User:Johnbibby/Sandbox/Karl Pearson/Over the Moor
"Over the Moor": Yorkshire fact and fantasy in the writings of Karl Pearson
MY DEAR FRANCIS GALTON, I have got back to my Yorkshire moors and their fresh air ...
I smelt the good smell of the turves and the bracken and the young heather and saw the first young grouse yesterday. The only grief is to come back after two years and find those one left hale now in the churchyard. When you know nearly the whole country-side, there are sure to be big gaps in the ranks. In London where one does not know even the names of one's neighbours within fifty yards of one's house, one does not get into touch with other folk's sorrows.
I shall be here, if you write at any time, the whole holiday, except perhaps a couple of days to the South of the moors to see a tablet we have put up to my Father in his birthplace. Here we belong to those who have "gone over the moor," and have thus passed out of memory.
As one of my ancestors of 1680 says in his will " Let my son Henry take my black mare and ride across the moor." That meant he was to go and seek his fortune south. My Father remembered as a boy the Quaker relatives from this Dale riding pillion with their wives across the moor, and stopping at his grandfather's house on their way to York Quarterly Meeting. That was his last touch with Danby. Four years ago I saw a farmer riding pillion with his wife over the moor on what is still called the " Quakers' Path." Four miles up on the moor is the solitary hut which used to be a meeting-house, whence Gregory Pearson was taken to York Gaol in- 1684, where he died. My other forebear, George Unthank, came back alone a year afterwards across the moor. You will understand why I like the smell of the moor.
Affectionately, K. P.
- (Letter from Danby, North Yorkshire, 6 July 1908)
Eumemics
survival of the meme
History, family history, and personal personae
History weaves myth with reality, and reality with myth. Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of family history, where fact conspires with fiction to enhance and threaten one's public and private persona. The family id and ego compete through the generations, as descendants beget ancestors and vice versa.
Of course "persona"" should really be in the plural. For we all have multiple personae, who move front-stage and back-stage and whose voices rise and fall as one's life and audiences develop and vary.
In family history, authors and dramatis personae overlap, and are almost identical, so if the reality presented by family history appears theatrical - or moreso it does not - it is a very peculiar type of theatre.
So much for the general. We now descend to the particular - and our particular particular is a late-Victorian scientist and early eugenicist, for whom genetics was supremely important. For such people, one would think, the role of forebears has particularly deep personal significance.
Karl Pearson has been vilified for his role in developing the early /eugenics movement - and it is true that particularly towards the end of his life, several of his comments may be viewed as extreme, and even fascistic. A key influence in this area was the great scientist and data-analyst /Sir Francis Galton, of whom KP wrote the definitive 3-volumes biography.
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Pearson adored natural settings, and linked many of them to intense emotional experiences. Sexual and pastoral allusions
combine in the following excerpt from KP's neo-Goethian Bildungsroman: his hero, Arthur, has just fallen asleep among
ferns and long grass beside a stream about a mile below Schapbach (a real village) when suddenyl he is awoken by "ten or
twelve village maidens (who) had also come to enjoy the pelasure of an evening bathe ... with loosened hair falling to theikr
waists, splahing and sporting in the pool before me, as we fancy the nymphs did in the happy pastoral days of old!" (New
werther p.58; Porter 200x:58).
As a young man Pearson was profoundly influenced by Goethe (Porter (passim), and this affect remined in the mature KP, and
may even jhave been reverted to as the grand old man became older.
Towards the end of Goethe's "Sufferiongs of Young Werther" 'the prospect of a union with nature draws the hero as to a swweet
death' (Porter p.49)
The countryside was also linked in Pearson's mind with prospects for theism, or pantheism: "He loved to be alone in the
country, and when he thought of fo divinity in relation to the natural world rather than society, he sometimes supposed he
might still be a deist" Natures' beauty made him feel one of the gods, whiel civgilisation was mere "misery, hypocrisy, and
blasphemy" (Porter p.28):
"A Byron Keats or Shelley I'd be (I thought in truth I could be all three) The world forsooth I'd revolutionize Abolish kings, priests, customs, mockeries."
Porter (p.28) refers to KP's "poetic megalomania" and to him feeling "as if he was equal to the gods". At other times he was
surrounded by gloom. It may not be over-psychologising to wonder whether, as a young man at least, KP displayed some of the
symptoms of what today would be called bipolar disorder.