As it is such a quiet week in the world of public affairs, I turn for my topic to the world of scholarship. I must begin with a personal confession. I enjoyed the privilege of a superb university education over a period of nearly a decade at three fine institutions without ever spending a dime. What may sound like a boast is actually a cause of long-standing anxiety. How many people have had a life’s career getting paid to do work that wild horses could not stop them from attempting? That our country is in a perilous condition only the most foolish optimist could deny. But I, personally, must be eternally grateful for the opportunities it has afforded me and so many others like me. Beyond that, one is moved to contemplate the extraordinary ways in which our civilization continues to advance through the generosity of philanthropists.
One of the great men of the English Middle Ages, at least so far as I am concerned, was John Peckham, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1279. He died in 1292. In the old history books one often encounters the phrase “an obscure youth”—or “a person of humble origins,” usually meaning a young person of such social insignificance that historians have been able to find few if any written records of his family relations or, often, of his very existence. My own incipient scholarly ambitions suffered a terrible blow when, as a teenager, I read Hardy’s terminally offputting novel Jude the Obscure. It is the story of a brilliant young man of great scholarly potential overwhelmed by poverty, the rigidities of class prejudice, and the “biological trap” of fatherhood. We have lots of obscure and humble youth in our country today, but by the age of twenty practically every one of them has amassed a documentary archive of census, school, and health records, however banal, thicker than that which the Duke of Wellington could have produced in 1790. Of Peckham we know practically nothing. Given the fact that he became an eminent churchman, that paradoxically means we can safely surmise quite a lot.
We suppose that he may have been born, probably around 1235, in or near the village of Peckham, now part of the city of Brighton on the Sussex coast. But there’s another Peckham in Kent, so…In order to have a family name, you first had to have a family. Otherwise you were simply from somewhere or you did something for a living. The latter is where all our Bakers, Barbers, Smiths, Thatchers, Farmers, and Fishers eventually come from. Our guess is that John simply was born in Peckham, doubtless in common with numerous other obscure Johns Peckham. We do know that his early education was at Lewis Priory, a rich and aristocratic Cluniac house very near Peckham. This could have been obtained only through the patronage of a person or persons who recognized his extraordinary intellectual gifts. He can hardly have been more than a child when he spent some time at the Franciscan friary in Oxford, and departed for the University of Paris, where he became the personal student of Saint Bonaventure and built his own brilliant academic career. It was inevitable that he himself would become a Franciscan, and one of the ornaments of the Order during some of its most glorious decades. Theologians tend to write books of theology, and Peckham wrote several. But he was also a cutting-edge scientist of his time, the author of a book on optics, and a very fine Latin poet. His Philomena (“The Nightingale”) is one of the greatest religious poems written by an Englishman. Though he commanded the admiration of kings and princes, he was hardly a social climber. They practically had to waterboard him to accept the highest ecclesiastical office in the land. What he really wanted to do was teach and pray. So here’s to the unknown benefactor who paid for a peasant’s upkeep at the Lewes Grammar School!
Not all proletarian scholars turned out so saintly. There is the famous instance of Eugene Aram (1704-1759) one of the more prominent murderers of the eighteenth century. Aram was a lowlife genius born into the beautiful provinciality of the Yorkshire dales. His special gifts, frequently found among famous autodidacts, were linguistic. His life was full of hard knocks. He knocked around England doing unsatisfying odd jobs but reading so widely and voraciously through the night that he soon felt qualified to open a small school back in Yorkshire, where he unfortunately also entered a disastrous marriage as a result of knocking up a local girl. Aram, alas, had no benefactor, known or unknown. Mainly on his own, working in the dead of night, he immersed himself deeply in ancient tongues, including Hebrew and the Celtic tongues of Britain. This was not his only mode of moonlighting, however. His involvement in a shady deal bordering on a heist eventuated in his commission of a murder. He fled, and successfully hid out for some time on the Norfolk coast, but was eventually discovered, dragged back to Yorkshire, tried, convicted and hanged. In the meantime he had become one of the most learned linguists in Europe. His memorialist in the Dictionary of National Biography, Richard Garnett, the literary scholar, wrote thus: “It is hardly too much to say that had he enjoyed wealth and leisure he might have advanced the study of comparative philology by fifty years.” He is remembered not in the annals of scholarship but in a creepy ballad, once much admired, by Thomas Hood, and in the novel Eugene Aram by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a prolific and popular Victorian author from whom Snoopy plagiarized the great opening line It was a dark and stormy night…
Watching the Downton Abbey series and now Victoria suggests to me that the high point of obnoxiousness in British snobbery, slowly maturing in its refinement from the time of King Canute, probably arrived only with the turn of the twentieth century. This is a fact that makes the career of Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge (1857-1934) all the more remarkable. Budge was a genuine bastard in the days when bastardy was a disastrous social condition rather than just a nondescript insult. His mother was the daughter of a servant in a hotel in Bodmin, in the West Country. Presumably she knew who his father was, but as she wasn’t talking, the question stayed moot. Compared with young Ernie, Jude the Obscure was a blueblood. Budge was a shy, chubby kid who, at about the age of ten, developed an eccentric passion for the study of Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Assyrian cuneiforms, topics commanding only limited interest in the social circles of his peers. By the operations of good fortune—I generally prefer the term Providence—Budge’s precocious erudition came to the attention of powerful patrons. Having moved to London and taken up a humdrum job in the City, he generally spent his supposed lunch hour studying Assyriology in nearby St. Paul’s Cathedral. Over time he became friendly with the composer John Stainer, the cathedral organist, who recognized the lad’s promise. Stainer approached two of his political buddies, Gladstone and W. H. Smith, scion of the newsagent/bookstore chain, who bankrolled Budge at Cambridge and then helped him secure his life-long position in the British Museum.
Many curators and librarians of that age were the scholarly equals or superiors of chaired university professors, and Budge became one of the greatest Egyptologists of his time. He was active in the field as archaeologist and entrepreneur of antiquities, and his publication record is prodigious. I first discovered him in my own area of medieval religious history through his sumptuous edition and translation of the Syriac versions of the literature of the Desert Fathers. I am even now in the process of rebinding for a friend his facsimile edition of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The study of those ancient civilizations that somehow captured the imagination of an obscure English schoolboy has of course moved on in the last century, and much of Budge’s work now seems quaint and outmoded. That is the common fate of most scholarship, but should I (as I hope) ever return again to England, I shall continue to buy my newspapers and my Cadbury bars exclusively at W. H. Smith’s.
