The nature of the possible mental ailments that plagued Minor, and which may have been triggered by his experiences during the war, are comprehensively explained by Gordon Claridge in Origins of Mental Illness: Temperament, Deviance and Disorder (Oxford University Press, 1985). Andrew Scull’s splendid Masters of Bedlam (Princeton University Press, 1996) offers a fascinating history of the mad-doctoring trade before the times of psychiatric enlightenment.
I looked to Roy Porter – also an expert on madness and its treatment – for his rightly acclaimed social history of the city where Minor committed his murder: London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994) sets the scene admirably, and remains one of the best books on England’s remarkable capital.
But the one book that above all should be read in conjunction with this small volume is one of the biggest and most impressive works of scholarship to be found – the twelve-volume first edition, the 1933 supplement, the four-volume supplements of Robert Burchfield or the fully integrated twenty-volume second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary itself.
It makes for an expensive and bulky set of books – which is why nowadays the CD – ROM is much preferred – but it does, most importantly of all to his fans, acknowledge formally the existence and contributions of William Chester Minor. And I find that somehow the simple discovery of his name, buried as it is among the contributors who helped to make the OED the great totem that it remains today, is always an intensely touching moment. While it is of course in and of itself no justification for ever needing to own the great book, the finding of the name presents perhaps the finest of examples of the kind of serendipitous moment for which the OED is justly famous. And few would disagree that serendipity, in dictionaries, is a most splendid thing indeed.