Beyond Treasure Island: Leo Damrosch on the Art, Debt, and Tragedy of Robert Louis Stevenson

Literary Hub: Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny

Leo Damrosch, now in his mid-eighties and the author of acclaimed biographies of Swift, Johnson and Boswell, Rousseau, Casanova, Tocqueville, and Blake, has given us another spellbinder in The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson: Story Teller.

Readers may fairly wonder why another Stevenson biography. There had been Frank McLynn’s 1994 life, which The Christian Science Monitor thought “magisterial,” followed by Camille Peri’s A Wider Shore, appearing only a year before this one.

Damrosch claims no new discoveries, and critics are right that his book is largely a synthesis. But I think it offers three things the others do not.

First, he lets Stevenson speak. Much of the life is told through the nearly 3,000 surviving letters collected in the eight-volume-volume Yale edition (1994–95) by Booth and Mehew.

Ironically, Stevenson found letter-writing a chore, yet drafted each one several times to make it seem casual. The result is a kind of autobiography he intended, but never wrote.

Second, Damrosch looks at the whole body of work, not just the famous novels. I was struck by the essays, where Stevenson defends indigenous peoples and condemns the excesses of capitalism, and by the poetry, which scholars have overlooked, revelatory of his inner life. We don’t think of Stevenson as a social activist, yet it was woven into his passionate nature.

Third, he shows how much landscape mattered. Although Stevenson disliked Scotland’s wind, rain, and chill, he delighted in the mountainous Highlands, its violent history shaping Kidnapped and its topography nearly a character, as in Thomas Hardy’s novels. His landscapes are kinetic in their motion, redolent in sound, felt rather than described. He disliked adjective pile-ups.

Nothing is overlooked: Stevenson’s lifelong respiratory illnesses and fragility that would launch a peripatetic search for a more favorable clime that concluded with Samoa, the temporary breach with his family when he renounced their devout Calvinist faith and refused to follow the family profession of engineering, his early amours, his friendships, and quarrels, his momentous marriage to flamboyant Californian Fanny Osbourne, a divorcee twelve years older than himself, with two children, defying social mores.

Fanny was central to his success, despite her mercurial moods, gifted with an intuitive critical intelligence that he took seriously.

There was nothing in his early years of schooling predictive of his future writing prowess. He found the curriculum boring and was averse to mathematics. His ennui continued at the University of Edinburgh, where he took a degree in law to please his worried parents. He wanted to be a writer.

Fluent in French, he was a Francophile, enamored of sun-drenched Provence, where he and Fanny lived two years, charmed by its hilltop houses of stone, winding lanes, and proximity to the Mediterranean. One novel, The Wrecker, co-written with his stepson, Lloyd, and several of his novellas, short stories and travelogues have French settings.

He read widely, focusing especially on Melville’s South Pacific novels, Omoo and Typee, with their depiction of an idyllic, unspoiled archetypal paradise increasingly imperiled by European intrusion—from lustful whalers bearing fatal diseases that ravaged Polynesian immune systems to missionaries enforcing Western norms on a traditional way of life.

Melville kindled in Stevenson an eager desire to taste the Pacific’s delights, inspiring the journey to his final Samoan home. There, he embraced the island warmth, cherishing the thunderous advancing surf and its reluctant, muffled retreat.

Tall and very thin, his clothes drooped from his skeletal frame like rags on a hanger. And yet his voice was magical and compelling, strong and melodious, rhythmically poetic, mesmerizing in his command of so many subjects. His presence filled a room. Congenial, he made friends easily.

Damrosch gives thoughtful attention to all the principal works, Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped among them, and wants us to see Stevenson as a deliberate artist, not just a writer of adventure stories. Stevenson himself believed the great storyteller satisfies “the nameless longings of the reader” and obeys “the ideal laws of the daydream.”

Rising early, he gave four hours to writing in the morning and two more in the afternoon, a conscientious sentence smithy, revising repeatedly for clarity, cadence, and eloquence.

Damrosch is candid about what made some of Stevenson’s novels succeed and others fail. While admiring a perseverance that transcended repeated bouts of respiratory illness and constant financial pressure, yielding adventure narratives that continue to fascinate readers young and old, Damrosch nevertheless considers his artistry modest when compared to the expansive idea novels of George Eliot or Henry James. A slight quality of the jejune hovers over his penchant for heroic romance, pirates, and high-seas ventures: a proclivity Stevenson constantly wrestled with in his quest to be taken seriously as a literary artist.

