January 11, 2012 • 27 mins
When we last left the story of W.C. Minor, he'd fatally shot a man in London. In the conclusion of this episode, Sarah and Deblina look at the events that led Minor to become one of the Oxford English Dictionary's most prolific contributors.
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Street Stuff. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to
(01:05):
bling a choker boarding and and with this episode, we're
continuing on with our look into the life of William
Chester Miner, an American man who became one of the
most prolific contributors to the first edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, but from what we've seen of his life
so far, he doesn't really seem to be headed in
that direction at all. In Part one of this podcast,
(01:26):
we took a look at Miner's early life, how he
came from an aristocratic family, he got a good education,
he studied medicine at Yale and joined the Union Army
as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War, and his
life and career at that point seemed really full of promise.
But his mental health went downhill after the war, and
we talked about how that downward spiral may have been
(01:48):
triggered by an incident during the Battle of the Wilderness
in which he was forced to brand an Irish deserter
on the cheek. After spending about eighteen months in a
hospital for the insane in d c, Minor decided to
have cross the Pond to England, where he could hopefully rest,
paint kind of calm his thoughts a bit, maybe earned
back his reputation by connecting with the right people in London.
(02:08):
But when we last saw Minor he had done nothing
like that. No, it didn't go down that way at all.
He had gotten off on the wrong foot by taking
up residents in Lambeth, which was one of the seediest
parts of London. And when we left off with part
one of this story, he had just killed a man
who he had never laid eyes on before. So we're
(02:29):
going to pick up at that crime February eighteen seventy two,
just as the constables were reaching the scene finding Minor
standing there gun in hand. And we should mention before
we get too far into this that one of the
sources of information in this podcast is Simon Winchester's book
The Professor and the Madman. One of our listeners actually
(02:50):
mentioned on Facebook, so it reminded me that I need
to bring it up and talk about a little bit.
It's a really fascinating book. It takes a really in
depth look at Minor, story of the other characters, prinitive
work on his life. Yeah, it is a lot of
articles about Minor used this as a source too, so
even the other sources we used probably pulled from that
to some extent. So moving on with the story. Though,
(03:11):
the man that Minor had shot was bleeding all over
the street. Two constables tried to get him to a
nearby hospital, but it was too late. They identified the
dead man as George Merritt, who had been a stoker
at the Red Lion Brewery, which was something of a
landmark in the area, even though the area wasn't that great,
and he had been there for eight years, which meant
that he pretty much he being a stokermant that he
(03:33):
kept the fires over which the beer was made burning. Um.
Obviously that wasn't a glamorous job. This guy brought home
twenty four shillings a week, which wasn't a lot even
back then. He was very poor, and he also had
a wife and six kids and one more baby on
the way. Yeah, so a lot of family relying on him.
He was about thirty four years old and he did
live in the area and when he ran into Minor,
(03:55):
he had been on his way to work at the
dawn shift to the brewery. So it's about two am
heading out, runs into this guy on the street who
ends up shooting him. So meanwhile, the constable who apprehended Miner,
who was Constable Tarrant, had what was sort of a
strange exchange with the suspect. He asked him, whom did
(04:16):
you fire at? And Miner who Tarrant described as really
cool and collected. Gave this bizarre response. He said, it
was a man. You do not suppose I would be
so cowardly as to shoot a woman. So not really
the response he was probably expecting to get out of him. Um.
(04:36):
Tarrant proceeded to take Minor down to the Tower Street
police station. Asked some questions on the way, though, Miners
started to say that the whole thing was an accident.
Started to give a little more reason, maybe more of
what Tarrant had been expecting in the first place. He
was just saying he had shot the wrong man. He
had been trying to defend himself from somebody broken into
(04:57):
his room and he had made a mistake. He was
also saying a lot of other weird stuff on the
way to the police station two, so you could see
how maybe the constable wouldn't quite believe him. He was
asking the constable to search him. He was like, well,
what if I have another gun? And the constable was like, well,
please keep it in your pocket if you have another gun.
I mean. It's really kind of an odd sort of
interaction that they had. But when they got to the station,
(05:18):
Miner was formally arrested and charged with murder. Because he
was American, the U S. Minister in London had to
be notified in the crime, which became known as the
Lambeth tragedy, became an international incident, and Minor was thirty
seven years old at this time. Just to give you
kind of a reference point, Okay, So at this point
Miner got put into the horsemonger Land jail and Scotland
(05:41):
Yard got put on the case. So Minor himself wasn't
really much of a help. I mean, this is no surprise.
He wasn't much of a help with the investigation. He
just continued to say, over and over it was an accident,
you know, I I shot the wrong man. But when
the trial started in early April, details about minors strange
life started to surface through the help of various witnesses.
(06:04):
His Lambeth landlady, for instance, came forward, Mrs Fisher, and
she said that while he was a very good tenant,
he was kind of a strange fellow. He was anxious.
He had often demand to have the furniture in his
room moved around and rearranged, and he was really really
afraid that people might break into his place. In particular,
(06:24):
she said that he was very afraid of the Irish.
He would always ask if she had any Irish servants
working in the house or if there were any Irish
lodger staying there. In part one of this podcast, we
mentioned Miner's delusions about irishman breaking into his room at
night and how it was probably related to that branding
incident during the Civil War when he had to brand
the Irish desert or on the cheek, and we talked
(06:47):
about how he'd already contacted Scotland Yard about this. During
the trial, a Scotland Yard detective named Williamson, in fact
came forward and testified that Miner had come to him
three months earlier, complaining that men were trying to come
into his room at night and poison him. Specifically, Minor
believed the intruders were members of the Finnian Brotherhood, militant
Irish nationalists, and he thought they were planning on murdering
(07:10):
him and making it look like a suicide. And other people,
you know, people who had met Minor and spoken to
him before, did have a suspicion that something was off
with him. Williamson, the guy who Minor went to, wrote
in his notes from that time that Miner was clearly insane,
but there was another aspect to Minor's delusions as well.
