Mind your language
`I'VE got it!' I exclaimed at midnight, nudging my husband in the ribs.
`Keep it till the morning,' he replied drowsily. By then he had forgotten about it. But I hadn't.
My nocturnal enlightenment had sud- denly elucidated a crux in Roy Jenkins's biography of W.E. Gladstone (which was the Whitbread biography of 1995). It comes in a quotation from Gladstone's diaries recording his reception of an hon- orary doctorate of civil law from Oxford on 5 July 1848. The ceremony took place in the Sheldonian Theatre. Lord Jenkins quotes Gladstone as describing it thus: There was great tumult about me mite that I am: the hissers were obstinate and the fautores [supporters] also very generous and manful. 'Gladstone and the Jew Bill' came sometimes from the gallery, sometimes more favouring sounds.
Lord Jenkins comments that 'mite that I am' was 'a very odd phrase; there seems to be no other example implying that Glad- stone (in fact of medium height or a little more for the period) thought of himself as small'. Lord Jenkins then discusses various evidences for Gladstone's height at differ- ent times. But before we construct a Napoleon theory for Gladstone's over- compensating drive to power, let us stop, and admit with a tear in the eye that Lord Jenkins has made an egregious error. Gladstone did not write 'mite that I am' (which sounds like a crossword clue or a contrived anagram) but 'in the Theatre'.
I do not blame Lord Jenkins. He was only copying out the entry as printed in M.R.D. Foot and H.C.G. Matthew's 14- volume edition of Gladstone's diaries. Nor are they much to blame. Gladstone's writ- ing is not always easy. Indeed, in dis- cussing Gladstone's frequent night-time meetings with prostitutes in the street, Lord Jenkins takes the liberty of amending Foot and Matthew's trusts to trysts.
What put me onto the pleasingly absurd error in the transcription of the Oxford ceremony was the contemplation of the so-called minim error so frequent in scrib- al copies made in the Middle Ages. I think I have discussed it here before: you know, the mistaking of inne for June, and that sort of thing. In Gladstone's handwriting in the, especially when the dot does not appear over the i, looks like mite. Once the transcriber has taken the reading mite, he has to interpret Theatre as best he can: here he can see a t and another and defi- nitely an a. So, really, 'mite that I am' is quite an ingenious solution.
We can forget the image of Gladstone as a dwarf and be glad that Lord Jenkins was not in the position of Charles Kingsley, who once received a 14-page letter of condo- lence from B.F. Westcott in which only one phrase was decipherable: 'ungrateful devil'.
Dot Wordsworth
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