The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (18 page)

Within days the American vice-consul was writing, making sure that the hapless army officer was being well looked after. Might it be possible for “our poor friend,” he prayed, to have some of his personal effects sent down? (They had been left at the consulate to help pay any of the diplomats’ expenses at court.) Is it in theory possible to visit? To cheer him up, could we send him a pound of Dennis’s coffee and some French plums? Mr. Orange was silent on the specific matter of plums, but told the consul that Doctor Minor could have whatever he liked so long as it didn’t prejudice his safety or the asylum’s disciplined running.

So a week later the official sent up a leather portmanteau by rail: It held a frock coat and three waistcoats, three pairs of drawers and four undervests, four shirts, four collars, six pocket handkerchiefs, a prayer book, a box of photographs, four pipes, cigarette papers, a bag of tobacco, a map of London, a diary, and a fob watch and gold chain—the last a family heirloom, it had been said during the trial.

Most important of all, the superintendent reported later, the doctor was given back his drawing materials: a cheap deal drawing box and its contents, a paintbox and a collection of pens, a drawing board, sketchbooks, and painting cards. He would now be able to occupy his time constructively, which all patients were encouraged to do.

Over the succeeding months Minor furnished his cells comfortably—much, indeed, as a member of the Athenaeum might. He had money: His officer’s pension of about twelve hundred dollars a year was paid to his brother Alfred in Connecticut—he acted for William, whom the state had designated “an incapable person”—who regularly telegraphed funds to England to keep his sick brother’s running account up-to-date. Using this constant credit, Doctor Minor satiated his one consuming passion: books.

He demanded first that his own books be sent over from home in New Haven. Once they were installed he ordered, from the big London bookstores, scores upon scores of new and secondhand volumes, which he first stacked in precarious piles in his cells until he asked—and paid for—bookshelves to be built. In the end he had converted the more westerly of the two rooms into a library, with a writing desk, a couple of chairs, and floor-to-ceiling teak bookshelves.

He kept his easel and his paints in the other, easterly room; he also kept a small selection of wines and some bourbon, with which the consul kept him supplied. He took up the flute again, and gave lessons to some of his neighbor inmates. He also found that he was permitted—and was well able to afford—to pay one of his fellow patients to perform work for him—tidying his room, sorting his books, cleaning up after a painting session. Life, which in those first months had been at least tolerable, now started to become really quite agreeable: William Minor was able to live a life of total leisure and security, he was warm and reasonably well fed, his health was attended to, he could stroll along the long gravel pathway known as the Terrace, he could take his ease on one of the benches by the lawn and gaze at the shrubbery, or he could read and paint to his heart’s content.

His cells still exist—not much at Broadmoor has changed in a century, and although Block 2 is now called Essex House, it is still much preferred for those patients who are in for the long haul. One of the two rooms—the westerly of the pair, where Doctor Minor maintained his library—houses a patient whose violent propensities are readily apparent: The room is littered with magazines devoted to bodybuilding, posters on the wall celebrate the achievements of Rambo-like figures, there are technical drawings of large American motorcycles, and a slogan torn from a comic book has been pasted onto the cell door. It says: Mad Killer.

The other room, where Minor painted, was by contrast so tidy that it looked almost unoccupied: The bed was so well made that one could have bounced the proverbial coin on its taut surface, leather shoes were neatly arranged and polished, clothes were hanging neatly in the wardrobe. There were no books, nothing on the walls. The fireplace had long since been boarded up, although there was a mantel, which had a small desk calendar. The room’s occupant, I was told, was an Egyptian.

Doctor Minor’s sanity, or lack thereof, was never in doubt. He was never so ill as to be ordered away from the benign atmosphere of Block 2 and into the harsher regime of the back blocks (though a strange and terrible incident in 1902 did take him away from his rooms for many weeks). But the ward notes show that his delusions became over the years ever more fixed, ever more bizarre, and that there seemed no likelihood that he would ever regain his reasoning. He was comfortable in Broadmoor, maybe; but there was nowhere else he could be allowed to live.

