God’s Fugitive. Andrew Taylor

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СКАЧАТЬ though still an undergraduate, been making the social contacts necessary for a career in science. He had cultivated not just the acquaintance of Sir Charles Lyell himself, but also that of several other worthies of the British Association and the Royal Geographical Society. And, most important of all, if he had been disappointed not to be given a scholarship by Downing, he was still confidently expected to gain a first-class degree.

      But in December 1865 those expectations were dashed. Doughty found himself near the top of the second class in the Cambridge Tripos examinations – although it seems that his examiners were at least as disappointed as he was with the result. More than fifty years later Professor Thomas George Bonney, then Professor of Geology at London University, said of his distinguished pupil: ‘I was very sorry not to be able to give him a First, as he had such a dishevelled mind. If you asked him for a collar, he upset his whole wardrobe at your feet.’³³ It would not be the last time in his life that Doughty would be criticized for hurling facts at his readers by the handful.

      But while such an examination result would have been a setback, it would not necessarily have prevented him from following a career as a scientist, particularly as he still enjoyed the financial support of his father’s legacy. Doughty, though, seems to have changed his priorities during that final year at Cambridge: although he prepared his report on Jostedal-Brae for its full publication, he had abandoned any thought of making his name through science.

      A letter written to him shortly before his final examinations by the Revd Henry Hardinge, the rector of Theberton, seems to confirm that he still had grandiose plans – the adolescent boy who had been turned down by the navy clearly still thought in the same patriotic terms of serving his country. Hardinge refers to Doughty’s ‘researches and noble ambition as regards this earth’, and goes on to praise his determination to ‘soar above the vanities of this world and take a place among the worthies who have lived for its adornment and the real glory of God’.³⁴ But the researches and noble ambition would be directed at literature: though science and geology would remain among his interests, his life, he had decided, would be devoted to writing. He left the university with his second-class degree, no firm plans for a career, and a brief formal note of introduction from Bonney.

      Doughty, after all, could afford high-flown ambition: there was no pressing need to find a way of earning his living. His education had not been designed to fit him for a career, unless perhaps, like his father, as a parson in one of the Suffolk livings. His inheritance should have enabled him to live a life of comfortable scholarship. For fifteen years his financial affairs had been cautiously managed, with his father’s old friend, Henry Southwell of Saxmundham, and his own uncle and guardian, Frederick Goodwin Doughty, acting as trustees. Now, with his studies behind him, he could take up the rights that had passed to him on his twenty-first birthday. He had both the power and the leisure to handle his wealth himself.

      What he does not seem to have had was luck or shrewdness: over the next three or four years his inheritance simply withered away. He was never to show the remotest financial acumen, and it is significant that the collapse of his financial affairs should have come just after he took over the active management of his investments from his father’s trustees.

      Neither Doughty nor anyone else in his family would ever say exactly what happened. Fifty years later the memory of the collapse clearly still hurt: asked about stories of his past involvement in the printing industry, he replied shortly, ‘Printing I conceived of in my early inexperience as an adjunct to literature, but I was deceived in that matter, and was somewhat of a victim. Therefore it would not be kind to mention it.’³⁵

      His widow would only speak generally of ‘depreciation of investments’ – but the overall effect was that the rest of Doughty’s life was passed in a state of genteel poverty. Years after his death she turned down the offer of financial help for herself and her daughters from her husband’s friends: ‘Really we are much better off than a good many people … I think Rubber will recover in time; I have put up half the grounds for sale; if a small bungalow is built it won’t hurt us, but so far, I’ve had no success there. I sold 5 dozen spoons and forks for £17 …’³⁶ Her husband’s books, respected as they were, made little money: financially, he simply never recovered from the crushing blow of his early twenties.

      Doughty’s response at the time was to bury himself in his books. The letter of recommendation he had taken with him from Cambridge had been addressed to the Library of Winchester College, probably because of some personal connection of Bonney’s; but he used it, and his standing as a graduate, to gain entrance to the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

      His name first appears in the Bodleian’s records on 1 December 1868; and for the next fourteen months he was an assiduous reader there. He was, he said later, a solitary man, and entirely dependent now on his own resources to direct his studies – but a glance down the list of books he was reading at the time demonstrates that he had already established where his primary interests lay. There is nothing of modern science – and precious little as late as the seventeenth century.

      There is Gavin Douglas’s translation of The Aeneid, published in 1553; several books of medieval songs and ballads; a number of Anglo-Saxon grammars and dictionaries; commentaries on the Bible, catechisms and sermons. Doughty was immersing himself in the distant past. Above all, he was reading Spenser and Chaucer, the two poets he believed all his life had reached the uncontested summit of English literature. It was they, he told an interviewer not long before he died,³⁷ who finally decided him upon a life dedicated to poetry.

      When, at the end of his life, he completed Mansoul, which he firmly believed to be his greatest work, he declared: ‘I have not borrowed from any former writer; save I hope something of the breath of my beloved, Master Edmund Spenser, with a reverend glance backward to good old Dan Chaucer …’³⁸ It was at the Bodleian, as he threw himself wholeheartedly into the new life of a poor scholar, that he first made their acquaintance.

      But there is one book among the volumes of ancient history and literature which seems slightly out of place. Of the works of the seventeenth-century writer George Sandys Doughty chose neither his translations of Ovid, nor his poems based on the Psalms and the Passion, but his travel writing, A Relation of His Journey to the Levant.³⁹

      Possibly he was struck by the similarities between his own position and that of his Jacobean predecessor, who came, like him, from a background of well-connected country gentlefolk with naval antecedents. Sandys, too, had been a literary man and an academic – and in 1610, at the age of thirty-two, he had set off on a journey that took him through Europe and into the Middle East.

      The two years of wanderings described in Sandys’s book took him through France, Italy, Egypt, the Middle East and Malta. He gazed with a slightly bilious eye on the ancient wonders of the pyramids and of the city of Troy; he was robbed and manhandled by angry Muslims in the towns of Palestine and as he journeyed by caravan across the desert; he was fascinated by the habits and beliefs of the common people who were his companions.

      There were moral and religious lessons to be drawn from his travels. The naturally rich lands of the Middle East, he wrote, were now waste, overgrown with bushes, and full of wild beasts, thieves and murderers. It was a country in which Christianity – ‘true religion’ – was discountenanced and oppressed: ‘Which calamities of theirs, so greatly deserved, are to the rest of the world as threatening instructions … thence to draw a right image of the frailty of man, and the mutability of whatever is worldly.’ The thought, and its expression, could almost have come from the СКАЧАТЬ