James Stout

Like he is not going to work at the fabric store, you know?

Yeah.

In Granville, this expresses itself.

He's a debate kid.

He's the good kind of debate kid, but he has this pathological need to debate with his peers to the extent he is so committed to this that he makes a Jewish friend, and they start having good-natured arguments about religion.

And because he wants to argue better with his Jewish friend, he learns Hebrew and becomes a fluent speaker of Hebrew in order to argue about the Torah with his Jewish friend.

Yeah, that's perfect, actually.

Yeah.

When he makes a friend who's a member of a weird Greek Christian sect, he learns Greek for the same reason.

Like again, like Equiano, he's one of these guys who just picks up languages.

He's just crazy smart.

Yeah.

In 1757, he gets a job as a clerk in the ordinance office, which so far as I can tell is like a mid-level bureaucratic position.

This leaves him with ample free time, which he spends idly studying the law and presumably learning more languages in order to argue with his friends.

Wow.

One of his older brothers is a doctor who – and you get the feeling this is like a family of good people because his older brother, the doctor, runs a free clinic out of his house for the poor of London, right?

Damn, yeah.

And Granville periodically will just like show up to hang out with him and his patients and like talk.

There's not TV at the time.

What else are you going to do, right?