Another man who testified at the trial was William Dennis,
(07:31):
and he was an employee at London's Bethlehem Hospital for
the Insane. We've talked about maybe doing a podcast on
on that at some point, but his job was to
watch Minor at night when he was in jail, and
Dennis said that every morning when Minor would wake up,
he would accuse Dennis of having been paid to moless
Minor during the night while he was asleep, and minor
(07:54):
step brother George Minor would later confirm these delusions about
sexual abuty thing that for the time that Minor was
home before he left for England, he would often accuse
people of trying to break into his room and molest
him at night. So it wasn't just the spear of
somebody breaking in or the Irish trying to get him.
There was this whole other aspect to it. Yeah, the
(08:17):
sexual aspect of his delusions, and I think that's why
some people relate sort of his mental illness, or maybe
relate the beginning of his mental illness to um the
lascivious thoughts that we mentioned in the first part of
this podcast that he used to have about girls in
Sri Lanka when he was growing up, that maybe that
was an exactly maybe that was an early indication of
(08:39):
mental illness, I should say so. Minor himself pretty much
confirmed this aspect of his delusions when he was interrogated
to he testified that on the night that he killed
George Merritt, he woke up suddenly and saw a man
standing at the foot of his bed. So he reached
for his cult service revolver, which he kept under his
pillow while he slept, And he said that and saw
(09:00):
him reach for his gun and then took off and
ran down the stairs and out of the house. Minor
followed him and then saw a man running down the street,
thought it was the intruder, fired four times and shot him.
That's his side of the story anyways, really our poor
brewery employee. But the final decision in the case was
determined by the McNaughton rules, which were named for somebody
(09:22):
who had shot a man and was acquitted on the
grounds of being insane, and the jury in Miner's case
determined that he was also of unfound mind when he
had committed the crime, so the ruling was not guilty
on the grounds of insanity, and the judge told him,
quote you will be detained in safe custody, doctor Minor,
until her Majesty's pleasure be known. So we already know
(09:45):
where Minor was sent from the story at the beginning
of our first episode. The detention was set to take
place at Broadmoor Asylum for the criminally Insane, in the
village of Crowthorne in the County of Berkshire, and he
was known there officially as File number seven four to
two and was expected to spend the rest of his
(10:07):
life there as a quote certified criminal lunatic. But we
need to describe what his life really was. There was
more than just being a number and a quote certified
criminal lunatic. Yeah, it's it was better than you might expect.
He got to broad Moore on April seventeen, eighteen seventy two,
and according to that account kept by the Berkshire Record
(10:29):
Office that we mentioned in the first part of the podcast,
he was described at the time as a thin, pale
and sharp featured man with light colored sandy hair, deep
set eyes, and prominent cheekbones. He was considered to be
low risk, so he ended up in cell Block two,
which was known unofficially I guess as the Swell Block.
(10:49):
It was like that Swell block cell block. It was
the lowest security cell block and it's where prisoners had
the most privileges. And since Minor was well educated and
a well to do you American, he got special treatment there,
special freedoms and comforts that a lot of inmates probably
didn't get. Almost as soon as he got there, the
American consulate in London, for example, made sure that Minor
(11:11):
was reunited with his possessions, including his own clothes, his
art materials, and his diary. They didn't send him with
his surgical instruments though they catch those. Don't send a
venture of scalpels over to the guy in the sant asylum.
But he also had some money coming in. He had
a regular allowance from his family, which gave him the
ability to buy stuff or have the hospital purchase things
(11:34):
on his behalf. And that made his food a lot better.
You know, he'd have poultry and gain steak, biscuits, coffee,
sometimes even wine and spirits. But it also allowed him
to keep his mind occupied. This was an intellectual man,
and he was able to purchase newspapers, engineering papers. He
(11:54):
might have used those to get some tips on this
dirty building construction, because he was, of course still extremely
troubled by these delusions of people breaking into his room
at night. Um at one point he supposedly even had
his bedroom floors covered with zinc to keep the demons
from coming up through the floorboards while he was asleep.
(12:14):
He would also get a lot of books, and we're
going to talk about that a little bit more in
a second, but many of these books he would have
shipped from New Haven, Connecticut, or ordered from shops in London,
and at some point during his stay there, probably pretty
early on, from what we can tell, Minor was also
given access to two cells a separate day room in
addition to his bedroom, and he converted that day room
(12:35):
into a kind of library lined with bookshelves. So overall
he had this pretty comfortable existence at Broadmore, considering the circumstances,
and he received visits from family and friends, and he
had occasionally dine in the superintendent's home. According to Winchester's book,
he even received visits from Eliza Merritt, who is none
other than the widow of the man he'd shot. She'd
(12:57):
supposedly forgiven him after minor Or settled some money on
her and her children, but whether or not this actually
happened is still up for debate. So Minor might have
just been in this situation with his two cells, all
of his books, his newspapers, engineering papers, spent the rest
of his days. They're unknown, But one day around the
(13:18):
summer of eighteen eighty, while he was reading some of
that material, he came across this sort of press release
and it was called an appeal to readers, and it
was in a book that he'd ordered from a library
in London. So it was basically this request for English
speaking volunteer readers around the world to help out with
a massive publication project that was going on at Oxford University,
(13:43):
which at the time was going to be called the
New English Dictionary, and it was intended to be the biggest,
most thorough collection of English words yet so they needed,
through soliciting, some help for their new dictionary they were writing.