I credit Damrosch for a biography truthfully told, a full portraiture of a gifted artist constrained by illness, Victorian taboos, and limited range from a greater achievement about to commence.

His books have never gone out of print. They speak to the human longing for the distant and the exotic. Stevenson’s gift was his ability to render that quest palpable.

Damrosch thinks Stevenson’s greatest completed novel, written during his Vailima sojourn, was Catriona, and Stevenson agreed: “I shall never do a better book than Catriona; that is my high water mark.”

Yet it is the unfinished Weir of Hermiston, set in the familiar Pentland Hills of his youth, that hints at a higher literary summit. As Damrosch notes, it is “no adventure yarn . . . but a tale of people trapped in the selves they can’t help being,” a tragic, richly autobiographical work marked by a central father-son feud and women far more fully realized than in any of his earlier fiction.

Pentland Hills

Every morning Stevenson paced the room, dictating it to his stepdaughter Belle, the words flowing as if the whole novel were already conceived.

Though a fierce opponent of imperialism, Stevenson lived in Samoa as a benign patriarch, operating his estate like a Scottish chieftain among his clan. The Samoans embraced him for defending their native autonomy, affectionately bestowing on him the title Tusitala, or “storyteller.”

Money worries dogged him incessantly. Having built the expansive estate of Vailima, Stevenson was the sole breadwinner for an immense extended household: his wife, mother, stepson Lloyd, stepdaughter Belle, her deadbeat husband Joe, and their son Austin. Compounding the strain was a retinue of nineteen full- and part-time Samoan staff, leaving Stevenson perpetually tethered to his desk to keep the estate afloat.

Vailima

They lived lavishly, as in his birthday feast, three weeks before his death, that included a whole heifer, twenty roasted pigs, and fifty chickens.

In those Vailima years, he had written “pot-boilers” to pay the bills and was ashamed of them.

Then came the evening of December 3. He had just filled the wine glasses and was helping Fanny make a salad when he suddenly grabbed his head and cried out, falling backward into the arms of his devoted servant Sosimo, never to regain consciousness.

Vailima had been a hiatus from chronic ailments. He seemed, though thin, to at last enjoy robust health. Yet in a cruel irony, the chronic lung trouble that had stalked him his entire life did not claim him. He died of a swift cerebral hemorrhage. He had just turned 44.

In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were interred on Mount Vaea, 700 feet above Vailima.

Vailima has been a museum since 1994, restored largely through American philanthropy sources, governed by a Samoan council, and attracting an estimated 180,000, visitors, mostly anglophones, annually.

News of Stevenson’s early death shocked his many friends in Europe, among them his lifelong friend and admirer Henry James who, reading his posthumously published unfinished Weir of Hermiston, lamented that its sheer beauty rendered his loss “doubly heartbreaking. . . the extinction of a talent that could still give one such a sense of freshness and life, of not yet having played, as it were, its highest card.”

–rj

Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: A Review

Dante Running from the Three Beasts

Writer and filmmaker Philip Hoare has of this date written ten well-received books of non-fiction, including multiple award-winning Leviathan, or the Whale (2008). His expertise ranges widely as a connoisseur of poetry, painting, and environmental concern. He once rescued a butterfly from a crowded tube platform. Every winter, for twenty-four years, he has traveled from his native Britain to Cape Cod to film and research the few Right Whales that remain.

These eclectic interests repeat themselves in his latest book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love (2025), extraordinary in its telling as a mix of tribute and memoir embedded in seascapes and the long cast of those Blake influenced—among them Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, Paul Nash, Nancy Cunard, Iris Murdoch, and Patti Smith. Hoare elaborates at length on each of them.

Readers may find this annoying in a book supposedly focused on Blake, but Hoare sees them as linked to Blake in their radical politics. I found these vignettes intriguing, especially regarding Hopkins, Lawrence, and Murdoch, who I was unaware were bisexual. I had not known that Lawrence translated The Odyssey directly from Greek, or that Blake learned Italian to read Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original.

I did not, however, find most of the vignettes convincing emissaries of Blake’s influence. To have read Blake does not invoke influence; Hopkins, Lawrence, and Cunard loom especially tentative. While Hoare is concerned with seascapes in Blake’s work, that Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland is situated in an aquatic domain does not evidence Blakean influence by itself. T. E. Lawrence read Blake, but no specific instances of linkage occur in his work. And while Blake abhorred painting landscapes, Nancy Cunard was obsessed with them.

