A FEW LESS, BUT NOT MANY MORE (via The Mother Judd):

The reading of life: A story about a grandfather, a box of old books, and the meaning of success (David Mehegan, December 23, 2006, Boston Globe)

About six months ago, my brother telephoned: "Do you want the Five-Foot Shelf?" I said, "If you don't want it, I'll take it." A few days later, several cardboard boxes sat outside my back door. Inside were my grandfather's "Harvard Classics: The Five-Foot Shelf of Books," 51 volumes, bound in red, with the Harvard shield and motto ("Veritas") on the cover of each. Two volumes have lost their covers. Inside the index volume is a pasted note in my mother's handwriting: "These Harvard Classics belonged to, and were treasured by, John Jeremiah Humphreys."

Born in 1875, John Jeremiah Humphreys had a ninth-grade grammar school education, like most children of Irish immigrants. His brothers became Boston firefighters (one died in the line of duty). After he left St. Mary's School in the North End, he was apprenticed as an upholsterer but hated the work. He managed to get a clerical job with the city before he and my grandmother were married in 1906.

He was bookish and craved learning. In 1909 he enrolled in Northeastern University law school, founded in 1898 as The Department of Law of the Boston YMCA. It was in the Huntington Avenue Y. In her 1983 memoir, my mother writes that he went to school five nights a week for six years, and had to include in his studies the completion of high school. He was admitted to the Massachusetts bar Feb. 23, 1915. Around the time he began his studies, he ordered "The Five-Foot Shelf of Books."

"The Five-Foot Shelf of Books free you from the limitations of your age, of your country, of your personal experiences," wrote Charles William Eliot in his introduction to "Harvard Classics." "They take you out of the rut of life in the town you live in and make you a citizen of the world. . . . They offer you education, the means of making your life what you want it to be."

Though Eliot, editor of the series, was a retired Harvard president, and the Harvard Board of Overseers agreed to lend the university's name and emblem, "The Five-Foot Shelf" was actually a commercial project, conceived by New York publisher P.F. Collier . According to Adam Kirsch 's excellent article in the fall 2001 Harvard magazine, 350,000 sets were sold in the first 20 years.

Eliot believed that one need read only 15 minutes a day to absorb the great learning of the world. My mother wrote in her memoir that Granddad told her that he had read every volume, about 23,000 pages. As I looked through the old books, I noticed that the top of each spine was tattered by a thumb repeatedly pulling it off a bookcase.

Eliot's Elect: The Harvard Classics, 1910 (Adam Kirsch, Fall 2001, Harvard Magazine)

In his introduction to the series, dated March 10, 1910, Eliot made it clear that the Harvard Classics were intended not as a museum display-case of the "world's best books," but as a portable university. While the volumes are numbered in no particular order, he suggested that they could be approached as a set of six courses: "The History of Civilization," "Religion and Philosophy," "Education," "Science," "Politics," and "Criticism of Literature and the Fine Arts." But in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is "Progress"--progress in each of these departments and in the moral quality of the human race as a whole. Eliot's introduction expresses complete faith in the "intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization," "the upward tendency of the human race."

Eliot's life was spent in the cultivation of that tendency. He built up Harvard into one of the world's great universities, vastly expanded its student body, course offerings, and faculty, and became a sort of public oracle on questions of education. He was one of the most effective evangelists for what the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold called "sweetness and light." Samuel Eliot Morison, in Three Centuries of Harvard, describes Eliot as a representative of "the best of his age--that forward-looking half-century before the World War, when democracy seemed capable of putting all crooked ways straight--the age of reason and of action, of accomplishment and of hope."

But already in 1936, when Morison wrote, Eliot's variety of optimism seemed sadly obsolete. Today we are proudly alert to the blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress. Three thinkers whose names appear nowhere in the Harvard Classics--Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud--have taught us a new, more suspicious kind of reading, in which an author's motives are to be questioned, probed, overturned.

How much better might the 20th Century have been -- and how much optimism retained -- had the works of those three and their bearded co-conspirator been burned.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2007 9:53 PM