'Inevitable Gaps in His Knowledge'

I discovered a happy tidbit in Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Allen Lane, 2018) by Andrew Roberts. While stationed in India from 1896 to 1898, Churchill imposed on himself a rigorous regimen of self-improvement. Roberts quotes a source who says, “He decided to be better informed. He began to spend after-siesta time lying on his charpoy [bed] reading.” Roberts refers to Churchill’s “supremely ambitious reading programme which within two years was to leave him easily as well read as those of his contemporaries who had gone to Oxford or Cambridge.” But the news gets better:

“Churchill’s reading programme began with Edward Gibbon’s 4,000-page The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire -- which he was to re-read twice more over the course of his life, and parts of which he could quote from memory. He followed it with Gibbon’s autobiography and then read Macaulay’s six-volume History of England, which he loved (except for the attacks on the 1^st Duke of Marlborough) and the Lays of Ancient Rome. After that he read Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Republic, and the key texts of Schopenhauer, Malthus, Darwin, Adam Smith [and so forth].”

Roberts notes that though “the sheer breadth of his reading was astonishing,” Churchill read no novels. Odd, given that the novel was reaching its peak of literary supremacy just before and during his lifetime. Churchill’s ambitious and highly idiosyncratic reading resulted in the inevitable spottiness that can afflict the self-taught:

“[His] autodidacticism meant that there were inevitable gaps in his knowledge. As late as 1906 he had not heard of Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ and he confused the poet William Blake with the admiral Robert Blake. But once this was pointed out, a friend recorded, ‘the next time I met him, he had learned not merely this, but all the odes of Keats by heart – and he recited them to me mercilessly from start to finish, not sparing me a syllable!’”

On Friday, I mentioned to an electrical engineer I work with that Abraham Lincoln is the only American president to hold a patent. While navigating flatboats on the Mississippi River, he devised a device for “buoying vessels over shoals.”  My colleague said, “I had no idea that Lincoln had a mechanical bent.” Today, we’re astonished that before our age of specialization and advanced degrees, people often possessed multiple gifts, any one of which might sustain a career today. Churchill, of course, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values."