What all these figures share with Blake is not artistic continuity, but their remaining authentic, defiant selves, eccentric in their otherness, endowed with vision, often revolutionary.

Nonetheless, I’m fond of this book, having been drawn to Blake years ago—the genesis of much of my subsequent musings on myth, Carl Jung, and Northrop Frye, whose Fearful Symmetry laid bare Blake’s mythology, handing me a roman à clef to unlock literature’s portals.

I’m biased, I suppose, in sharing Hoare’s radical politics, his fierce accusatory polemic of capitalist transgression, his compassion for the marginalized, and his anxiety for the environment—especially whales, those denizens of the deep that profusely populate Blake’s artistry, emblematic of divine paradox, or contraries: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7, KJV).

Blake’s renegade politics as a devotee of the French Revolution align with Hoare’s own mindset, reflected in the bestselling 1972 environmental broadside The Blueprint for Survival (known as The Manifesto). Hoare traces its primogeniture back to Blake, who unsparingly critiqued burgeoning capitalism, state religion, and the military. “The prophet against Empire,” as historian David Erdman called him, Blake thundered his radicalism in works like Visions of the Daughters of Albion. He viewed Admiral Nelson not as a hero, but as an emissary of colonialism rife with exploitation.

In 1803, Blake was arrested for sedition after pushing a drunken soldier, John Schofield, out of his Felpham garden. Schofield retaliated by falsely claiming Blake had cursed the king—a charge that could have led to Blake’s execution. Fortunately, local jurors refused to testify against him and the court dismissed the case. This traumatic incident resonated through literary history, ultimately finding its way into James Joyce’s Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus encounters British soldiers in the Circe episode.

The book may be difficult for readers, emerging as much personal memoir as biography. Moving in a semi-stream-of-consciousness style—without chapters or quotation marks—time shifts fluidly from Blake’s Lambeth cottage to the present day. Along the way, tidbits fall like raindrops, yielding passages of sheer poetry: “Always different, always the same. The sea had no limits and neither did he. It promised everything. So did he.”

At times, Hoare comes close to hagiography in his reverence, yet his exuberance proves contagious: “People tell me I get over-excited, as if excitement were rationed. Well, bollocks to that.”

While he gives due credit to patron Thomas Butts and collector W. Graham Robertson for preserving Blake’s paintings, it was W. B. Yeats and John Ellis’s 1893 three-volume study, The Works of William Blake: Poetic. Symbolic and Critical (1893), that restored Blake to modern poetic awareness, probing deep into his multidimensional mythology. Joyce read this work and would later lecture on Blake in Trieste.

One of the book’s bonuses is its photo inclusions of many of Blake’s principal prints, paintings and engravings, a number of them accompanied by delineations of their technique and purpose.

In his lifetime, Blake was largely dismissed as mad for claiming inspiration from the dead. Following the death of his brother Robert at just nineteen, Blake took over Robert’s notebook (often called the Rossetti Manuscript), which is now held in the British Library. Over a lifetime, Blake filled its pages with his own notes and sketches alongside his brother’s.

Hoare does not query Blake’s claims. Whatever the source of his genius, Blake’s imagination is to be celebrated—promiscuous in its daring, defiant of the restraints of reason. What Blake critics so often miss, however, is that his wife, Catherine, whom Blake taught to read, claimed that very same source of inspiration for her own art. Hoare reminiscences holding the notebook in his hands.

He tries on Blake’s steel-rimmed glasses at Cambridge University’s Fitzwilliam Museum, an hour before closing time “to see through Blake’s eyes.”

Across the way, he visits the University Museum of Zoology, housing its massive fin whale skeleton hanging above the entrance and the vast collection of bones, baleen, and marine specimens. Moved, his thoughts shift to Isaac Newton, whose rationalist reductionism Blake angrily dismissed.

Where is the wonder that Blake proclaimed: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”?

Hoare’s book emerges a moving tribute to Blake, to those who courageously followed in his daring to be himself, to the Earth, infinite, but exploited. If it reads like poetry, it is poetry—direct, passionate, creative, resonant:

You get more for your money with Blake. He’s the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds. He takes you there by the hand. His generosity is magical and without limits. Blake in fire, in iron, in paint; in ink, in the flesh, in the stars. Like the sea, you can’t be for or against him; he doesn’t give you that choice and he never, ever gives way. In his certainty is his ambiguity. He’s a cloud floating over the ocean, a layer of unknowingness through which new worlds arise. The stars rearrange themselves before your eyes.