So it seems my Er immediately realized that he was
kind of in the perfect position to contribute here, seeing
(14:04):
as how he had tons of time on his hands,
to read, and he could get new books pretty much
whenever he wanted. So he wrote to James Murray, who
had taken over as editor of the Dictionary project in
eighteen seventy nine, and he's the one who had drafted
that press release we just mentioned, and asked if he
could help out. And as we mentioned in part one
to this podcast, James Murray ended up being the Oxford
(14:25):
English Dictionaries editor for forty years and was also its
greatest and most famous editor. He's a really interesting character
and probably deserves a podcast in his own right. Though
he was around miners age, very intelligent and he loved learning,
but he came from a poor family and had to
quit school at fourteen, so he was basically self taught,
which I think is pretty amazing considering all he accomplished.
(14:46):
And I mean by self taught, you mean he knew
lots of languages and astronomy, not just like he was
an informed man. Yes, exactly. He was very highly regarded
for his knowledge. But of course we're focusing on minor
story here, so we'll just tell a little bit about
the Dictionary so you'll understand exactly how Minor was helping
out from his cell in broadmore so. This Grand Dictionary
(15:08):
project actually started in eighteen fifty seven with three members
of London's Philological Society, Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Fernival,
who saw some serious deficiencies in the dictionaries that have
been published so far, including those by Webster, which we
talked about a little bit in the previous podcast. Samuel
Johnson and Charles Richardson. They had two main problems with
(15:32):
these existing dictionaries. On one hand, they didn't think that
they were comprehensive enough. For example, some just included very
difficult words, so word if you would need to look
up in the dictionary exactly, and they felt a dictionary
should really include every word in the English language. They
also felt that every word, along with a definition, should
have an authoritative etymology, So quotations from literary passages that
(15:56):
would illustrate every meaning of every single word include ing.
And this was a key point. One meaning one quotation
I should say that illustrated the words earliest known usage
in English. I try to wrap your mind around that
for a minute. I mean, I think that's important before
we go on, imagine trying to find that earliest usage
(16:17):
through every book printed in English and not have any
sort of search engine capabilities. Of course, real people would
have to go through these books reading and looking for
the words. So of course, since there will be a
lot of words included, and each word might need the
support of several quotations, there was no practical way that
(16:40):
a dictionary staff could handle all of that on their own.
So the plan was to involve these unpaid volunteer readers,
enthusiastic readers, I guess, from all over the English speaking world.
And that was the announcement that Minor saw in the
paper for the book. So in that article in the
Nation by Joshua Kendall that we referenced in the previous episode,
(17:01):
he compares it to quote what we now know of
as the wiki model of creating and disseminating knowledge, which
I think is a really cool way to think about it.
It makes it all makes sense when you think about
it like that. We do have this modern way to
look to look at it, to compare it something, to
compare it to yeah, wiki without the Internet exactly. So,
(17:22):
for a number of reasons, real work on the dictionary
didn't get going until Murray came on board in eighteen
seventy nine, and even then it was really slow going.
For example, it took until eighteen eighty four to publish
the first volume, which was a to aunt, so very slow,
very slow going. But still this wiki model of um
collecting illustrative quotations was pretty successful. You know, they were
(17:46):
getting a lot of real work done, and they ended
up getting millions of contributions from volunteers in England, Ireland,
Scotland and the United States, people who would send in
quotations from books and magazines and newspapers, and like we mentioned,
you know, they were trying to go for the earliest
known youth. Some of these went back as far as
(18:07):
the ninth century. And it was to this aspect of
the dictionary that Minor was contributing. So he didn't really
do any defining like he had done for Websters. But
as we've mentioned several times, he did become one of
Murray's best contributors. He'd send in these small cards with
quotations on them. By the thousand and eventually more. His
personal library contained a lot of rare sixteenth and seventeenth
(18:29):
century books in particular, and he'd searched through these for
appropriate quotes and he even went a step further and
would sometimes ask the O E ed editors what word
they were working on, and then find quotes to go
with those specific words. And I mean, just thinking about
that makes my head hurt. That you would get a list,
maybe a short list, of a few words they were
(18:50):
working on, and then go look through your entire library
for that word. I just I can't imagine. So in eighteen,
Ury said that Minor had sent in quote No. Less
than twelve thousand quotes and added quote so enormous have
been Dr Miner's contributions during the past seventeen or eighteen
(19:11):
years that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries
from his quotations alone. So it's no wonder that Murray
really wanted to meet Minor along the way, this guy
who was contributing so much to the dictionary. But their
first meeting probably didn't take place quite like that dramatic
legend that I think I've compared it to Wilkie Collins.
