Notes & Queries: A Fragment on Mummies

I was recently reading volume three of Sir Thomas Browne’s Works, edited by Geoffrey Keynes (1964 edition). The volume contains mostly miscellaneous pieces and lesser-known works by Browne. It ended with a little piece that I found absolutely charming, “A Fragment on Mummies”. I had never come across the “Fragment” before, and although I enjoyed it immensely, there was something a little odd about it. After finishing it, I referred back to Keynes’ introduction to the volume to see what he had to say about it. He wrote that the fragment

 “was initially supplied to Wilkin by his friend, James Crossley of Manchester, who pretended to have forgotten where he had seen the original manuscript. Wilkin printed the piece in good faith, but afterwards saw that there was reason to doubt its authenticity, and it was omitted from Bohn’s reprint of his edition in 1852. Crossley never publicly admitted having written it himself, and the reader may be left to judge whether Browne would have owned to its verbal extravagances, or would even have gusted so irreverent a pleasantry.”

 The story is that James Crossley (1800-1883) of Manchester had sent the “Fragment on Mummies” to Simon Wilkin, who was preparing his 1835 edition of Browne’s works. Crossley claimed to have gotten it from a manuscript in the British Library, but no one has managed to find any such manuscript. (The documentary history of this story is laid out in Samuel Swett Green’s 1903 paper.)

Keynes’ account, above, is a bit ambiguous, making it sound as if it were still an open question whether or not the “Fragment on Mummies” was written by Browne, and if it was not, what telltale signs within the piece might give it away as a fake. (I believed I had spotted at least one such sign.) So, of course I needed to learn more.

The consensus of course is that it is not genuine, which leads me to the question of Crossley’s intentions. I have seen the “Fragment” described as a “parody”. In a letter to the Manchester Guardian (17 December 1901), C. W. Hutton referred to it as a “hoax” and a “jeu d’esprit”. Since Crossley fessed up to it only much later and only once he was directly accused, and since his confession was not to poor Wilkin, I would prefer to call this a forgery. But it is a very beautiful one, as this passage, once famously quoted by Emerson, demonstrates:

“Of their living habitations they made little account, conceiving of them but as hospitia, or inns, while they adorned the sepulchres of the dead, and planted them on lasting bases, defying the crumbling touches of time and the misty vaporousness of oblivion. Yet all were but Babel vanities. Time sadly overcometh all things, and is now dominant, and sitteth upon a sphinx, and looketh unto Memphis and Thebes, while his sister Oblivion reclineth semisomnous on a pyramid, gloriously triumphing, making puzzles of Titanian erections, and turning old glories into dreams. History sinketh beneath her cloud. The traveller as he paceth amazedly through those deserts asketh of her, who buildeth them? and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not.”

Three days after Hutton’s letter appeared, the editor of the Guardian thanked him for clearing up the mystery: “We should never have guessed that it was not a genuine piece by the author of the ‘Urn Burial,’ and are inclined to place Mr. James Crossley, who wrote it, among the most skilful imitators of other men’s style of whom literary history tells us.” Note again the indulgence granted here to Crossley. He is not a fraudster, he is an imitator.

Anyway, as I said, I guessed it was not genuine, and here is why. As I was reading the piece, I stumbled at one word in the following sentence:

“Shall we eat of Chamnes and Amosis in electuaries and pills, and be cured by cannibal mixtures? Surely such a diet is dismal vampirism…”

Now, the OED’s earliest citation for “vampire” (or “vampyre”) is from The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh (1734). And the earliest citation for “vampirism” is from Erasmus Darwin’s Zoonomia (1794-96). This was the rat I smelled.

Now I wish, dear reader, that I was clever enough to have been the first to note this. But it turns out that I was anticipated by at least one other person, Robert Kane, in a 1933 paper. Two further lexical anachronisms in the “Fragment” identified by Kane are worthy of mention, if for no other reason than to give Crossley his due as an innovator. First, Crossley’s 1835 use of “blinkingly” pre-dates the OED’s earliest citation of 1879. Second, the OED’s earliest citation of “semisomnous” is from Henry Rogers’ The Supernatural Origin of the Bible (1873). But in that work Rogers was himself quoting from the “Fragment on Mummies”!

 

Sources

 BROWNE, Sir Thomas. The Works (4 Vols.). Geoffrey Keynes (ed.). London: Faber & Faber, 1964.

 GREEN, Samuel Swett. “Did Sir Thomas Browne Write ‘Fragment on Mummies’?” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 15 (1903), 442-447.

 KANE, Robert J. “James Crossley, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Fragment on Mummies,” Review of English Studies 9.35 (1933), 266-274.