Coal

Languages learned this week: 2 and counting

Jan 25, 13:26 Misc

As anyone with academic experience knows, the world is filled with great men (and occasionally women) whose early life biographies are tales of hardship, discipline, and ultimately, distinction. One studies and ponders these biographies, and it’s hard not to think that if you don’t know fifteen languages, play five instruments, and haven’t published anything by by the time you’re about 16, you might as well throw in the towel and become a plumber, or maybe a writer of other people’s bios.

And then this.

I’m reading Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, who pretty much fits the above description of a dedicated young genius. Impressive, yes, but it’s a story I’ve heard before. What stopped my pulse was a teacher of his named Joseph Wright, who is a story of another kind altogether.

Joe Wright was a Yorkshireman, a truly self-made man who had worked his way up from the humblest origins to become a Professor of Comparative Philology. He had been employed in a woollenmill from the age of six, and at first this gave him no chance to learn to read and write. But by the time he was fifteen he was jealous of his workmates who could understand the newspapers, so he taught himself his letters. This did not take very long and only increased his desire to learn, so he went to night-school and studied French and German. He also taught himself Latin and mathematics, sitting over his books until two in the morning and rising again at five to set out for work. By the time he was eighteen he felt that it was his duty to pass on his knowledge to others, so he began a nightschool in the bedroom of his widowed mother’s cottage, charging his workmates twopence a week for tuition…

...And so on, until he arrives some years later at Oxford and becomes a distinguished professor of Philology.

If that doesn’t make a man feel like he’s wasting his life away, I don’t know what would.