Henry Thomas Buckle - Biography

Biography

The son of Thomas Henry Buckle, a wealthy London merchant and shipowner, he was born at Lee in Kent. His delicate health prevented him obtaining much formal education; he never attended university and was little at school. However, he received a high degree of education privately, and the love of reading he felt as a child was given many outlets. He first gained distinction as a chess player, being known, before he was twenty, as one of the best in the world. In matchplay he defeated Kieseritsky and Loewenthal and was named Chessgames.com player of the day on 11 November 2012.After his father's death in January 1840, he inherited an ample fortune and a large library, and travelled with his mother on the continent (1840–1844). He had by then resolved to direct all his reading and to devote all his energies to the preparation of some great historical work. Over the next seventeen years, he is said to have spent ten hours a day on it.

At first he planned a history of the Middle Ages, but by 1851 he had decided in favour of a history of civilization. The next six years were occupied in writing, altering and revising the first volume, which appeared in June 1857. It made its author a literary and social celebrity. On 19 March 1858 he delivered a public lecture at the Royal Institution (the only one he ever gave) on the Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge, which was published in Fraser's Magazine for April 1858, and reprinted in the first volume of his Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works.

On 1 April 1859, his mother died. It was under the immediate impression of his loss that he concluded a review he was writing of John Stuart Mill's Essay on Liberty with an argument for immortality, based on the yearning of the affections to regain communion with the beloved dead—on the impossibility of standing up and living, if we believed the separation were final. The review appeared in Fraser's Magazine, and is to be found also in the Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works (1872).

The second volume of Buckle's history was published in May 1861. Soon afterwards, he left England to travel for the sake of his health. He spent the winter of 1861-62 in Egypt, from which he went over the deserts of Sinai and of Edom to Syria, reaching Jerusalem on 19 April 1862. After eleven days he set out for Europe by way of Beirut, but at Nazareth he developed typhoid fever, and later died at Damascus.