The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (4 page)

He first settled at Radley’s Hotel, in the West End, and from there traveled by train to the major cities of Europe. He had brought with him a letter from a friend at Yale University, recommending him to John Ruskin, the celebrated British artist and critic. The two men had met once, and Minor had been encouraged to take his watercolors along with him on his travels, and to paint as a form of relaxation.

As the police imagined, Minor had moved from the West End shortly after Christmas 1871, and settled in Lambeth—a highly dubious choice for a man of his background and breeding unless, as he later admitted, it offered him easy access to easy women. The American authorities told Scotland Yard that they already had records of his behavior as an army officer: He had a long history of frequenting what were then beginning to be called the “Tenderloin Districts” of the cities in which he had been posted—most notably New York, where he had been assigned to Governor’s Island and from where, on his leave days, he had gone regularly to some of Manhattan’s roughest bars and music halls. He had, it was said, a prodigious sexual appetite. He had caught venereal diseases at least once, and a medical examination conducted at Horsemonger Lane jail showed that he had a case of gonorrhea even then. He had caught it, he said, from a local prostitute, and had tried to cure it by injecting white Rhine wine into his urethra—an almost amusingly inventive attempt at a remedy, and one that, not surprisingly, failed.

His room, however, betrayed none of this seamier side. The detectives reported that they found his heavy leather-and-brass-bound portmanteaus, a great deal of money—mainly French, in twenty-
livre
notes—a gold watch and chain, some Eley’s bullets for his gun, his surgeon’s commission, and his letter of appointment as a captain in the U.S. Army. There was also the letter of introduction to Ruskin, as well as a large number of watercolors, evidently by Minor himself. They were said by everyone who saw them to be of the highest quality—views of London, largely, many from the hills above the Crystal Palace.

His landlady, Mrs. Fisher, said that he had been a perfectly good tenant, but odd. He used to go away for several days at a time, and on returning, rather ostentatiously left his hotel bills—the Charing Cross Hotel was one she remembered, the Crystal Palace Hotel another—lying around for all to see. He seemed, she said, a very anxious man. Often he demanded that the furniture in his room be moved. He also seemed afraid that people might break in.

He had one particular worry, Mrs. Fisher told the police: Doctor Minor was apparently formidably afraid of the Irish. He would ask interminably whether or not she had any Irish servants working in the house—and if so, demand that they be sacked. Did she have Irish visitors, any Irish lodgers? He was always to be kept informed—of a possibility that in Lambeth (which had a large population of casual Irish laborers, working on the legions of London construction sites) was in fact all too real.

Yet it was not until the murder trial, held in early April, that the full extent of Doctor Minor’s illness became starkly apparent. Among the score of witnesses who appeared before the lord chief justice in the court at Kingston Assizes—for this was Surrey’s jurisdiction still, not London’s—three of them told a stunned courtroom what they knew of the sad captain.

The London police, for a start, admitted that they were already somewhat acquainted with him, and that for some time before the murder had known that they had a troubled man living in their midst. A Scotland Yard detective named Williamson testified that Minor had come to the Yard three months earlier, complaining that men were coming to his rooms at night, trying to poison him. He thought that they were members of the Fenian Brotherhood—militant Irish nationalists—and they were bent on breaking into his lodgings, hiding in the roof rafters, slipping through the windows.

He made such allegations several times, said Williamson; shortly before Christmas, Minor had even persuaded the commissioner of police in New Haven to write a letter to the Yard, underlining the fears that Minor felt. Even after the doctor moved to Tennison Street, he kept in touch with Williamson—on January 12, 1872, he wrote that he had been drugged and was afraid that the Fenians were planning to murder him and make it look as though his death had been a suicide.

A classic cry for help, one might think today. But an exasperated Superintendent Williamson did nothing and told no one, beyond noting with some contempt in his logbook that Minor was clearly—and this was the first use of the word to describe the hapless American—insane.

Then came a witness who had something very curious to offer from his observations of Doctor Minor during the time the American was held on remand in the cells at Horsemonger Lane.

The witness, whose name was William Dennis, was a member of a profession that has long since receded from modern memory: He was what was called a “Bethlem watcher.” Usually he was employed at London’s Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane—such a dreadful place that the name has given us the word
bedlam
—where his duties included watching the prisoner-patients through the night to make sure that they behaved themselves and did not try to cheat justice by committing suicide. He had been seconded to the Horsemonger Lane Jail in mid-February, he said, to watch the nocturnal activities of the strange visitor. He had watched him, he testified, for twenty-four nights.