—rj

In Memoriam: Annie Dillard (1945-2026)

With the death of Annie Dillard, another of America’s great writers has left the room this year. She made her first published appearance in 1974. Over the next several decades, she wrote more books, including Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a modern day Walden that’s become must reading for nature lovers and devotees of the meditated, simplified life. Then, with The Maytrees book in 2007, she chose not to write another: “I wrote for 38 years at the top of my form, and I wanted to quit on a high note.” In subsequent years, she focused on reading, painting, and walking.

In the rush of life, she gave me pause to weigh life’s essentials, to distill each day for what it is, to observe nature down to its minutiae with wonder and joy. I admired her passion for nature, her eloquence and candid confrontation with mortality and aging. Like the flowing waters of Tinker Creek, her legacy survives:

“It has always been a happy thought to me that the creek runs on all night, new every minute, whether I wish it or know it or care, as a closed book on a shelf continues to whisper to itself its own inexhaustible tale.”

—Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

RIP, dear Annie.

Morning Thoughts

Morning returns. My mind, as always, tumbles at wake of day, waves touching every shore.

Whales fill my thoughts, those biblical, wondrous leviathans of the deep, the creatures Job extols as exempla of divine majesty beyond infinity’s reach.

I think of Rachel Carson, guardian of the deep, her The Sea Around Us, prescient in its admonition, eloquent in its utterance, observing in 1951 alteration of climate: “… the frigid top of the world is very clearly warming up” and “the surface waters of the North Atlantic {are} showing rising temperatures.”

Childhood memories of Newburyport sea-captain mansions lining High Street, their terraced porches, vistas toward the ocean. Moby Dick. Coastal Maine. Nantucket’s cobbled lanes. Whalers and harpoons.

We hunted them to near extinction. Right whales, only a scarce few.

Thoughts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and “Binsey Poplars”:

“O if we but knew what we do
When we delve or hew…”

Sea mining has begun.

There are no boundaries.

As sea lover Philip Hoare writes, stirred by a whale sighting off my beloved Cape Cod, “I watch as the whale plays in the surf the way a dog runs around a field. There are less than three hundred and forty of their kind left, set against the teeming multitude of the whole human race. Too few whales now to fill this great ocean, or animate it enough to save themselves. Too few to fertilise it, with their living excretions or their dead bodies. Too few females to continue the line” (William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love).

We don’t hunt Right whales anymore, but human activity menaces still—fishing-net entanglements, vessel collisions, plastic pollution. Navy underwater sonar shakes the ocean deep.

Most ominously, only about 70 breeding females remain.

A world without whales? Like dinosaurs, the stuff of children’s storybooks and museum displays? It’s a world I’m glad to leave.

Poet Robinson Jeffers echoes my thought in his “End of the World”:

“When I was young in school in Switzerland, about the time of the Boer War,
We used to take it for known that the human race
Would last the earth out, not dying till the planet died. I wrote a schoolboy poem
About the last man walking in stoic dignity along the dead shore
Of the last sea, alone, alone, alone, remembering all
His racial past. But now I don’t think so. They’ll die faceless in flocks,
And the earth flourish long after mankind is out.”

I have no more words.

RJ

Wendell Berry: He Tried To Teach Us

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
—Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things”

The NYT this evening is reporting the death of Kentucky sage Wendell Berry at his home in Henry County. Earlier this year, I focused on reading his major essay collections and two of his novels.

Berry stridently opposed agribusiness, advocating for family farmers and the sustaining of local communities. He refrained from using farm machinery and chemical fertilizers. Horses and mules, they did the plowing.

Berry had his stubborn ways, nearly Amish in his habits. He wrote his many books in pencil on a yellow legal pad, his wife Tanya typing them up for publishers. He never owned a computer or even a television. His clock was set by sunrise and sunset. In simplicity, he found a happiness that possessions could not give.

He had much to teach us about a way of life that yielded contentment through resourcefulness and the social intimacy of small-town America—a way of life lamentably vanishing in the throes of urbanization, the decline of the family farm, the corporate erosion of local industries, and the flight of young people to the cities.

