Description
Feel sorry for Gilbert Collins, Chartist Bank Clerk who taught himself Greek but could not afford the books from which to learn Arabic. He was one of the best friends of Thomas Cooper, who writes about him in ch. 11 of his THE LIFE OF THOMAS COOPER WRITTEN BY HIMSELF (1897). During the years 1836-8 Cooper was working as a radical journalist in Lincoln:
‘Gilbert Collins became my most frequent companion and closest friend in Lincoln. He was, at first, a clerk in the Old Bank, and afterwards manager of the Hull Branch Bank, at Lincoln. We were nearly of an age; had been attached to the same religious denomination, and had left it; and had an equally strong attachment to the study of languages. Collins had learned Latin at school, and had taught himself Greek, and had translated for himself the entire Iliad and Odyssey. Of the Greek Testament, he had a more perfect knowledge than any one I ever knew. He was laboriously constructing a Harmony of the Four Gospels, in Greek, when I knew him; and you could not mention a Greek text in the Gospels, but he would give you the context, in a moment. He was also a chess-player; and we sometimes spent an hour at the game; but I was never a proficient in it.
‘Collins one day bought an old quarto Arabic Grammar which had been tumbled about for years in an old book shop. There was a considerable vocabulary of Arabic words at the end; and the whim seized us both to set on and learn Arabic. I copied the words from the vocabulary, in what we thought very pretty Arabic writing; and we were much taken with our project, when, one evening, George Boole suddenly stepped in, and found us earnestly bent over our new toy. He examined the quarto book with interest; but seemed to have difficulty in restraining his laughter when he saw our Arabic writing, and heard us gravely say we were determined to learn the language.
“But where will you get your Arabic books?” asked George; “and how can you read them without a dictionary? You could not get a copy of Richardson’s dictionary, I should think, under some twelve or fifteen pounds.” We felt ashamed of our thoughtlessness, and laid the project aside.’