(19:34):
It sounded like a Wilkie Collins set up um that
we related at the beginning of part one of this
podcast um, the one that was published in The Strand
in nineteen fifteen. That sensationalized account has the two meeting
in eighteen ninety seven after Minor failed to attend the
Great Dictionary Dinner, which sounds fun, thrown at Queen's College
(19:55):
in Murray's honor to celebrate the dictionaries progress. And according
to that ledge, and this was the first time Murray
realized that his favorite contributor was actually an inmate in
a mental asylum. But Winchester's research kind of turned up
something different. Yeah. Both through his research and the discovery
of a letter written by Dr Murray and the Broadmore archives,
(20:15):
we can see that Murray, though we might have thought
that Minor was just a retired doctor or doctor in
the asylum at first, he probably was clued into Minor's
actual situation by the late eighteen eighties and probably visited
him as soon as eighteen ninety one rather than eighteen
ninety seven. Murray was always really sensitive to minor situation,
though apparently never letting him know that he knew that
(20:38):
Minor was mentally ill, so the to form this kind
of friendship that went beyond their working relationship. Murray even
visited Minor on several occasions, though it's unclear according to
the Broadmore records exactly how often that occurred. Murray would
supposedly telegraph ahead, however, to find out what Miner's exact
mood was before visiting, and he would avoid coming if
(20:59):
Minor was especially angry at the time. But when he
did visit, they have these very cozy experience is kind
of like two well respected colleagues hanging out together. Mury
and Minor would sit in minors day room and have
some tea and have some cake in front of the fire,
just like it was a normal kind of situation, just
catching up friends hanging out. So you'd think that maybe
(21:21):
this friendship and having a purpose in the form of
his dictionary work would have been really good for Minor's
mental state, but his paranoid delusions just continued to get worse.
He'd think that he was being drugged at night with chloroform,
or tortured with electricity, or kidnapped from the asylum at
night to be abused, so that nightly sexual abuse was
still a big part of it, and he'd even tried
(21:43):
to barricade his room at night to protect himself and
around the turn of the twentieth century, on December third,
nineteen o two. To be exact, he experienced a major
setback that morning. He actually mutilated his own genitals, and
it seemed to be a desperate attempt to kind of
put a stop to the indecent acts that he thought
he was being forced to do every night. When asked
(22:05):
why he did it, he said he did it quote
an interests of morality. So after that he was kept
in the infirmary for four months and then sent back
to his rooms. But the delusions just persisted, and as
the years went by, he continued to get worse mentally
and work less and less, and also his health started
to decline. So a lot of people, including Murray, began
(22:28):
to petition for his release to his family, and at
first these petitions were denied, but the government finally relented
in nineteen ten and then granted Miners release and ordered
that he be deported back to the States. So Murray,
who had by that time been knighted for his work
in the Dictionary, and his wife visited Miner one last
(22:50):
time right before Miner left the country on April fifteenth,
nineteen ten, and he brought along a court photographer to
document this last his final meeting between two friends and
two really influential contributors to what was going to be
a famous dictionary. Murray was accompanied back to the States
(23:11):
on a steamer by his brother Alfred, but it was
really a long time before he actually made it home
to Connecticut. He he immediately went back to that hospital
for the Insane in d C. That he was at previously,
which is now Sat Elizabeth's, and he spent almost ten
years there, kind of in the same way that he
had lived at Broadmore as a privileged in may who
(23:32):
still had nightly outbursts. So his problems kind of continued
to progress, and in between he would sort of spend
his day's reading and painting and doing, you know, his
activities that he enjoyed, but still in ill health. Yeah.
So by nineteen nineteen though, he was finally allowed to
go back to Connecticut to be near his family, and
he died there March nineteen twenty um, you know, having
(23:57):
been in prison the majority of his life by that point,
or the hospital rather so, even though he lived the
life of anonymity while he was locked away for so
many years, his name is still pretty well known. It's
still in the preface to the Oxford English Dictionary in fact, yeah,
which ultimately that dictionary took seventy years to complete. It
(24:20):
was completed in nineteen eight, which was a decade after
Murray's death. And I think I found I saw this
in that Nation article that we mentioned, give us some status,
some stats to kind of boggle the mind. In the end,
the first edition, not including the supplements that were published after,
but that first edition, published in nineteen had four hundred
(24:40):
and fourteen thousand, eight hundred twenty five headwords, so to speak,
defined by one million, eight hundred twenty seven thousand, three
hundred and six illustrative quotations over fifteen thousand, four hundred
ninety pages. Pretty incredible, very incredible, And it sounds like
(25:00):
Minor was a pretty significant part of all of that.
So in recent years consequently, more people have taken an
interest in his life. And of course there's Winchester's book
that you mentioned in the beginning, and there's maybe even
gonna be a movie. Do you have any more info
on that. I don't have any more info on that.
When you look it up, it just says that the
movie The Professor and the Madman is in development. Apparently
(25:24):
mel Gibson bought the rights to the movie in nine
and they've gone through a couple of different directors I think,
and they're working on it, but I don't know when
it's supposed to come out, but I think that'll be
an interesting one to see when it does. Yeah, it
sounds like it would be a fantastic movie. Actually, I'm
imagining the how you dramatize the dictionary writing scenes though,
(25:46):
sort of like computer movies, they have to have scenes
of like rapid typing, maybe page flipping through country book. Yeah,
you'll have to really make looking upwards interesting. But I
guess hopefully we'll get to see that down the road.
And as I mentioned, somebody did bring up this book
on Facebook, so we wouldn't just throw it out there
again like we always do. If you guys have read
(26:07):
any cool historical books or have any other ideas that
you want us to podcast develop, please write us Where
History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com, or you can
look us up on Facebook, of course, or at Twitter
at mist in History. So I think I'm gonna head
off and start maybe planning a great dictionary dinner because
that sounds truly, it just sounds good. Yeah, you don't
want to do the dictionary research. But you want to
(26:29):
have a dictionary dinner. I think everybody could come as
a word never know. That would be fun. Oh I
like that? All right, I'll invite you to Blina. So
if you're not going to go plan your own dictionary party,
we do have an article written by Molly Edmonds called
how Can You Tell if You're Mentally Ill? And you
can find it by searching for that title on our
(26:51):
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com
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Street Stuff. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm to
(01:05):
bling a choker boarding and and with this episode, we're
continuing on with our look into the life of William
Chester Miner, an American man who became one of the
most prolific contributors to the first edition of the Oxford
English Dictionary, but from what we've seen of his life
so far, he doesn't really seem to be headed in
that direction at all. In Part one of this podcast,
(01:26):
we took a look at Miner's early life, how he
came from an aristocratic family, he got a good education,
he studied medicine at Yale and joined the Union Army
as an assistant surgeon during the Civil War, and his
life and career at that point seemed really full of promise.
