Joseph Crabtree (fictional polymath)
Joseph Crabtree is the name of a late 18th / early 19th century poet and polymath revealed in the early 1950s by scholars at University College London. In February 1954 Professor James Sutherland, delivered an oration to a group of interested scholars which was entitled “Homage to Crabtree”. The meeting was presided over by Professor Hugh Smith, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at UCL, and twenty-four scholars were present. The proceedings of the "Crabtree Foundation" thus founded have been collected together and were published as the Crabtree Orations in 1997. Aside from its home at University College London, the Crabtree Foundation has also opened chapters at Monash University in Victoria, Australia, in Lisbon, Portugal and in Florence, Italy.
Biography
Joseph Crabtree (born in 1754, at Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, and died in 1854, at Haworth, Yorkshire) was a British poet, polymath and sometime banker and brewer whose life and career have been developed through the research of the scholars and orators of the Crabtree Foundation at University College London from 1954 to the present day. Crabtree 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 eclipsed until Professors Hugh Smith and James Sutherland brought him to the attention of University College London during the centenary of his death. 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 accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage in the Endeavour as a "flute boy". 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, 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 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 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.
Notable achievements
As a polymath, Crabtree is credited with a great number of achievements in many fields, literary, scientific and artistic. Orations by eminent scholars in their field have demonstrated how important Crabtree has been to their own research. Sir James Lighthill, formerly Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, for instance, adduced 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.
Dinner and oration
Scholars (members) of the Crabtree Foundation meet annually to venerate his life. Scholars are admitted to the Foundation when it is deemed that they possess the potential for revelation concerning Crabtree's life. In one notable case, a scholar was even spoken to by the spirit of Joseph Crabtree. 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.