John Selby Watson

The Reverend John Selby Watson (April 1804 – 6 July 1884) was a British classical translator and murderer. He was sentenced to death in 1872 for killing his wife, but a public outcry led to his sentence being reduced to life imprisonment. The case is notable for Watson's use of a plea of insanity as his defence, bringing "the insanity defense into perhaps its greatest prominence since M'Naghten."

Career Watson was born at Crayford. He was educated by an uncle and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin in 1838. He was ordained Deacon by the Bishop of Ely in 1839 and married Anne Armstrong in January 1845 at St. Marks, Dublin. Due to his poverty Watson had been engaged to Anne for quite a number of years before they could marry. where he became the headmaster of Stockwell Grammar School. Because of falling pupil numbers he was laid off in 1870. In the words of Martin J. Wiener, "the incongruity of the offense and the lack of any lesser defense pushed the system to a controversial finding of "temporary" insanity to prevent the unedifying spectacle of the hanging of a clergyman of the Church of England. In a sense, in Watson's case, provocation (by his wife, under the stress of his forced retirement) had been reconceived as temporary insanity." Biographies of John Wilkes and William Cobbett The Reasoning Power in Animals, 1867

Translations Anabasis by Xenophon Xenophon's Minor Works: Literally Translated from the Greed with Notes and Illustrations Conspiracy of Catiline and the Jugurthine War by Sallust On the Nature of Things by Lucretius Carus Lives of Eminent Commanders by Cornelius Nepos Historia Philippicae et Totius Mundi Origines et Terrae Situs by Justin, 1853 Cicero on Oratory and Orators by Marcus Tullius Cicero, 1855 Institutes of Oratory by Quintilian, 1856