I remember the America he loved: the small town with its eccentric characters; schoolmates, many from family farms; baseball on the town common; a trip to the big city a major happening; the doctor, with his little black bag, coming to the house; a trip to the barber, a conversation. Families seemed stationary, one generation succeeding another. Faces changed. The surnames remained. This is the America Wendell wrote about.

When hard times came, as inevitably they do, we were there for each other, binding up the wounds. We knew our heroes, and we gladly paid them tribute.

I miss that America. And I will miss Wendell.

He tried to teach us, but we didn’t listen. A voice is silenced, but his wisdom hovers.

Rest peacefully, Wendell, in the dark Kentucky soil you so loved.

RJ

You Can Do Anything At Any Age

Credit: Markus Kammermann

Keep your brain young. It’s never too late. There’s a world out there waiting for you, gorgeous in its buffet.

You’ve heard of neuroplasticity—that the brain can rewire itself? Yes, it’s true: everything you think, everything you do, triggers new neuroconnections, along with revamping older ones. The more you focus on something new, the more your brain gets good at making it easier for you to comprehend and make part of your daily routine.

I learned Spanish in my 80s. I read a book each week, new gleanings with every read, new brain wrinkles, the kind you want.

Your brain likes exercise, just like Fido.

Free online courses opened up whole worlds I’d never touched—from the ecosystems of the Amazon to feminist poetry, and even a Yale module on oncology.

New conversations. New friends.
Widened empathy, walking in another’s shoes.

Forrest Gump tells us, “Life is like a box of cħocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” That’s true, but part of the excitement is getting to choose.

For me, life is like doing a jigsaw puzzle, putting the pieces in place. Isn’t that a lot of what life’s about?

Growing older doesn’t have to mean the doldrums. A rocking chair, endless TV, nostalgia about the past.

Grandma Moses took up painting seriously at 77. You know the story.

Frank McCourt of Angela’s Ashes fame, was 66 when he wrote it, winning a Pulitzer.

I can give you tons more examples.

Forming new habits can be challenging. For me, I’ve found it takes six weeks to lock-in a new habit, consistency a key. Apart from illness, I never miss a Spanish read or showing up week after week, quietly writing nearly 700 essays.

Venturing new things, replacing bad habits, mindlessly practiced with better ones, isn’t easy.

Think of it this way: There’s a fatty substance in the brain known as myelin that wraps itself around your neural connectors, augmenting faster signaling, or what we might call automatic response pathways.

Everything you do repeatedly digs the pathway deeper, which is why bad habits are sometimes hard to break. Your brain fights you at first. It likes to automate behavior and conserve energy. It’s simply doing what evolution designed it to do.

You are what you think and do. Your brain, in turn, creates cravings accordingly. You like munching on Ruffles? The brain makes that easy.

Ridding yourself of bad habits doesn’t come down to will power. It’s in the doing, starting simply, sometimes like children in their first stumbling steps, but with repeated tries, succeeding.

The brain gets the message. You’ve built a new highway. Like Route 66, the old highway no longer gets traffic.

Believe me, I’ve done what I’ve counseled. That it works I know from its results.

Each day, I wake to my chosen pathway. The joy of the psalmist comes to mind: “The lines are fallen upon me in pleasant places” (Ps.16:6 KJV).

I may be ripe in years, but I am the happiest I’ve ever been.

—rj

And This Is Why I Read

Last night, I read my 30th book this year, not that I’m prioritizing numbers, but simply because I’m spending more time at it, reading a minimal fifty pages daily, and not just any book, but some of the best ever written, conglomeration of genres that have shaped my world, defined who I am, not the quixotic schoolboy of sixteen, rebellious, often angry, in pursuit of discovering who I was and, better, who I wanted to be, that best self, enlarged through awareness and sensitivity.

Today, a new book: Philip Hoare’s William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love: Art, Poetry and the Imaging of a New World (2025), his moving tribute to the great poet and his myriad influence. I first read Blake as a university English major and he’s stayed with me as one of my favorite poets.

Blake taught me to see life as polarity, the mix of opposites, of their necessity to wholeness, like summer and winter, the sun by day, the moon by night, beginning and ending, “the marriage of heaven and hell” as he called their fusion, innuendos of Isaiah 45:7: “I form the light, and create darkness: make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (KJV).

