Biography
He was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, and later returned to teach classics at Winchester in the 1870s, 80s and 90s. There, he gained the nickname "Mush" (his classroom hence inevitably becoming the "Mushroom"). Morshead was famed for his personal idiolect, eccentric even by the standards of Victorian schoolmasters, known as "Mushri". His pupils compiled and privately published a "Mushri-English pronouncing dictionary", which proved popular enough to run to seven editions. It now forms a valuable source for research into upper-class slang in Victorian England.
Morshead has been described by the academic Christopher Stray as a "Liberal among Tories", an eccentric and an individualist. Notably for a classicist in the late 19th century, he spoke out against the view, held by some of his colleagues, of science as "the enemy", and considered some defences of his discipline as bigoted, ill-informed assaults upon it. Stray emphasises his contribution to personal idiosyncrasy in the increasingly homogenous age of the Industrial Revolution, and draws parallels between Morshead's teaching and that of teachers in the Greek and Roman era.
Read more about this topic: E. D. A. Morshead
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)