Professor Porson’s Memory

I don’t think my memory was ever very good (I can’t remember) and it has not improved. Perhaps, for that reason, I often took notes when I encountered people with powerful ones - and fortunately jotted them down. This leads us to Porson who was an English classicist and, apart from having a remarkable memory, is appealing to me since he was somewhat of a drunkard and a librarian.

Although poor, he and his siblings were all reported to be clever and our Porson displayed, early on, his talent for memorizing and was also good at maths. He claimed he worked at improving his memory and here is his tip for those of you who are trying to improve yours: “I have made myself what I am by intense labour: sometimes, in order to impress a thing upon my memory, I have read it a dozen times and transcribed it six.” But don’t get your hopes up because one of his biographers notes: “But he was certainly gifted by nature with most extraordinary powers of memory. Dr. Downie, of Aberdeen, told me that, during a visit to London, he heard Porson declare that he could repeat Smollett’s Roderick Random from beginning to end: - and Mr. Richard Heber assured me that soon after the appearance of the Essay on Irish Bulls (the joint production of Edgeworth and his daughter), Porson used, when somewhat tipsey, to recite whole pages of it verbatim with great delight.”

For those of you who never got around to reading The Adventures of Roderick Random, it is about 400 pages in length. It is also reported that “Drunk or sober he had a prodigious memory. He could repeat Humphrey Clinker or the Odyssey word for word.” Before we move to the “tipsey”, drunken stuff, here is a sober assessment of his abilities since it is taken from the DNB:

“Porson's memory was considered amazing even in an era where much more emphasis was placed on rote learning than today. There are literally hundreds of surviving Porson anecdotes attesting to his skill, most of them strongly suggesting that he thoroughly enjoyed displaying himself in this way. Some such stories have him behaving almost like a circus oddity, reciting lengthy passages of Greek from memory, or reciting them both from memory and backwards. Others have Porson allegedly identifying which edition of Thucydides a reader was testing him from by being able to remember which side of the page a particular word occurred in a particular edition and then being able to regurgitate the entire relevant passage on the page of the edition in question, sight unseen. Many of his memory feats were no doubt authentic, but many sound embellished for effect, if not by Porson himself, then by his many admirers. Porson's feats of memory did not come without intense effort and he admitted that to retain information he sometimes had to copy it several times and read it a dozen.

The memory skill was developed early on and, coming late to Latin and Greek as compared to other boys with whom he studied, Porson must have found that his mathematical skills would serve well for words. Indeed, he later found that memory could form the search engine for some of his most famous classical text emendations. Rather than having the unwanted memory powers of some kind of idiot savant, Porson's memory seems to have been developed by him as a necessary adjunct to his scholarship and no doubt went along with his lifelong habit of writing out his notes in calligraphic fair copy.” (Geoffrey V. Morson, ‘Porson, Richard (1759–1808)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

If he showed up at your house he would likely be recognizable since “he was not remarkably attentive to the decoration of his person” and he would likely stay for days and drink everything on the premises.  He also would usually arrive “with a patch of brown paper soaked in vinegar on his inflamed nose, the rusty black coat hung with cobwebs”. It is clear that he recognized that the problems with his proboscis were  likely related to his imbibing since he refused one invitation with this response:  “...for some time past, my face, or rather my nose, whether from good living or bad humours, has been growing into a great resemblance, of honest Bardolph’s [a big-nosed character in Shakespeare], or to keep still on the list of honest fellows, of honest Richard Brinsley’s. I have, therefore, put myself under a regimen of abstinence till my poor nose recovers its quondam colour and compass; after which I shall be happy to attend your parties on the shortest notice.”

At some point Porson became the Librarian at the London Institution, a position he clearly regarded as a sinecure: “'A man of such habits as Porson was little fitted for the office of Librarian to the London Institution. He was very irregular in his attendance there; he never troubled himself about the purchase of books which ought to have been added to the library; and he would frequently come home dead-drunk long after midnight. I have good reason to believe that, had he lived, he would have been requested to give up the office—in other words, he would have been dismissed. I once read a letter which he received from the Directors of the Institution, and which contained, among other severe things, this cutting remark: 'We only know that you are our Librarian by seeing your name attached to the receipts for your salary.' . . .”

Porson was also capable of clever, cutting remarks since he said of the Directors of the Institution that they were “mercantile and mean, beyond merchandise and meanness”. Now there is a line I could have used several times during my library career.

Even better is his quip about Gibbon's Decline and Fall, about which he was heard to say “here could not be a better exercise for a schoolboy than to turn a page of it into English.”

And even better than that is this rejoinder when supposedly someone said of him: “Dr. Porson, my opinion of you is most contemptible,” and his reply was “I never knew an opinion of yours that was not contemptible.”

There is a good Wikipedia entry for Richard Porson which generally avoids the scurrilous material provided above. For the drunken data see Chapter 8, “Some Men of Learning”, in Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics. See also Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers which has an entire collection of  Porsoniana, and Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists, by John Timbs. The “Clinker quote” is from: “The Cool World of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Richard Porson, Don or Devil,” P. M. Zall, The Wordsworth Circle Vol. 6, No. 4 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 255-260. p.256.