What drove Crabber to invest thirty four years of his life to the painstaking construction of The Chronicle is not well established. He died at the age of sixty seven from the dehydrating effects of a prolonged bout of diarrhoea. At that point he was pretty much a recluse spending his days in even measure between his glasshouses in Kent and his study in the adjoining house. Even his research trips to the British Museum Reading Rooms that, along with his excursions to selected locations of the Mediterranean, the Levant and North Africa, had been such a characteristic feature of his early studies had declined to nothing in his last five or six years of life.
The fact that he died with no family or close friends and left neither diaries nor any obvious autobiographical texts means that most of what we know of Crabber has been gleaned from the text of The Chronicle itself, a work that Crabber finally completed, in sporadic bursts, in those final days. Over and above the fascinating biographical details that can be teased from the text, the overwhelming sense one gets from reading The Chronicle is that Crabber, through his single-minded pursuit of figs and all things figgy, had in fact stumbled across both a consistent epistemological framework for metaphysical analysis and a rather fine variant on the date and walnut cake (where it is the walnuts, and not the dates, that are replaced with figs).
When I was at University, too many years ago to mention now, there was a miniature underground academic industry of people writing exegeses and commentaries on sections of The Chronicle. No one was doing this as part of their main course of study, no department would countenance such a thing, but instead it was all done in spare moments, the papers and pamphlets circulated amongst the clique of initiates. Some of the more bawdy or anarchistic commentaries were occasionally left, mischievously, in department coffee areas or slipped under the study doors of the more staid professors and lecturers. These always created quite a stir and, for a time, the college library’s edition of The Chronicle of Figs was removed from the stacks to try to put an end to such things. It was eventually returned after accusations of censorship and illiberalism were levelled at the college administrators, forcing them to relent. Within days new commentaries were doing the rounds. In fact I would guess that most people who have come across Crabber and his Chronicle would have done so through these, or similar, commentaries rather than through actually reading The Chronicle itself.
Anyhow, I’m straying from the point, what I am really trying to say here is that just because a book is called The Chronicle of Figs doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain great philosophical insight and, conversely, just because a book purports to be of great philosophical importance doesn’t mean that it contains a fig of truth.
Now I wonder whether there is a library anywhere down here in Tartarus Central…
