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Walter Jekyll (27 November 1849,
Bramley, Surrey Bramley is a village and civil parish about three miles (5 km) south of Guildford in the Borough of Waverley in Surrey, south east England. Most of the parish lies in the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Within its bound ...
,
England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
– 17 February 1929, Bower Hall, Riverside,
Hanover Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...
, Jamaica), was an
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
clergyman who renounced his religion and became a planter in Jamaica, where he collected and published songs and stories from the local African-Caribbean community.


Early life

Jekyll lived in his youth with his family at 2 Grafton Street,
Mayfair Mayfair is an affluent area in the West End of London towards the eastern edge of Hyde Park, in the City of Westminster, between Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly and Park Lane. It is one of the most expensive districts in the world. ...
, London, the seventh of the seven children of Captain Edward Joseph Hill Jekyll, an officer in the
Grenadier Guards "Shamed be whoever thinks ill of it." , colors = , colors_label = , march = Slow: " Scipio" , mascot = , equipment = , equipment ...
, and his wife Julia Hammersley. His sister was the gardener Gertrude Jekyll. He was educated at Harrow and
Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by Henry VIII, King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge ...
. Jekyll was a friend of
Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson (born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson; 13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer. He is best known for works such as ''Treasure Island'', ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll a ...
, who borrowed the family name for his 1886 novella ''
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'' is a 1886 Gothic novella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson. It follows Gabriel John Utterson, a London-based legal practitioner who investigates a series of strange occurrences between his old ...
''.


Clerical career

He was ordained as a
Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
deacon in 1874, and as a priest in 1875, becoming the rector of Holy Trinity church,
Heydon, Cambridgeshire Heydon is a village and civil parish in Cambridgeshire, England. The parish of Heydon was transferred from Essex to Cambridgeshire in 1894. The area of the parish is . It is situated on one of the highest places in Cambridgeshire, with the nearb ...
until 1877. He then became a
minor canon A minor canon is a member of staff on the establishment of a cathedral or a collegiate church. In at least one foundation the post may be known as "priest-vicar". Minor canons are clergy and take part in the daily services but are not part of t ...
of
Worcester Cathedral Worcester Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Worcester, in Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified ...
until 1879 when he became a chaplain at Malta. In 1880 he lost his faith and stood down from his church career.


Subsequent career

He moved to
Milan Milan ( , , Lombard: ; it, Milano ) is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of about 1.4 million, while its metropolitan city h ...
where he learnt singing with
Francesco Lamperti Francesco Lamperti (11 March 1811 or 1813 – 1 May 1892) was an Italian singing teacher. Biography A native of Savona, Lamperti attended the Milan Conservatory where, beginning in 1850, he taught for a quarter of a century. He was director ...
. He returned to England where he provided and English translation of his ''Art of Singing'' in 1884.


Life in Jamaica

Walter set sail for
Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...
from Southampton on 24 October 1894. Aside from a brief visit to England in 1895, he spent the rest of his life there. Following a narrow escape in a landslide in the
1907 Kingston earthquake The 1907 Kingston earthquake which shook the capital of the island of Jamaica with a magnitude of 6.2 on the moment magnitude scale on Monday January 14, at about 3:30 p.m. local time (20:36 Coordinated universal time, UTC), is described by t ...
he moved to Bower Hill, Lucea. He soon gained a reputation for a broad range of knowledge and a generosity in sharing it. Local residents would go to him to resolve queries concerning questions of music, literature, religion, botany and science. The phrase "Ask Mr. Jekyll" became popular at this time. He regularly organised seminars on a Saturday morning covering music and literature. However, his musical skills were particularly noted. Not only did he publish a significant collection of Jamaican folk songs, but he would regularly practice on his
grand piano The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
at precisely 1pm each day with the windows open. Local residents would gather nearby to listen to him play. Walter Jekyll was buried in the graveyard of the Hanover Parish Church, Lucea. On his tombstone this epitaph is inscribed: "Musician, gardener, philosopher, teacher, and writer, he lived 34 years in this Island of his adopting, where he gave himself to the service of others and was greatly beloved by all who knew him."