The ward notes from his first ten years show the sad and relentless progress of his downward spiral. Already at the time he was admitted he had a detailed awareness of the curious happenings that plagued him at night—always at night. Small boys, he believed, were put up in the rafters above his bed; they came down when he was fast asleep, chloroformed him, and then forced him to perform indecent acts—though whether with them as boys, or whether with the women of whom he dreamed constantly, the record-keepers were never clear. He claimed he would awaken with abrasions around his nose and mouth where they had clamped the gas bottle; the bottoms of his pajama legs were always damp, he said, indicating he had been forced to walk in a stupor through the night.

April 1873: “Dr. Minor is thin and anaemic, excitable in manner, though appears rational by day and occupies himself with painting and playing the flute. But at night he barricades the door of his room with furniture, and connects the handle of the door with the furniture using a piece of string, so that he will awaken if anyone tries to enter the bedroom….”

June 1875: “The doctor is convinced that intruders manage to get in—from under the floor, or through the windows—and that they pour poison into his mouth through a funnel: he now insists on being weighed each morning to see if the poison has made him heavier.”

August 1875: “The expression of his face in the morning is often haggard and wild, as though he did not obtain much rest. He complains that he feels as if a cold iron has been pressed against his teeth at night, and that something is being pumped into him. Otherwise, no change.”

A year later the demons were seeming to have a depressing influence. In February 1876 the doctors noted: “A fellow-patient stated today that Dr. Minor came to see him in the Boot Room and said he would give him everything, if only he would cut his—Dr. Minor’s—throat. An Attendant was ordered to look after him.”

The following year was no better. “Socially,” he was reported as explaining to an attendant in May 1877, “all systems are based on schemes of corruption and knavery, and he is the subject of their machinations. This lies at the heart of the brutal torture to which he is subjected each night. His spinal marrow is pierced and his heart is operated on with instruments of torture. His assailants come through the floor….”

In 1878 technology becomes a part of the villainy. “Electric currents from unseen sources are passed through his body, he insists. Electric buttons are placed on his forehead, he is placed in a wagon and trundled across the countryside.” He was taken as far afield as Constantinople, he told an attendant once, where he is made to perform lewd acts in public. “They are,” he declared, “trying to make a pimp of me!”

But while the delusions clearly persisted and worsened over those early asylum years, the clinical notes do show—and crucially to this story—the parallel development of a more thoughtful and scholarly side to the afflicted man.

“With the exception of his impressions on the subject of his night-time visitations,” says one entry in the late 1870s, “he talks very coherently and intelligently on most topics. He works in his bit of garden, and is fairly cheerful just now—but he has his days of moodiness and reserve.” A year later a doctor records simply: “He is rational and intelligent for the most part,”

He also begins to settle down, starting to regard the great hospital as his home and the attendants as his family. “He is not particularly aware that he is anxious to go back to America, as at one time he was,” writes another doctor. “All he asks is a little bit more freedom, perhaps to go and see sights in London, or perhaps visit the orchid show for which he had just received a card.” Yet the doctor who conducted this particular interview was certain of his patient’s condition, and inscribed a sentence which seems in hindsight almost to have sealed William Minor’s eternal fate.

There can be no doubt that Dr. Minor, though on occasion very calm and collected, is generally-speaking more abundantly insane, and shows himself to be more so, than he was some years ago. He has the calm and firm conviction that he is almost nightly the victim of torment and purposive annoyance, on the parts of the Attendants and others connected with an infernal criminal scheme.

It was at about this time that there came two developments, one of which by chance led indirectly to the other. The first stemmed from a factor that is not uncommon among those who commit appalling crimes: Minor became truly remorseful for what he had done, and resolved to try and make some kind of amends. It was with this in mind that he took the bold step of writing to his victim’s widow, via the American Embassy, which he knew had helped raise a fund for her in the months immediately following the tragedy.

