceded it.

The contrast between the two men’s memorials sharpens the book’s judgment of the story. Minor was buried in the family plot at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, with a small sandstone gravestone bearing his name. His dictionary work survives on a monumental scale: the completed work comprised twelve volumes, and Minor alone had contributed many thousands of its quotations. Merrett, by contrast, has no grave marker and is remembered chiefly through the account of the man who killed him. The book presents the dictionary as a lasting remembrance of Minor while warning that its grandeur can obscure the person whose death made this unlikely history possible.