“I Am The First In The East, The First in The West, And The Greatest Philosopher In The Known World.” – A Pickle for the Knowing Ones

Feb 28, 2014 | History, Illustrated Books

A Pickle for the Knowing Ones

A Pickle for the Knowing Ones – BOOK SOLD

One of the most gratifying curiosities of working in this trade is that every now and then you turn up a book that, though it be small in stature and ever so obscure, nonetheless makes an expansively good excuse for a story.

Just so with this lovely copy of “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones”, the august literary debut of Lord Timothy Dexter. Who he? Well…

Timothy Dexter (1748-1806), though born to a lowly station, was by the end of his life to become a prodigious businessman, a lunatic millionaire, a (self-appointed) Lord, a political philosopher and would-be prophet, a local laughing stock and latterly, through the reception of his much-loved memoir the “Pickle”, the comedy cult hero of the American Dream. If you can imagine a cross between Swedenborg and Forrest Gump, you’ve made a good start.

Massachusets born, Dexter worked first as a farm labourer, then as an apprentice leather-dresser. His fortunes changed sharply when he moved to Newburyport and managed to woo and marry a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Frothingham, conferring upon himself a sizeable fortune. He promptly spent a portion of this on a mansion, but then he began a series of business speculations which were as remarkably successful as they seemed ill-advised. These improbably profitable ventures included:

–          Sending warming pans to the tropical West Indies (where the captain sold them as ladles for the molasses industry),

–          Sending wool mittens to the same (where they were bought by Asian merchants happening by on route to Siberia), and

–          Literally, sending coals to Newcastle (their arrival coinciding, as profitably for Dexter as it must have been dumbfounding for his “friends” who had jokingly advised him in this trade venture, with a miner’s strike).

Soon Dexter, whether through genius yoked to an illustrious destiny (as he believed), or through absurdly good luck (as everyone else thought), became one of the richest men in the State.

It is perhaps not surprising that a man so unremittingly blessed by Fortune should begin to consider himself in some way special – Dexter, however, took this tendency to the next level; he decorated his Newburyport mansion with minarets and put a golden eagle on the dome, created a mausoleum for himself and a garden populated by 40 wooden statues of eminent men: George Washington, William Pitt, Thomas Jefferson, Napoleon Bonaparte, and, chiefest amongst these, himself.

Mansion of Lord Timothy Dexter

His own statue bore the unequivocal legend: “I am the First in the East, the First in the West, and the Greatest Philosopher in the Known World.”

He had a particularly eccentric relation to his wife (who, not forgetting of course his own genius, was in fact the original source of his fortune); at some point in his life, he conceived the notion that she had died, but continued to haunt him as a nagging ghost. In fact, she outlived him – twice; for Dexter once faked his own death and funeral, in order to see how people would react. When his wife (unsurprisingly) did not weep at her husband’s funeral (which was attended by 3,000 people), Dexter returned vengefully from the grave to cane her for not grieving sufficiently.

He actually died, without children, in 1806, and his mansion was ruined by storms; consequently, his main legacy remains his “Pickle”, in which, at the age of 50, he set down his vision of his life and the world in a disarmingly original style and orthography.

The text of the Pickle is divided into chapters, or outbursts, whose headings may give some notion of the book’s character and contents. Here are some:

–          Lord Dexter relates how he was created Lord by the People, announces his intention of forming a Museum of great men, that shall be the wonder of the world, and shall confound his enemies.

–          Lord Dexter relates how he came to Fortune, by Speculations in Warming-Pans, Whalebone, Bibles, and Government Securities.

–          Lord Dexter informs the whole World of the Improvements made and contemplated about his Palace: describes his Tomb, &c.

–          The Magnanimity of Lord Dexter

–          Lord Dexter against Colleges and Priests

–          Quixotana: Lord Dexter’s Pugilism – Rencontre with a Lawyer – the Peer suffers ignominious Defeat.