Works


''The Bible Untrustworthy'' (1904)

This book, ''The Bible Untrustworthy. A Critical Comparison of Contradictory Passages in the Scriptures, with a View of Testing Their Historical Accuracy'', London: Watts and Co., The book was reviewed in '' Open Court'', the official publication of the
Free Religious Association The Free Religious Association (FRA) was an American freethought organization that opposed organized religion and aimed to form in its place a universal rational religion free of dogma or theology, based on evolutionary science.Parsons, Gerald. ( ...
: :"This volume of 284 pages proposes the question, “Is the Bible the inspired word of God?” and naturally answers it in the negative. The author goes over many errors and objectionable passages, including the blood-thirstiness of Yahveh, the legend of the fall, the fish-stories of the New Testament, the prophecies, the sins of David, the inhumanities of the patriarchs, and other religious errors, miracles, authorship of the Fourth Gospel, etc., etc., and finds the book that contains them wanting. He is not an irreligious man. On the contrary, he believes that we need a religion, and on account of the untenableness of dogmas rejects the Christian creed and prefers a rationalised faith which recognises the truths of Eastern religions, especially Buddhism with its noble ethics and universal lovingkindness. The author condemns especially the efforts of the Bible League to establish faith in the Bible and to suppress the higher criticism as far as possible. For this purpose he criticises the leaders of this movement for their lack of truthfulness and concludes his book with the following conciliatory comment: “In parting from them let me ask their forgiveness if I have said anything which they may think too hard. I have written purely in the interest of truth. The war is with principles, not with them.”


''Jamaican Song and Story'' (1907)

Jekyll published
Jamaican Song and Story: Annancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes
', in (1907), with introduction by
Alice Werner Alice Werner (26 June 1859 - 9 June 1935) was a writer, poet and teacher of the Bantu languages.- Alice Werner
and appendices by
Charles Samuel Myers Charles Samuel Myers, CBE, FRS (13 March 1873 – 12 October 1946) was an English physician who worked as a psychologist. Although he did not invent the term, his first academic paper, published by ''The Lancet'' in 1915, concerned ''shell sh ...
and
Lucy Broadwood Lucy Etheldred Broadwood (9 August 1858 – 22 August 1929) was an English folksong collector and researcher, and great-granddaughter of John Broadwood, founder of the piano manufacturers Broadwood and Sons. As one of the founder members of the Fo ...
. The book made a major contribution to recording and analysing Jamaican folk music.


''The Wisdom of Schopenhauer'' (1911)

''The Wisdom of Schopenhauer: As Revealed in Some of His Principal Writings'', London: Watts and Co. consists of texts selected and translated by Walter Jekyll MA formerly of Trinity College, Cambridge, and issued for the
Rationalist Press Association The Rationalist Association, originally the Rationalist Press Association, is an organization in the United Kingdom, founded in 1885 by a group of freethinkers who were unhappy with the increasingly political and decreasingly intellectual tenor ...
. The publisher was primarily concerned with publishing cheap editions of popular science and secular texts for a largely working class readership. The edition consists of extracts from ''The Will in Nature'', ''
Essay on the Freedom of the Will An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal ...
'', '' The Basis of Ethics'', and the ''
Parerga and Paralipomena ''Parerga and Paralipomena'' (Greek for "Appendices" and "Omissions", respectively; german: Parerga und Paralipomena) is a collection of philosophical reflections by Arthur Schopenhauer published in 1851. The selection was compiled not as a summa ...
''.
''The Wisdom of Schopenhauer: As Revealed in Some of His Principal Writings''
Full text on pdf.


Other

Jekyll was a regular contributor to '' The Garden'', to which his brother Herbert had contributed in 1871, and of which his sister, Gertrude, had become an editor in 1900. He also provided the introduction and footnotes to Claude McKay's '' Songs of Jamaica'' (1912).


In fiction

In his novel ''Banana Bottom'' (1933) first published four years after Jekyll's death,Claude McKay states "This story belongs to the Jamaican period of the early nineteen hundreds, and all the characters, as in my previous novels are imaginary, excepting perhaps Squire Gensir". Rhonda Cobham has argued that the figure of Squire Gensir, the mentor of the lead character, Bita Plant, constitutes McKay's
eulogy A eulogy (from , ''eulogia'', Classical Greek, ''eu'' for "well" or "true", ''logia'' for "words" or "text", together for "praise") is a speech or writing in praise of a person or persons, especially one who recently died or retired, or as a ...
to his former mentor. McKay describes Squire Gensir thus: :"For Squire Gensir was held in high esteem everywhere and enjoyed an honourable reputation among all classes, clerical as much as lay people, although he was openly atheistic. For he was not antagonistic to ecclesiastical folk as a social group and sometimes on his long lonely tramps in the country he had taken tea with some of them as well as the gentry. Indeed he was asked more often than he accepted, as he preferred to live his life almost entirely amongst the peasantry."


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Jekyll, Walter 1849 births 1929 deaths Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge Anglican clergy from London Jamaican planters People educated at Harrow School Critics of Christianity English philosophers People from Hanover Parish British emigrants to Jamaica