It was a most curious and disturbing experience, Dennis told the jury. Each morning Doctor Minor would awake and immediately accuse him of having been paid by someone specifically to molest him while he slept. Then he would spit, dozens of times, as though trying to remove something that had been put into his mouth. He would next leap from his bed and scrabble about underneath it, looking for people who, he insisted, had hidden there and were planning to annoy him. Dennis told his superior, the prison surgeon, that he was quite certain William Minor was mad.

From the police interrogation notes came the evidence of an imagined motive for the crime—and with them a further indication of Doctor Minor’s patent instability. Each night, Minor had told his questioners, unknown men—often lower-class, often Irish—would come to his room while he was sleeping. They would maltreat him; they would violate him in ways he could not possibly describe. For months, ever since these nocturnal visitors had begun to torment him, he had taken to sleeping with his Colt service revolver, loaded with five cartridges, beneath his pillow.

On the night in question he awoke with a start, certain that a man was standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed. He reached under the pillow for his gun; the man saw him and took to his heels, running down the stairs and out of the house. Minor followed him as fast as he could, saw a man running down into Belvedere Road, was certain that this was the intruder, shouted at him, then fired four times, until he had hit him and the man lay still, unable to harm him further.

The court listened in silence. The landlady shook her head. No one could get into her house at night without a key, she had said. Everyone slept very lightly; there could not have been an intruder.

And as final confirmation the court then heard from the prisoner’s stepbrother, George Minor. It had been a nightmare, said George, having brother William staying in the family house in New Haven. Every morning he would accuse people of trying to break into his room the night before, trying to molest him. He was being persecuted. Evil men were trying to insert metallic biscuits, coated with poison, in his mouth. They were in league with others who hid in the attic, came down at night while he was asleep, and treated him foully. Everything was punishment, he said, for an act he had been forced to commit while in the American army. Only by going to Europe, he said, could he escape his demons. He would travel and paint and live the life of a respected gentleman of art and culture—and the persecutors might melt away into the night.

The court listened in melancholy silence while Doctor Minor sat in the dock, morose, shamed. The lawyer the American consul-general had procured for him said only that it was clear that his client was insane, and that the jury should treat him as such.

The chief justice nodded his agreement. It had been a brief but sorry case, the defendant an educated and cultured man, a foreigner and a patriot, a figure quite unlike the wretches who more customarily stood in the dock before him. But the law had to be applied with just precision, whatever the condition or estate of the defendant; and the decision in this affair was in a sense a foregone conclusion.

For thirty years the law in such cases had been guided by what were known as the McNaughton rules—named for the man who, in 1843, shot dead Sir Robert Peel’s secretary, and who was acquitted on the grounds that he was so mad he could not tell right from wrong. The rules, which judged criminal responsibility rather than guilt, were to be applied in this case, he told the jury. If they were convinced that the prisoner was “of unsound mind” and had killed George Merrett while under some delusion of the kind that they had just heard about, then they must do as juries were wont to do in this extraordinarily lenient time in British justice: They were to find William Chester Minor not guilty, on grounds of insanity, and leave the judge to apply such custodial sanction as he felt prudent and necessary.

And that is what the jury did, without deliberation, late on the afternoon of April 6, 1872. They found Doctor Minor legally innocent of a murder that all—including him—knew that he had committed. The lord chief justice then applied the only sentence that was available to him—a sentence still passed occasionally today, and that has a beguiling charm to its language, despite the swingeing awfulness of its connotations.

“You will be detained in safe custody, Dr. Minor,” said the judge, “until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.” It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.

The Home Department took brief note of the sentence and made the further decision that Doctor Minor’s detention—which, considering the severity of his illness, was likely to occupy the rest of his natural life—would have to be suffered in the newly built showpiece of the British penal system, a sprawling set of red-brick buildings located behind high walls and spiked fences in the village of Crowthorne, in the Royal County of Berkshire. Doctor Minor was to be transported as soon as was convenient from his temporary prison in Surrey to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor.

Dr. William C. Minor, surgeon-captain, U.S. Army, a forlornly proud figure from one of the oldest and best-regarded families of New England, was henceforward to be formally designated in Britain by Broadmoor File Number 742, and to be held in permanent custody as a “certified criminal lunatic.”

2

THE MAN WHO TAUGHT LATIN TO CATTLE

Polymath
(
),
sb. (a.)
Also 7
polumathe
. [ad. Gr.
  having learnt much, f.
  much +
, stem of
  to learn. So F.
polymathe
.] A person of much or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of study.