But his mental health went downhill after the war, and
we talked about how that downward spiral may have been
(01:48):
triggered by an incident during the Battle of the Wilderness
in which he was forced to brand an Irish deserter
on the cheek. After spending about eighteen months in a
hospital for the insane in d c, Minor decided to
have cross the Pond to England, where he could hopefully rest,
paint kind of calm his thoughts a bit, maybe earned
back his reputation by connecting with the right people in London.
(02:08):
But when we last saw Minor he had done nothing
like that. No, it didn't go down that way at all.
He had gotten off on the wrong foot by taking
up residents in Lambeth, which was one of the seediest
parts of London. And when we left off with part
one of this story, he had just killed a man
who he had never laid eyes on before. So we're
(02:29):
going to pick up at that crime February eighteen seventy two,
just as the constables were reaching the scene finding Minor
standing there gun in hand. And we should mention before
we get too far into this that one of the
sources of information in this podcast is Simon Winchester's book
The Professor and the Madman. One of our listeners actually
(02:50):
mentioned on Facebook, so it reminded me that I need
to bring it up and talk about a little bit.
It's a really fascinating book. It takes a really in
depth look at Minor, story of the other characters, prinitive
work on his life. Yeah, it is a lot of
articles about Minor used this as a source too, so
even the other sources we used probably pulled from that
to some extent. So moving on with the story. Though,
(03:11):
the man that Minor had shot was bleeding all over
the street. Two constables tried to get him to a
nearby hospital, but it was too late. They identified the
dead man as George Merritt, who had been a stoker
at the Red Lion Brewery, which was something of a
landmark in the area, even though the area wasn't that great,
and he had been there for eight years, which meant
that he pretty much he being a stokermant that he
(03:33):
kept the fires over which the beer was made burning. Um.
Obviously that wasn't a glamorous job. This guy brought home
twenty four shillings a week, which wasn't a lot even
back then. He was very poor, and he also had
a wife and six kids and one more baby on
the way. Yeah, so a lot of family relying on him.
He was about thirty four years old and he did
live in the area and when he ran into Minor,
(03:55):
he had been on his way to work at the
dawn shift to the brewery. So it's about two am
heading out, runs into this guy on the street who
ends up shooting him. So meanwhile, the constable who apprehended Miner,
who was Constable Tarrant, had what was sort of a
strange exchange with the suspect. He asked him, whom did
(04:16):
you fire at? And Miner who Tarrant described as really
cool and collected. Gave this bizarre response. He said, it
was a man. You do not suppose I would be
so cowardly as to shoot a woman. So not really
the response he was probably expecting to get out of him. Um.
(04:36):
Tarrant proceeded to take Minor down to the Tower Street
police station. Asked some questions on the way, though, Miners
started to say that the whole thing was an accident.
Started to give a little more reason, maybe more of
what Tarrant had been expecting in the first place. He
was just saying he had shot the wrong man. He
had been trying to defend himself from somebody broken into
(04:57):
his room and he had made a mistake. He was
also saying a lot of other weird stuff on the
way to the police station two, so you could see
how maybe the constable wouldn't quite believe him. He was
asking the constable to search him. He was like, well,
what if I have another gun? And the constable was like, well,
please keep it in your pocket if you have another gun.
I mean. It's really kind of an odd sort of
interaction that they had. But when they got to the station,
(05:18):
Miner was formally arrested and charged with murder. Because he
was American, the U S. Minister in London had to
be notified in the crime, which became known as the
Lambeth tragedy, became an international incident, and Minor was thirty
seven years old at this time. Just to give you
kind of a reference point, Okay, So at this point
Miner got put into the horsemonger Land jail and Scotland
(05:41):
Yard got put on the case. So Minor himself wasn't
really much of a help. I mean, this is no surprise.
He wasn't much of a help with the investigation. He
just continued to say, over and over it was an accident,
you know, I I shot the wrong man. But when
the trial started in early April, details about minors strange
life started to surface through the help of various witnesses.
(06:04):
His Lambeth landlady, for instance, came forward, Mrs Fisher, and
she said that while he was a very good tenant,
he was kind of a strange fellow. He was anxious.
He had often demand to have the furniture in his
room moved around and rearranged, and he was really really
afraid that people might break into his place. In particular,
(06:24):
she said that he was very afraid of the Irish.
He would always ask if she had any Irish servants
working in the house or if there were any Irish
lodger staying there. In part one of this podcast, we
mentioned Miner's delusions about irishman breaking into his room at
night and how it was probably related to that branding
incident during the Civil War when he had to brand
the Irish desert or on the cheek, and we talked
(06:47):
about how he'd already contacted Scotland Yard about this. During
the trial, a Scotland Yard detective named Williamson, in fact
came forward and testified that Miner had come to him
three months earlier, complaining that men were trying to come
into his room at night and poison him. Specifically, Minor
believed the intruders were members of the Finnian Brotherhood, militant
Irish nationalists, and he thought they were planning on murdering
(07:10):
him and making it look like a suicide. And other people,
you know, people who had met Minor and spoken to
him before, did have a suspicion that something was off
with him. Williamson, the guy who Minor went to, wrote
in his notes from that time that Miner was clearly insane,
but there was another aspect to Minor's delusions as well.
