Henry Jackson (classicist) - Biography

Biography

Born on March 12, 1839 in Sheffield, the son of an eminent Sheffield surgeon of the same name and his wife, Frances, third daughter of James Swettenham, of Wood End, near Winksworth. He attended Sheffield Collegiate School and Cheltenham College before entering Trinity College Cambridge in 1858; he graduated BA in 1862 as third Classic. He joined the Cambridge Apostles in 1863. He became a fellow at Trinity College in 1864, and became Assistant Tutor in 1866, Praelector in Ancient Philosophy in 1875 and Vice-Master in 1914. In 1875 he married Margaret, daughter of the Reverend Francis Vansittart Thornton, vicar of South-Hill with Callington, Cornwall. They had two sons and three daughters.

Jackson's married life was clouded by the illness of his wife, for many years bedridden and unable to live at Cambridge; his wife spent time in a nursing home.

Together with Henry Sidgwick and others he essentially established the Cambridge university's supervisory system by introducing it in the classical side at Trinity. Other disciplines and other colleges soon followed suit. He was interested in university reform including the reform of Triposes (including the Classical Triposes), the admission of women for university education, the abolition of tests, and for the general reform of university and college statutes, and voted for women's degrees. He became Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge University, a post he was appointed to in 1906, following Sir Richard Jebb; after 1879 he became one of the editors of The Journal of Philology until his death. In July, 1919, Jackson was honored on the occasion of his eightieth birthday and his retirement as Vice-Master of Trinity College, with an address presented by the Master and Fellows.

Jackson's area of study was Greek philosophy, but he did not publish greatly - editing book 5 of the Nichomachean Ethics and writing a series of pieces on Plato's later theory of ideas in the Journal of Philology. His important work was in translating and commenting upon Aristotle's Ethics. His favourite author was William Makepeace Thackeray and, long before his death it was said he had read Thackeray's "Henry Esmond" forty times apparently.

His greater achievement was in his lectures and his ability to train the next generation of classical scholars, his more eminent students included R K Gaye, Francis Cornford and R G Bury. He was a founder member of Cambridge University Liberal Club in 1886, ultimately serving as its President from 1897 to 1899.

Henry Jackson died at Bournemouth on September 25, 1921, having been a great reformer, both within his college and the university. He is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, where his predecessor as Regius Professor of Greek, Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, a fellow member of the Order of Merit, is also buried.

There is an article on Jackson in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society suppl. vol. 28 (Cambridge 2005), 87-110. It is in a special volume entitled The Owl of Minerva: The Cambridge Praelections of 1906.

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