Sadi’s Scroll of Wisdom

In his preface, Arthur Naylor Wollaston (1842-1922) describes the Pand-nāma (Book of Counsel) as ‘a small volume of poetry embodying precepts which would do no discredit to the philosophy of this, the twentieth century of the Christian era’ (p.25), whereas Encyclopaedia Iranica deems it ‘a dry moral rule-book in abrupt and grammatically very simple language with trite wording’. Little read today, in the 19th Century it was accorded high status among European orientalists, in part because of its misattribution to Sa‘di (1210-1291/92). Today the authorship is disputed, though it is commonly ascribed to ‘Attar (1145/46-1221). It was translated by Francis Gladwin into English and by Silvestre de Sacy into French (a portion of the latter being rendered into English by Louisa S. Costello in her 1845 anthology, The Rose Garden of Persia), before Wollaston, an archivist in the India Office, produced this version for the Wisdom of the East series in 1906.

This book’s flyleaf bears the pencilled price ‘1/- net’ (i.e. one shilling), and is autographed ‘Jas. Gemmell Knight, Jun. / 1906’. The ‘Junior’ was key to identifying its original reader, with the help of the Lancashire Online Parish Clerks Project, which has transcribed the marriage registers of parish churches in the English county. It is recorded that ‘James Gemmell Knight, Compositor’, of 32 Tynemouth Street, Liverpool, son of ‘James Gemmell Knight, Compositor’, was married to Frances Evans at St Saviour’s, Everton, on 4 May 1874. This is undoubtely the same James Gemmell Knight, ‘veteran head of an old-established firm of Liverpool printers’ who died in 1940 at the age of eighty-nine (Liverpool Echo), having dissolved his business partnership four years earlier (London Gazette). The Echo gives his home address as 429 Walton Breck Road, while according to the Gazette his printworks was at 34 Moorfields, Liverpool. It cannot be affirmed with absolutely certainty that this is the same Knight who owned Sadi’s Scroll, but the match is a close one (another James Gemmell Knight, also son of James, who died in the First World War was too young in 1906 to have read this book and left the kind of annotations visible inside).

The annotations begin on p.30 where Knight has left a large, puzzled question mark next to the line ‘The earth-conquering horseman with his chestnut Buraq’ (a reference to the Prophet Muhammad). He has drawn marginal lines along large sections of the chapters ‘In Praise of Generosity’ and ‘In Condemnation of Parsimony’, and along the entirety of the chapter ‘On the Excellence of Learning’. ‘Go, seize fast hold of the skirt of knowledge, / For learning will convey thee to everlasting abodes’, which he has lined doubly, was a passage that clearly appealed to a man who is likely to have been a working-class autodidact. On page 53, however, he has bridled at the suggestion that ‘Want of fidelity is the attribute of women’, marking it with a large question mark, followed by ‘Wrong!’, and below that the sarcastic comment, ‘Here evidently thinking of his own wives / see introduction’. This refers to Wollaston’s introductory biography of Sa‘di, which mentions his tempestuous first marriage. Sa’di completed the Bustan in his forty-seventh year, and Knight purchased the book his mid-fifties, so poet and reader were at similar stages in their lives.