He explained to Eliza Merrett how immeasurably sorry he was for what he had done, and he offered to try to help in any way he could—perhaps by settling money on her or her children. Already Minor’s stepmother, Judith, had contributed: Now, perhaps, and if Mrs. Merrett would only be so gracious as to accept, he could do rather more.

The letter seems to have worked a small miracle: Not only did Mrs. Merrett agree to accept financial help from Minor—she also asked if it might be possible to visit him. It was an unprecedented request, that an incarcerated murderer be allowed to spend time with a relative of his victim; but the Home Office, after discussing the matter with Doctor Orange, agreed to one experimental supervised visit. Accordingly, sometime during late 1879, Mrs. Eliza Merrett traveled up from Lambeth to Broadmoor and first met the man who had ended her husband’s life seven years before, and who had so drastically changed her own life and the lives of her seven children.

The meeting, according to Doctor Orange’s notes, was at first tense, but it progressed well, and by its end Mrs. Merrett had agreed to come again. Before long she was making monthly ventures down to Crowthorne, eager to talk with interested sympathy to this now seemingly harmless American. And though the conversations apparently stopped short of developing into any real friendship, it is believed that she made Minor an offer that was to lead to the second of the major developments of this period of his life. She agreed, it seems, to bring parcels of books to Minor from the antiquarian dealers in London.

Eliza Merrett knew very little of books—indeed, she was barely literate. But when she saw how keenly Doctor Minor collected and cherished his old volumes, and when she listened to his querulous remarks about the delays and costs of the postal service between London and Crowthorne, she made an offer to collect his orders for him, and bring them down on her visits. And so it happened that, month after month, Mrs. Merrett began delivering packages, wrapped in brown paper and sealed with twine and wax, from the West End’s great book emporiums, like Maggs, Bernard Quaritch, and Hatchards.

The delivery system, such as it was, probably remained in place for only a few months—Mrs. Merrett eventually took to drink and apparently lost all interest in the curious and eccentric unfortunate. But the system appears during its brief life to have led what was undeniably the most serendipitous event in William Minor’s otherwise melancholy life.

For it was in the early 1880s that he stumbled across the first of James Murray’s famous appeals for volunteers, which asked for interested parties to indicate that they might be prepared to work on the new dictionary. Murray first published his appeal in April 1879 and had two thousand copies printed and circulated by booksellers: One would almost certainly have found its way, probably fairly soon after its distribution, into one or more of the packages that Mrs. Merrett brought to Minor at the asylum.

The eight pages explained in very broad terms what was likely to be wanted. First there were Murray’s own suggestions for the kind of books that needed to be read:

In the Early English period up to the invention of Printing so much has been done and is doing that little outside help is needed. But few of the earliest printed books—those of Caxton and his successors—have yet been read, and any one who has the opportunity and time to read one or more of these, either in the originals, or accurate reprints, will confer valuable assistance by so doing. The later sixteenth-century literature is very fairly done; yet here several books remain to be read. The seventeenth century, with so many more writers, naturally shows still more unexplored territory. The nineteenth-century books, being within the reach of everyone, have been read widely; but a large number remain unrepresented, not only of those published during the last ten years while the Dictionary has been in abeyance, but also of earlier date. But it is in the eighteenth century above all that help is urgently needed. The American scholars promised to get the eighteenth-century literature taken up in the United States, a promise which they appear not to have any extent fulfilled, and we must now appeal to English readers to share the task, for nearly the whole of that century’s books, with the exception of Burke’s works, have still to be gone through.

After this Murray listed rather more than two hundred specific authors whose works, in his view, were essential reading. The list was quite awesome: Most of the volumes were rare, and likely to be in the hands of only a very few collectors. Some books, on the other hand, were already available at Murray’s newly established dictionary library at Mill Hill: They could be sent to readers who promised to do work on them. (And vouched to return them: When Henry Furnivall had been editor he found that a number of disgruntled readers used the lending scheme as a means of swelling their own library collections, and neither sent in the requested quotation slips nor ever returned the books.)