157. The Admirable Crichton by JM Barrie

Rhetorician, scholar, wit, musician, fencer, lover and all-round good guy, James Crichton of Clunie (1560-82) was the origin of the ‘admirable’ Crichton of Barrie’s famous play. Crichton lived his short life at tornado pace: he gained his MA at fifteen, could speak ten languages (including Chaldean) by the age of 20, and became a military advisor to the Duke of Mantua aged 21, in which capacity he was assassinated by a rival aged only 22. He was soon dubbed the ‘admirable’ Crichton (and appears as such in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair). Barrie, a fellow Scot, chose the epithet for the title of his play about a butler stranded with his employers on a desert island, but the stolid figure of Crichton the butler (who despite being the obvious superior of his aristocratic employers finally insists on his own lowly place in the social order) is rather incongruously at odds with that of the dashing 16th-century prodigy.

Consulted:
Tytler, Patrick Fraser: The Life of James Crichton of Cluny, Commonly Called the Admirable Crichton (1819)

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