Thus began my odyssey with myth, paradox its hub, my later love for Keats and his “negative capability,” of opposites unresolved, my passage into Blake”s protégés, Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Butler Yeats, Paul Nash, Iris Murdoch, counter culture artists Allen Ginsberg, Dave Bowie, and Bob Dylan.

Ahead of his time, Blake opposed slavery, championed social reform in poems like the “Little Black Boy”:

“…we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love,
And these black bodies and this sun-burnt face
Is but a cloud, and like a shady grove.

For when our souls have learn’d the heat to bear
The cloud will vanish we shall hear his voice.
Saying: come out from the grove my love & care,
And round my golden tent like lambs rejoice.

Thus did my mother say and kissed me,
And thus I say to little English boy.
When I from black and he from white cloud free,
And round the tent of God like lambs we joy:

Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear,
To lean in joy upon our fathers knee.
And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair,
And be like him and he will then love me.”

I have cherished his profundity veiled in simplicity, his magnificent “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour” (”Auguries of Innocence”):

I continue to rejoice in “Jerusalem,” England’s unofficial anthem, with its call to battle injustice:

“I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.”

Arrested for sedition, Blake was not a nationalist, but a champion of the ideals of the French Revolution. Not only opposing slavery, he was anti-monarchy and anti-Church of England, elitists out-of-touch with the laboring class.

My early reverence for Blake led me to seek out his grave in the Bunhill Fields Burial Ground of the London Borough of Islington, an unmarked grave he shared with others—meanwhile, the din of urban traffic that could not muffle an inner quietude of somber reverence.

Blake has been with me in all of life’s flux, an inspiration, a friend.

Reading has granted me converse with the best that’s been thought and said, new landscapes, new friendships, companions I have with me always, in the days and in the nights.

rj

The Fall of Jason Arday: Institutional Panic, Broken Vetting, and Academic Tragedy

Slender and youthful at 37, with chest-length hair and a gentle, affable demeanor, Dr. Jason Arday was widely popular among students and colleagues when he was appointed Professor of Sociology of Education at the University of Cambridge in March 2023.

His hire made history. The child of Ghanaian immigrants, he was the youngest Black professor in the university’s centuries-old record, holding a prestigious seat alongside a Professorial Fellowship at Jesus College.

Yet, just three years later, Arday abruptly resigned.

Days after stepping down, on August 14, 2026, police found him dead at his Battersea, London residence under non-suspicious circumstances, a tragic end to a meteoric rise brought down by an escalating controversy over his academic credentials and personal backstory.

THE SHELVED INVESTIGATION
The unraveling began long before it reached the public. In September 2025, Jack Grove, a senior reporter for Times Higher Education, alerted by Arday’s extraordinary athletic claims, sent Arday three direct emails requesting a response to alleged instances of plagiarism in his doctoral thesis and journal publications.

Rather than addressing the queries, Arday hired the law firm Carter-Ruck, known for aggressive media litigation, and reported Grove to the Metropolitan Police for criminal harassment.

The Met spent four months investigating the journalist. In February 2026, an officer called Grove, ordering him to cease contacting Arday because the inquiries were impacting Arday’s mental health. Facing legal threats and police intervention, Times Higher Education shelved Grove’s draft article.

THE WHISTLEBLOWER AND THE BLOG POST
The story broke wide open through a different channel. In June 2026, an unnamed Cambridge faculty member, frustrated by what they alleged was an internal administrative cover-up to avoid a public scandal, approached Nathan Cofnas, a former Cambridge philosophy researcher.

Cofnas subsequently ran Arday’s 2015 doctoral dissertation through plagiarism-detection software and, in July 2026, published his findings on Substack, alleging extensive verbatim text duplication.

Cofnas was already a lightning rod for controversy. In February 2024, he had published an essay claiming that Black people possess lower average cognitive ability due to genetic differences, asserting that in a meritocracy the proportion of Black professors at elite institutions like Harvard “would approach zero percent.”

While a Cambridge University investigation concluded that Cofnas’s essay fell within lawful free speech under UK law, Emmanuel College severed ties with him in July 2024, citing the hostile environment created by his public statements.

Cofnas challenged his dismissal in court, but in March 2026, a tribunal ruled that while his philosophical beliefs qualified for legal protection, Emmanuel College acted lawfully in terminating his affiliation due to the disruptive impact and tone of his writings.