Another man who testified at the trial was William Dennis,
(07:31):
and he was an employee at London's Bethlehem Hospital for
the Insane. We've talked about maybe doing a podcast on
on that at some point, but his job was to
watch Minor at night when he was in jail, and
Dennis said that every morning when Minor would wake up,
he would accuse Dennis of having been paid to moless
Minor during the night while he was asleep, and minor
(07:54):
step brother George Minor would later confirm these delusions about
sexual abuty thing that for the time that Minor was
home before he left for England, he would often accuse
people of trying to break into his room and molest
him at night. So it wasn't just the spear of
somebody breaking in or the Irish trying to get him.
There was this whole other aspect to it. Yeah, the
(08:17):
sexual aspect of his delusions, and I think that's why
some people relate sort of his mental illness, or maybe
relate the beginning of his mental illness to um the
lascivious thoughts that we mentioned in the first part of
this podcast that he used to have about girls in
Sri Lanka when he was growing up, that maybe that
was an exactly maybe that was an early indication of
(08:39):
mental illness, I should say so. Minor himself pretty much
confirmed this aspect of his delusions when he was interrogated
to he testified that on the night that he killed
George Merritt, he woke up suddenly and saw a man
standing at the foot of his bed. So he reached
for his cult service revolver, which he kept under his
pillow while he slept, And he said that and saw
(09:00):
him reach for his gun and then took off and
ran down the stairs and out of the house. Minor
followed him and then saw a man running down the street,
thought it was the intruder, fired four times and shot him.
That's his side of the story anyways, really our poor
brewery employee. But the final decision in the case was
determined by the McNaughton rules, which were named for somebody
(09:22):
who had shot a man and was acquitted on the
grounds of being insane, and the jury in Miner's case
determined that he was also of unfound mind when he
had committed the crime, so the ruling was not guilty
on the grounds of insanity, and the judge told him,
quote you will be detained in safe custody, doctor Minor,
until her Majesty's pleasure be known. So we already know
(09:45):
where Minor was sent from the story at the beginning
of our first episode. The detention was set to take
place at Broadmoor Asylum for the criminally Insane, in the
village of Crowthorne in the County of Berkshire, and he
was known there officially as File number seven four to
two and was expected to spend the rest of his
(10:07):
life there as a quote certified criminal lunatic. But we
need to describe what his life really was. There was
more than just being a number and a quote certified
criminal lunatic. Yeah, it's it was better than you might expect.
He got to broad Moore on April seventeen, eighteen seventy two,
and according to that account kept by the Berkshire Record
(10:29):
Office that we mentioned in the first part of the podcast,
he was described at the time as a thin, pale
and sharp featured man with light colored sandy hair, deep
set eyes, and prominent cheekbones. He was considered to be
low risk, so he ended up in cell Block two,
which was known unofficially I guess as the Swell Block.
(10:49):
It was like that Swell block cell block. It was
the lowest security cell block and it's where prisoners had
the most privileges. And since Minor was well educated and
a well to do you American, he got special treatment there,
special freedoms and comforts that a lot of inmates probably
didn't get. Almost as soon as he got there, the
American consulate in London, for example, made sure that Minor
(11:11):
was reunited with his possessions, including his own clothes, his
art materials, and his diary. They didn't send him with
his surgical instruments though they catch those. Don't send a
venture of scalpels over to the guy in the sant asylum.
But he also had some money coming in. He had
a regular allowance from his family, which gave him the
ability to buy stuff or have the hospital purchase things
(11:34):
on his behalf. And that made his food a lot better.
You know, he'd have poultry and gain steak, biscuits, coffee,
sometimes even wine and spirits. But it also allowed him
to keep his mind occupied. This was an intellectual man,
and he was able to purchase newspapers, engineering papers. He
(11:54):
might have used those to get some tips on this
dirty building construction, because he was, of course still extremely
troubled by these delusions of people breaking into his room
at night. Um at one point he supposedly even had
his bedroom floors covered with zinc to keep the demons
from coming up through the floorboards while he was asleep.
(12:14):
He would also get a lot of books, and we're
going to talk about that a little bit more in
a second, but many of these books he would have
shipped from New Haven, Connecticut, or ordered from shops in London,
and at some point during his stay there, probably pretty
early on, from what we can tell, Minor was also
given access to two cells a separate day room in
addition to his bedroom, and he converted that day room
(12:35):
into a kind of library lined with bookshelves. So overall
he had this pretty comfortable existence at Broadmore, considering the circumstances,
and he received visits from family and friends, and he
had occasionally dine in the superintendent's home. According to Winchester's book,
he even received visits from Eliza Merritt, who is none
other than the widow of the man he'd shot. She'd
(12:57):
supposedly forgiven him after minor Or settled some money on
her and her children, but whether or not this actually
happened is still up for debate. So Minor might have
just been in this situation with his two cells, all
of his books, his newspapers, engineering papers, spent the rest
of his days. They're unknown, But one day around the
(13:18):
summer of eighteen eighty, while he was reading some of
that material, he came across this sort of press release
and it was called an appeal to readers, and it
was in a book that he'd ordered from a library
in London. So it was basically this request for English
speaking volunteer readers around the world to help out with
a massive publication project that was going on at Oxford University,
(13:43):
which at the time was going to be called the
New English Dictionary, and it was intended to be the biggest,
most thorough collection of English words yet so they needed,
through soliciting, some help for their new dictionary they were writing.
