Eastern Europe

Wilfrid Voynich is perhaps best remembered for his association with the strange - and still undeciphered - document that now bears his name. However his life, even from the limited information readily available, is far more curious than might be expected.

Early years

He was born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, into a Polish-Lithuanian noble family in what was then the Russian Empire. He went to Cracow University, acquiring several degrees - to the level of doctorate - and an extensive knowledge of European languages, being able to write to publication level in a number of them.

Revolutionaries, anarchists, nationalists and others contributed to a degree of unrest in the Russian Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century There was much repression, and several assassination attempts on the Czars Alexander II and Alexander III - ultimately successful in the former, with one attempt on the latter involving Lenin's elder brother.

Wojnicz became a Polish revolutionary nationalist, using the name Wilfryd. Following an attempt to free some fellow conspirators from a Warsaw prison, he was arrested. It appears that, while in the Warsaw Prison, he saw a young woman walking in the street outside. He contracted TB while in prison and acquired a permanent stoop. In 1886 he was sent to Siberia from which he escaped in 1890, taking six months to leave Russian territory, ending up in London, having used all his resources to finance getting there. The story has it that he had the address, in Russian, of a fellow revolutionary, Sergius Stepniak, and it took some while to find someone who understood the language and was able to take him to his destination. Rather surprisingly he then found that the woman he had spotted in Warsaw was an associate of Stepniak: she was a fellow revolutionary, Ethel Lilian Boole, daughter of the mathematician George Boole and Mary Everest, feminist and niece of Sir George Everest. Among her acquaintances were Friedrich Engels and George Bernard Shaw.

In 1892 he started a relationship with Ethel Lilian, eventually marrying her in 1902 - which may be connected to his (successful) application for British citizenship. The surname was anglicized to Voynich and Michal adopted the given name Wilfrid. The couple continued their revolutionary activities and associations with Stepniak, the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin and others of a similar intent. Wilfrid - as Ivan Kel'chevskii - and Stepniak established the Society of Friends for a Free Russia. In August 1895 Stepniak attended Friedrich Engel's funeral - and died a few months later, being killed in a railway level-crossing accident in west London Among those who attended his funeral service were the Italian revolutionary Errico Malatesta, William Morris and Eleanor Marx Aveling daughter of Karl Marx.

Partially as a result of Stepniak's death, and the need for money, the Voynichs changed direction. Ethel Lilian became a successful novelist, and translator, probably best known for 'The Gadfly'. There are claims that she made use of her association with the man best known as Sidney Reilly (with whom she travelled to Rome in 1895) for the plot of The Gadfly, but it appears that he borrowed more from the story than he provided.

Wilfrid became an antiquarian book dealer: apparently selecting this career on the recommendation of an acquaintance at the British Library, whom he had asked for guidance. The choice proved successful, and he prospered, with bookshops in London (1898) and New York (1914), and many travels in Europe and the US to make acquisitions, of incunabula and later works. There are some indications that his profession was also used to smuggle revolutionary materials into and out of the Russian Empire. He became a noted medieval scholar and wrote bibliographical works in many languages, including 'books of which his was the only known printed example' and 'books not in the possession of the British Library.' (Some of his books and acquisitions were to end up in the British Library.)

Code-breaking

A regular visitor to Italy, in 1912 Voynich visited the Villa Mondragone, at the request of the Jesuits there - who wished to sell some of their books in order to raise funds (apparently without the knowledge of their superiors). Among the books he acquired was a peculiar volume, of some age and obviously written in code, which was to provide him with a more than contemporary notability. Voynich decided, on various grounds, that it had been written by Roger Bacon (this is now considered not to be the case): he spent the next few years attempting to 'crack the code' with the aid of specialists, to no effect.

Eventually he linked up with Dr William Romaine Newbold, of the University of Pennsylvania, who developed a system for interpreting the manuscript - which, he claimed, involved a six-fold cipher. However, others, including John Manley, of the University of Chicago, refuted the arguments put forward - there were too many ambiguities in the process, and, it was afterwards proved, the 'marks' interpreted by Newbold were in many cases, merely the product of the ink drying on the vellum, and he was discredited. (It should be noted that the Enigma machines in their earlier formats made use of three sets of encrypting discs, rising to five.)

The rest of Voynich's life seems to have been fairly unmemorable. In 1916 he was involved in the return of a book, which he had acquired in good faith, being one of the volumes appropriated from Lincoln Cathedral Library several years earlier by John Edward Tinkler. Tinkler was a noted antiquarian book dealer with a dubious private life and even more dubious associates. He had 'form' for similar offences in other contexts - and was sentenced in 1912 for thefts from Lincoln and Peterborough Cathedral libraries. Generously Voynich returned the book, despite its cost.

Having settled in the US Wilfrid died in New York in 1930. Ethel Lilian Voynich died in 1960, leaving the manuscript to a friend, who sold it to an antiquarian book dealer, who, after failing to sell it, donated it to Yale University. Further investigations and attempts to resolve the code were carried out at various times.

Many theories have been put forward for the Voynich manuscript – like the Anti-Kythira machine it is a 'thing without a historical context' – of varying degrees of plausibility and otherwise. The document is clearly of some age, and unlikely to have been fabricated by Voynich himself as has been argued (and would a modern 'reconstructor of ancient texts' create only one such document rather than several?). It can also be argued that, whatever its purpose and intent, given that the document was 'all of a piece' and would have taken some time to construct, a fairly simple system of text/script generation would have to be used.

Main Sources

There are many web sites devoted to the document itself, but very little information in English on Wilfrid Voynich – which seems to be mostly in newspaper sources of the period. There are a scattering of original documents (to be found via Access to Archives) and his application for naturalisation can be found in the National Archives.

The addresses of his bookshops in Regent Street and the Soho area can be traced through Post Office yearbooks, and some details of his journeys to and from the US can be found on the Ancestry web site (inter alia he travelled on the Lusitania).

Other Sources

Bernhardt, Lewis - The Gadfly in Russia, The Princeton University Chronicle Vol XXVIII Autumn 1966 No 1, p 1-19

Text copyright © Jackie Speel. An original feature for the History Files.