–          Lord Dexter discourses very learnedly on Bridges

The Pickle appears to be the product of a seething brain – a headful of ideas driving him insane. Unobstructed by the dual fetters of an education and an audience, Dexter’s philosophy is bold in its scope, countenancing in its stride a “Dissertation on Man” (“man is the best Annemal and the worst all men are more or Less the Divel…sum Like a Dog sum Lik horses sum bare s Cat sum Lion sum lik ouls sum a monkey sum wild Cat” and so on), and concluding with a rousing vision of the universe and its destiny. But Dexter, as the “Greatest Philosopher in the Known World”, demonstrates an intellectual modesty that would shame Socrates when he asserts his vision as merely one “guess” among the infinite guesses of thinkers past and present. Indeed, his caveat, “Now I suppose I may guess as it is guesing times”, demonstrates a casual awareness of the great intellectual and philosophical ferment in the turbulent age through which Lord Dexter, like a comet, moved, and lived, and guessed.

Lord Dexter’s guess (which, regrettably, has had its spelling and puntuation amended by an editor who has missed the point entirely) merits reprinting in full:

“I guess the world is one very large living creature, and always was and always will be without any end from everlasting to everlasting… What grows on this large creature is trees and many other things. In the room of hair the rocks is moulds. This is called land where the hair grows, the belly the sea – all kinds of fish is the worms in the belly. This large body wants dressing to get our living of this creature and by industry we get a living – We and all the animal creation is less than fleas in comparison on the back or belly of this very large immense body. Among the hairs to work on this great body is that of Nature, past finding out. All we know is we are here, we come into this world crying and gone out groaning. Mankind is the master beadt on the earth – in the sea, the whale is the head fish – the great fish eat up the little ones, and so men not only destroy one another, but they are master over the whole of beasts and fish, even over a lion, therefore men is the masterly beast, and the worst of the whole – they know the most and act the worst according to what they known. Seeing mankind so bad by nature, I think when the candle goes out, men and women is done, they will lay as dirt or rocks till the great gun fires, and when that goes off the gun will be so large that the gun will contain nine hundred million tons of the best of good powder, then that will shake and bring all the bones together, then the world will be to an end. All kind of music will be going on, funding systems will be laid aside, the melody will be very great. Now why can’t you all believe the above written as well as many other things to be true, as welll as what was set forth in the last Centinel concerning digging up a frog twenty feet below the surface, where it was most as hard as a rock – there was his shape like taking a stone out of a rock. This is from a minister. Now why wont you believe me as well”

The first edition (May 1802) was printed without any punctuation, but, after he received complaints, Dexter printed a second edition (1805) with all the punctuation supplied in an Appendix (still extant in this 1848 edition) along with the invitation to the readers that they may “peper and solt it as they plese”, attesting, perhaps, to a rare combination of lunacy with a sense of humour in Lord Dexter.

Proper punctuation

This lovely copy of the later 1848 edition, which confirmed the passing of Lord Dexter into the annals of local Massachusets “characters”, is published with a biography and commentary notes  characterised by an affectionately tongue-in-cheek adulation of Lord Dexter’s unparalleled “sagacity”.

Lifetime editions of Dexter’s “Pickle” are almost inaccessibly scarce, since they were not properly published; Dexter had them printed at his expense, even distributing them freely on the roads to people, many of whom must have cast them, nonplussed, in the ditch. This 1848 edition seems to have been the best distributed and the most retained, being much more usually met with; however, copies as nice as ours are far from common.

Jonathan Plummer

Ours also has a pleasing tracable local association, bearing a near-contemporary gift inscription from Dr Francis A. Howe, a prominent Newburyport physician, who treated the poet John Greenleaf Whitter (an acquaintance, incidentally of Dexter’s appointed “poet lauriet” Jonathan Plummer – see picture) and helped to found the local Anna Jacques Hospital in the 1880s. Above the presentation inscription appears the ownership inscription of “W. B. Graves”, likely Natural Sciences Professor W. B. Graves of Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. This inscription attests pleasingly to the continuing celebrity of Lord Dexter among the “Knowing Ones” of the state of Massachusetts.

Lord Dexter is regrettably little known this side of the pond – perhaps we are satisfied with our own bustling national roster of eccentrics – but he has a thriving cult status in his native land. Any “Knowing Ones” keen to know more would do well to explore www.lordtimothydexter.com

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