Genius Fan

When you read books about the Eighteenth century, the lives of their authors are often equally fascinating. Usually the interest comes from their time spent during one of the world wars. Robert William Chapman (1881-1960) is one such scholar-author – of literary history. If you read about James Boswell and Samuel Johnson you will almost certainly have come across RW Chapman; he’s the editor of the first edition to bring together into a single volume the accounts of Boswell and Johnson’s 1773 Scottish tour. That’s how I discovered him, following up that very bibliographic distinction. Last year I bought a second hand copy of his Tour to the Hebrides published in 1924, exactly one hundred years after first publication. (Very satisfying!) It’s a volume that’s printed on bible-like paper (nice), and has some heft, though not enough to make it into that ridiculous post about book heft that I made back in May.

In the preface to that book he writes, “This edition was planned, and in great part executed, in Macedonia, in the summer of 1918.” He was 36-years-of-age and part of the British Salonika Army (along with others from across the British Empire) in northern Greece from 1915-1918 to fight the combined forces of Austria, Germany and Bulgaria. His description of the six inch gun he operated is evocative, but it’s the picture of his scholarly activities during his downtime that’s truly captivating. He writes, “…here, in the long hot afternoons, when ‘courage was useless and enterprise impracticable’, a temporary gunner, in a khaki shirt and shorts, might be found collating the three editions of the Tour to the Hebrides, or re-reading A Journey to the Western Islands in the hope of finding a corruption in the text.” It’s a brilliant little vignette in the life of a scholar who, it turns out, was fighting the enemy, researching a groundbreaking book AND knocking out articles for the Times Literary Supplement and others which he collected and published in 1920 in a book called The portrait of a scholar, and other essays written in Macedonia, 1916-1918. (Incidentally, RW Chapman also appears as a ‘player’ in the story by which Boswell’s Fettercairn Papers were revealed to the world. That’s my post about Claude Colleer Abbott and the second part which has still to be written…in the coming weeks.)

Notes
Tour to the Hebrides, RW Chapman (1924)
The portrait of a scholar, and other essays written in Macedonia, 1916-1918, RW Chapman (1920)