Joseph Crabtree
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Joseph Crabtree (also known by the pseudonyms Joseph de la Pommeraye and Giuseppe Maria Silvestri) is the name of a fictitious late 18th / early 19th century poet and polymath revealed in the early 1950s by scholars at University College London.[1] In February 1954, Professor James Sutherland delivered an oration to a group of interested scholars entitled "Homage to Crabtree". The meeting was presided over by Hugh Smith, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL, with 24 scholars present.[1] That first meeting formed the basis of the "Crabtree Foundation", which has met regularly since then with scholars presenting new orations expanding on the fictional life of Crabtree. The orations have been gathered into a pair of volumes titled Crabtree Orations 1954 - 1994 and Crabtree Orations 1995 - 2003. The Crabtree Foundation has expanded from its roots at UCL to chapters at Monash University in Victoria, Australia,[2] in Lisbon, Portugal and in Florence, Italy.[3] Anthony Michaelis has described Crabtree as "the greatest and most successful academic spoof ever conceived.",[4] although claims that Crabtree is a hoax are vigorously denied by scholars who talk of a "conspiracy of silence" in all matters concerning Crabtree prior to 1954.[1]
Dinner and oration
Scholars (members) of the Crabtree Foundation meet annually to venerate his life. There are now over 400 scholars of the Foundation, and scholars, in the first President’s words, “scattered as they are over the face of the world”, have established overseas chapters in Australia, Portugal, Italy and Southern Africa each of which holds its own annual celebration of Joseph Crabtree. Their findings have established the international scope and diversity of Crabtree’s life and achievements.
Character biography
| Joseph Crabtree | |
|---|---|
| File:Joseph Crabtree.jpg Painting of Joseph Crabtree held by UCL | |
| Information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Occupation | Poet, polymath |
| Religion | Methodist |
| Nationality | British |
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Joseph Crabtree (born in 1754, at Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, and died in 1854, at Haworth, Yorkshire) has been described as a poet, polymath and sometime banker and brewer. He is said to have met and influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Johnson, William Blake, and Alfred Lord Tennyson, among others. Notionally well known before the twentieth century, his reputation was supposedly eclipsed until Professors Hugh Smith and James Sutherland brought him to the attention of University College London during the centenary of his death. As such, Crabtree's contributions to philosophy, science, art, mathematics, literature, publishing, criminology and brewing, among many others, would have placed him at a pivotal position in the history of the Age of Enlightenment.
Early life
Joseph Crabtree's story begins with his birth into a Methodist family by breech birth in 1754. His early life is marked by a number of interactions with key philosophical and luminary figures of the age, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who sent the eight-year-old Crabtree's mother a copy of his work on education, Emile. Aged 14, in 1768, Crabtree, we are told, accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage in the Endeavour as a "flute boy".[5] In 1770, he attended Eton College under the pseudonym of Burke, only to be expelled the following year for lampooning the headmaster. At the age of nineteen, it is said that he was sent down from Oxford University, after writing satirical verses aimed at his tutor, Jacob Jefferson, who subsequently expunged young Crabtree's name from the matriculation list.
Literary influences
Crabtree purportedly influenced a number of literary luminaries, including Goethe, whom he met in Rome in 1785 while travelling under the name of Tischbein. This meeting could well have, so the Orations tell us, led Crabtree into an affair with Emma Harte, about whom he wrote love poems which Goethe published in German in 1795 under the title of Erotica Romana. With William Wordsworth, he appears to have had a rapport which saw him invited to stay at Porlock in 1798, where he also is said to have met Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the time of the latter's supposed composition of Kubla Khan, a stay which ultimately led to his persuading Wordsworth to quantify certain lines in Tintern Abbey and The Thorn.[5]
Notable achievements
As a polymath, Crabtree is credited with a great number of achievements in many fields, literary, scientific and artistic. Crabtree Orations by many eminent scholars have included assertions of Crabtree's importance to their own research. Sir James Lighthill, formerly Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, for instance, gave a lecture on Crabtree's Theorem as the solution of a quintic equation that cannot be expressed through a formula involving a finite number of additions, multiplications, divisions and extractions of roots.[6][Notes 1]
Bibliography
- Bennett, Bryan (1997). The Crabtree Orations 1954-1994. London: Crabtree Foundation. ISBN 0-9529987-0-X. Unknown parameter
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- Bennett, Bryan (2004). The Crabtree Orations 1995-2003. London: Crabtree Foundation. ISBN 0-9529987-1-8. Unknown parameter
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Notes
- ↑ For an understanding of the farcical nature of this issue, see Abel–Ruffini theorem.
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 http://www.ucl.ac.uk/crabtree/index
- ↑ http://stephendownes.com/?p=29
- ↑ http://www.paoloalbani.it/Crabtree.html
- ↑ Anthony R. Michaelis, The Scientific Temper: An Anthology of Stories on Matters of Science, title 330. Accessed 7 Nov 2014
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 See THE CRABTREE ORATIONS, 1954-1994, edited by Bryan Bennett & Negley Harte (1997).
- ↑ See THE CRABTREE ORATIONS, 1954-1994, edited by Bryan Bennett & Negley Harte (1997), pp.236-44.
External links
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