So it seems my Er immediately realized that he was
kind of in the perfect position to contribute here, seeing
(14:04):
as how he had tons of time on his hands,
to read, and he could get new books pretty much
whenever he wanted. So he wrote to James Murray, who
had taken over as editor of the Dictionary project in
eighteen seventy nine, and he's the one who had drafted
that press release we just mentioned, and asked if he
could help out. And as we mentioned in part one
to this podcast, James Murray ended up being the Oxford
(14:25):
English Dictionaries editor for forty years and was also its
greatest and most famous editor. He's a really interesting character
and probably deserves a podcast in his own right. Though
he was around miners age, very intelligent and he loved learning,
but he came from a poor family and had to
quit school at fourteen, so he was basically self taught,
which I think is pretty amazing considering all he accomplished.
(14:46):
And I mean by self taught, you mean he knew
lots of languages and astronomy, not just like he was
an informed man. Yes, exactly. He was very highly regarded
for his knowledge. But of course we're focusing on minor
story here, so we'll just tell a little bit about
the Dictionary so you'll understand exactly how Minor was helping
out from his cell in broadmore so. This Grand Dictionary
(15:08):
project actually started in eighteen fifty seven with three members
of London's Philological Society, Richard Trench, Herbert Coleridge and Frederick Fernival,
who saw some serious deficiencies in the dictionaries that have
been published so far, including those by Webster, which we
talked about a little bit in the previous podcast. Samuel
Johnson and Charles Richardson. They had two main problems with
(15:32):
these existing dictionaries. On one hand, they didn't think that
they were comprehensive enough. For example, some just included very
difficult words, so word if you would need to look
up in the dictionary exactly, and they felt a dictionary
should really include every word in the English language. They
also felt that every word, along with a definition, should
have an authoritative etymology, So quotations from literary passages that
(15:56):
would illustrate every meaning of every single word include ing.
And this was a key point. One meaning one quotation
I should say that illustrated the words earliest known usage
in English. I try to wrap your mind around that
for a minute. I mean, I think that's important before
we go on, imagine trying to find that earliest usage
(16:17):
through every book printed in English and not have any
sort of search engine capabilities. Of course, real people would
have to go through these books reading and looking for
the words. So of course, since there will be a
lot of words included, and each word might need the
support of several quotations, there was no practical way that
(16:40):
a dictionary staff could handle all of that on their own.
So the plan was to involve these unpaid volunteer readers,
enthusiastic readers, I guess, from all over the English speaking world.
And that was the announcement that Minor saw in the
paper for the book. So in that article in the
Nation by Joshua Kendall that we referenced in the previous episode,
(17:01):
he compares it to quote what we now know of
as the wiki model of creating and disseminating knowledge, which
I think is a really cool way to think about it.
It makes it all makes sense when you think about
it like that. We do have this modern way to
look to look at it, to compare it something, to
compare it to yeah, wiki without the Internet exactly. So,
(17:22):
for a number of reasons, real work on the dictionary
didn't get going until Murray came on board in eighteen
seventy nine, and even then it was really slow going.
For example, it took until eighteen eighty four to publish
the first volume, which was a to aunt, so very slow,
very slow going. But still this wiki model of um
collecting illustrative quotations was pretty successful. You know, they were
(17:46):
getting a lot of real work done, and they ended
up getting millions of contributions from volunteers in England, Ireland,
Scotland and the United States, people who would send in
quotations from books and magazines and newspapers, and like we mentioned,
you know, they were trying to go for the earliest
known youth. Some of these went back as far as
(18:07):
the ninth century. And it was to this aspect of
the dictionary that Minor was contributing. So he didn't really
do any defining like he had done for Websters. But
as we've mentioned several times, he did become one of
Murray's best contributors. He'd send in these small cards with
quotations on them. By the thousand and eventually more. His
personal library contained a lot of rare sixteenth and seventeenth
(18:29):
century books in particular, and he'd searched through these for
appropriate quotes and he even went a step further and
would sometimes ask the O E ed editors what word
they were working on, and then find quotes to go
with those specific words. And I mean, just thinking about
that makes my head hurt. That you would get a list,
maybe a short list, of a few words they were
(18:50):
working on, and then go look through your entire library
for that word. I just I can't imagine. So in eighteen,
Ury said that Minor had sent in quote No. Less
than twelve thousand quotes and added quote so enormous have
been Dr Miner's contributions during the past seventeen or eighteen
(19:11):
years that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries
from his quotations alone. So it's no wonder that Murray
really wanted to meet Minor along the way, this guy
who was contributing so much to the dictionary. But their
first meeting probably didn't take place quite like that dramatic
legend that I think I've compared it to Wilkie Collins.