Despite Cofnas’s controversial background, his technical analysis of Arday’s text duplication was undeniable. On July 24, 2026, The Times published an explosive front-page exposé documenting passages in Arday’s dissertation that were identical or near-identical to previously published scholarship without attribution. Media scrutiny quickly spread to his published journal papers and his autobiography, which claimed he had remained non-verbal until age 11, illiterate until 18, and had run 30 marathons in 35 days.

RESIGNATION AND AFTERMATH
On August 5, 2026, Arday resigned his Cambridge professorship. In an open letter addressed to colleagues and the public, he maintained his innocence while pointing to the unbearable personal strain:

When I accepted the extraordinary honour of becoming Professor of Sociology at Cambridge, it was, without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life… Sadly, the years since my appointment have also been marked by an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack… The relentless accusations, speculation and public commentary have taken a profound toll on me and on those I love… This decision should not be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me.”

Following his death nine days later, his family expressed shock, stating that Arday was a “gentle man” who had been “subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse… by those who would leave no stone unturned in their quest to undermine him.”

AN ACADEMIC EVALUATION
Who bears responsibility for this tragic aftermath? In academia, the appropriation of another scholar’s work is an unpardonable offense. In my view as a former academic, the evidence of Arday’s unacknowledged text duplication and hyperbolic biographical claims is beyond doubt. Multiple passages in his writing trace directly back to uncredited source material, while his personal timeline, progressing from total illiteracy at age 18 to a doctoral dissertation in his twenties without an established paper trail of remedial education, defies statistical reality.

The root of this tragedy lies in an elite university rushing headlong to project progressive credentials. Cambridge was under immense pressure to diversify. According to reporting by The New York Times (August 15, 2026), internal hiring documents reveal that the selection panel bypassed candidates with far stronger scholarly records, brushing aside early warnings regarding Arday’s work as “vile efforts” to discredit a rising Black scholar. In doing so, the university abandoned its primary duty: to act as an impartial arbiter of intellectual truth.

While it is imperative that we confront racism wherever it rears its head, when institutions substitute top-down equity of outcome for equality of opportunity based on individual merit, they do not defeat prejudice: on the contrary, they merely replace rigorous judgment with performance art.

By waiving standard vetting out of ideological panic or political ideology, Cambridge did not elevate Jason Arday; instead, it exposed him, elevating a vulnerable man to a height built on sand, leaving him defenseless when the tide of inevitable scrutiny came in.

This tragedy serves as stark warning for modern higher education. When universities lower the bar to purchase moral virtue on the cheap, the consequences are ubiquitous: real scholarship is devalued, public trust in academia is shattered, and the genuine, unassailable achievements of minority scholars are quietly cast under a shadow of institutional doubt.

Everyone gets a prize—until the bill comes due. Cambridge got its headline, the ideologues got their symbol, and Jason Arday paid with his life.

—rj

Reaching Back: The Child Within

It’s a funny thing how I sometimes reach back into my childhood for memories that yield comfort in older years, simple truths endowed with a wisdom that sustains.

I loved Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, smartly drawn from her keen observation of England’s rural landscape, reinforcing my deep affection for my fellow creatures. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail, and Peter have been my buddies all the days of my life.

Along with them came the wild, staccato rhythms of Dr. Seuss and every volume of the Doctor Dolittle series.

Maybe I’m just waxing sentimental—I’ve always been a deeply feeling person—but in surfacing these forgotten memories, I feel reborn.

Here are several gems I indulged in just this morning, each granting its own quiet contentment. First, the anonymous lines of the children’s poem traditionally titled “The Polite Rabbit”:

I met a grey rabbit, at the top of the hill.
We both stopped to look, and stood very still.
But I didn’t scare him, and he didn’t scare me,
Because I was polite, and so was he.

Christina Rossetti captured a similar quiet kinship in “The Caterpillar,” tracking its transformation from humble crawler to exquisite butterfly, a reminder of how what seems simple can, given allowance, mature into unexpected beauty:

Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry,
Take your walk
To the shady leaf, or stalk,
Or what not,
Which may be the chosen spot.
No toad spy you,
Hovering bird of prey pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.

The capstone for me since my youth has always been William Wordsworth’s celebratory poem of nature’s beauty, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”—that supreme exemplar of poetry rendered in simple language, of “emotion recollected in tranquility”:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

I have since read every one of his several hundred poems—some better than others, but always granting solace.

Fortunately, great verse is still being written to guide our children and grandchildren on their life journeys. Take, for example, this marvelous stanza by Jeanne Willis, from her illustrated picture book, Wild Child    (2012):

They caught all the wild children, and put them in zoos,
They made them do sums and wear sensible shoes.
They put them to bed at the wrong time of day,
And made them sit still when they wanted to play.
They scrubbed them with soap and they made them eat peas.
They made them behave and say pardon and please.
They took all their wisdom and wildness away.
That’s why there are none in the forests today.

Talk about rearing conformist children, alienated from nature, taught never to draw outside the lines, never to rebel and find their true selves—wow!

Call it nostalgia if you like, but William Wordsworth got it right when he wrote in “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” that “The Child is father of the Man.”

By that, he meant that childhood’s gift of innocence and wonder amid nature’s plentiful grace helps define the adults we ultimately become.

I believe, like Wordsworth, that the child lingers within us. Recovering that child within, its capacity for wonder, to notice a rabbit on a hill, a caterpillar on a leaf, a field of daffodils dancing in the wind—these are not childish things to be outgrown.

Milton for Contemporaries

Many years ago, I took a graduate seminar on John Milton centered on Paradise Lost (1667), one of the crowning achievements of the English Renaissance. But it was another work—Areopagitica (1644), his impassioned defense of freedom of speech—that has resonated with me ever since.

Written in opposition to Parliament’s Licensing Order, Milton argued that truth is strengthened, not endangered, by being tested against error, a bold stance in an age when dissent could invite imprisonment or execution.

 Milton’s intellectual hero was Galileo. In Paradise Lost, he evokes the great astronomer when describing Satan’s massive shield:

“…the moon, whose orb
Through optic glass the Tuscan artist views…”

The “Tuscan artist” is Galileo, whose telescope transformed humanity’s understanding of the heavens.

In Areopagitica, Milton recalls visiting Galileo at his villa in Arcetri, where the aging scientist lived under house arrest after being condemned by the Roman Inquisition for advocating the Copernican model of the solar system.

Forced under threat of torture to recant what he knew to be true, Galileo spent his final years blind and confined. I like to imagine that Milton’s visit offered some measure of consolation to a man whose only offense had been to follow the evidence where it led.

Today, speaking one’s conscience seldom risks imprisonment in liberal democracies, but it can still carry severe consequences: reputational ruin, professional ostracism, organized harassment, and targeted campaigns intended to silence rather than engage.

Public discourse, accelerated by social media, spreads these consequences with astonishing speed, rewarding denunciation far more readily than disagreement.

Our universities bear part of this responsibility. Among the intellectual influences that have shaped portions of academic life is Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, mentor of the New Left. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse proposed a striking inversion of classical free expression:

“Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.”

He made the practical implications explicit, advocating for the “withdrawal of tolerance before the deed, at the stage of communication in word, print, and picture.”

In Marcuse’s view, there are issues where “certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed.”

Whether one agrees with Marcuse or not, his framework represents a profound departure from Milton’s conviction that truth emerges through open contest rather than enforced orthodoxy.

I have no dog in today’s culture wars. Censorship has become an equal-opportunity temptation for both the Left and the Right. Battles over gender, sexuality, race, religion, history, and politics have produced book bans, withdrawn publications, disinvited speakers, removed art, renamed institutions, and ousted educators. The particulars vary; the impulse to silence does not.

Milton himself understood the cost of dissent. Like Galileo, he eventually lost his sight. Following his death in 1674, he was denied burial in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner due to his support for the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War. Buried instead at St. Giles Cripplegate, his grave was desecrated more than a century later by souvenir hunters who carried away portions of his bones as grisly relics.

Some may dismiss Milton’s model as anachronistic, but I remain convinced that falsehood is exposed by argument, not by prohibition. The remedy for bad ideas remains better ideas, fearlessly expressed.

History offers sobering reminders of what happens when enforced orthodoxy replaces open debate. Authoritarian regimes throughout history have always understood that controlling speech is the prerequisite to controlling thought.

America has never perfectly reconciled its ideals with its practice, which is precisely why freedom of speech remains indispensable.

We improve our republic not by silencing one another, but by arguing honestly, listening seriously, and trusting that truth has nothing to fear from debate.

As Milton wrote in Areopagitica nearly four centuries ago:

“And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously, by licensing and prohibiting, to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

—rj