(19:34):
It sounded like a Wilkie Collins set up um that
we related at the beginning of part one of this
podcast um, the one that was published in The Strand
in nineteen fifteen. That sensationalized account has the two meeting
in eighteen ninety seven after Minor failed to attend the
Great Dictionary Dinner, which sounds fun, thrown at Queen's College
(19:55):
in Murray's honor to celebrate the dictionaries progress. And according
to that ledge, and this was the first time Murray
realized that his favorite contributor was actually an inmate in
a mental asylum. But Winchester's research kind of turned up
something different. Yeah. Both through his research and the discovery
of a letter written by Dr Murray and the Broadmore archives,
(20:15):
we can see that Murray, though we might have thought
that Minor was just a retired doctor or doctor in
the asylum at first, he probably was clued into Minor's
actual situation by the late eighteen eighties and probably visited
him as soon as eighteen ninety one rather than eighteen
ninety seven. Murray was always really sensitive to minor situation,
though apparently never letting him know that he knew that
(20:38):
Minor was mentally ill, so the to form this kind
of friendship that went beyond their working relationship. Murray even
visited Minor on several occasions, though it's unclear according to
the Broadmore records exactly how often that occurred. Murray would
supposedly telegraph ahead, however, to find out what Miner's exact
mood was before visiting, and he would avoid coming if
(20:59):
Minor was especially angry at the time. But when he
did visit, they have these very cozy experience is kind
of like two well respected colleagues hanging out together. Mury
and Minor would sit in minors day room and have
some tea and have some cake in front of the fire,
just like it was a normal kind of situation, just
catching up friends hanging out. So you'd think that maybe
(21:21):
this friendship and having a purpose in the form of
his dictionary work would have been really good for Minor's
mental state, but his paranoid delusions just continued to get worse.
He'd think that he was being drugged at night with chloroform,
or tortured with electricity, or kidnapped from the asylum at
night to be abused, so that nightly sexual abuse was
still a big part of it, and he'd even tried
(21:43):
to barricade his room at night to protect himself and
around the turn of the twentieth century, on December third,
nineteen o two. To be exact, he experienced a major
setback that morning. He actually mutilated his own genitals, and
it seemed to be a desperate attempt to kind of
put a stop to the indecent acts that he thought
he was being forced to do every night. When asked
(22:05):
why he did it, he said he did it quote
an interests of morality. So after that he was kept
in the infirmary for four months and then sent back
to his rooms. But the delusions just persisted, and as
the years went by, he continued to get worse mentally
and work less and less, and also his health started
to decline. So a lot of people, including Murray, began
(22:28):
to petition for his release to his family, and at
first these petitions were denied, but the government finally relented
in nineteen ten and then granted Miners release and ordered
that he be deported back to the States. So Murray,
who had by that time been knighted for his work
in the Dictionary, and his wife visited Miner one last
(22:50):
time right before Miner left the country on April fifteenth,
nineteen ten, and he brought along a court photographer to
document this last his final meeting between two friends and
two really influential contributors to what was going to be
a famous dictionary. Murray was accompanied back to the States
(23:11):
on a steamer by his brother Alfred, but it was
really a long time before he actually made it home
to Connecticut. He he immediately went back to that hospital
for the Insane in d C. That he was at previously,
which is now Sat Elizabeth's, and he spent almost ten
years there, kind of in the same way that he
had lived at Broadmore as a privileged in may who
(23:32):
still had nightly outbursts. So his problems kind of continued
to progress, and in between he would sort of spend
his day's reading and painting and doing, you know, his
activities that he enjoyed, but still in ill health. Yeah.
So by nineteen nineteen though, he was finally allowed to
go back to Connecticut to be near his family, and
he died there March nineteen twenty um, you know, having
(23:57):
been in prison the majority of his life by that point,
or the hospital rather so, even though he lived the
life of anonymity while he was locked away for so
many years, his name is still pretty well known. It's
still in the preface to the Oxford English Dictionary in fact, yeah,
which ultimately that dictionary took seventy years to complete. It
(24:20):
was completed in nineteen eight, which was a decade after
Murray's death. And I think I found I saw this
in that Nation article that we mentioned, give us some status,
some stats to kind of boggle the mind. In the end,
the first edition, not including the supplements that were published after,
but that first edition, published in nineteen had four hundred
(24:40):
and fourteen thousand, eight hundred twenty five headwords, so to speak,
defined by one million, eight hundred twenty seven thousand, three
hundred and six illustrative quotations over fifteen thousand, four hundred
ninety pages. Pretty incredible, very incredible, And it sounds like
(25:00):
Minor was a pretty significant part of all of that.
So in recent years consequently, more people have taken an
interest in his life. And of course there's Winchester's book
that you mentioned in the beginning, and there's maybe even
gonna be a movie. Do you have any more info
on that. I don't have any more info on that.
When you look it up, it just says that the
movie The Professor and the Madman is in development. Apparently
(25:24):
mel Gibson bought the rights to the movie in nine
and they've gone through a couple of different directors I think,
and they're working on it, but I don't know when
it's supposed to come out, but I think that'll be
an interesting one to see when it does. Yeah, it
sounds like it would be a fantastic movie. Actually, I'm
imagining the how you dramatize the dictionary writing scenes though,
(25:46):
sort of like computer movies, they have to have scenes
of like rapid typing, maybe page flipping through country book. Yeah,
you'll have to really make looking upwards interesting. But I
guess hopefully we'll get to see that down the road.
And as I mentioned, somebody did bring up this book
on Facebook, so we wouldn't just throw it out there
again like we always do. If you guys have read
(26:07):
any cool historical books or have any other ideas that
you want us to podcast develop, please write us Where
History Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com, or you can
look us up on Facebook, of course, or at Twitter
at mist in History. So I think I'm gonna head
off and start maybe planning a great dictionary dinner because
that sounds truly, it just sounds good. Yeah, you don't
want to do the dictionary research. But you want to
(26:29):
have a dictionary dinner. I think everybody could come as
a word never know. That would be fun. Oh I
like that? All right, I'll invite you to Blina. So
if you're not going to go plan your own dictionary party,
we do have an article written by Molly Edmonds called
how Can You Tell if You're Mentally Ill? And you
can find it by searching for that title on our
(26:51):
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com
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