Frederic Harrison (1831-1923), positivist and author, was born in London on 18 October 1831. He was educated at King's College School, Strand, from 1843 and entered Oxford in 1849. He was called to the bar in 1858, and took chambers at New Square, Lincoln's Inn. He wrote Neo-Christianity (1860) and began teaching history and Latin at the London Working Men's College founded by the Christian socialists in Bloomsbury. He published his lectures as The Meaning of History (1862), reprinted in The Meaning of History and other Historical Pieces(1894). He made the case for parliamentary reform in working-class papers, but wrote his liveliest essays for the middle-class readers of the Fortnightly Review. In 1869 Lord Westbury appointed him secretary to the royal commission for the digest of the law and in 1870 the Council of Legal Education appointed him examiner in jurisprudence, Roman law, and constitutional history. From 1877 to 1889 he was professor of jurisprudence, international law, and constitutional law for the Council. Essays derived from his lectures appeared in the Fortnightly Review and were reprinted in his On Jurisprudence and the Conflict of Laws (1919).
In 1870 Harrison found his vocation as a positivist and with others was responsible for the founding of England's first positivist centre. The first London County Council elected him an alderman in 1889, he also became a JP and held offices in the Royal Historical Society, the Sociological Society, the Eastern Question Association, and the London Library. His also published a novel, Theophano: the Crusade of the Tenth Century (1904), and a drama in blank verse, Nicephorus: a Tragedy of New Rome(1906). Between 1906 and 1908 he compiled six volumes of essays, including his recollections of mountaineering, My Alpine Jubilee, 1851-1907 (1908). His Autobiographic Memoirs appeared in 1911. He died suddenly at his home in London on 14 January 1923.
Source: Martha S. Vogeler, 'Harrison, Frederic (1831-1923)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/33732.
Benjamin Jowett (1817-1893), classical scholar and master of Balliol College, was educated at St Paul's School, London, from 1829, and went up to Balliol College with a scholarship in October 1836. He was elected a fellow of the college in November 1838, before he had even taken his degree (he gained a first in the following summer). He was ordained deacon, and was appointed to one of the tutorships in the college in 1842. Jowett became an advocate of university reforms, along with a group of friends which included Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, who had entered Balliol in 1834. Jowett and Stanley collaborated on a series of commentaries on the Epistles of St Paul, although only one volume was published by each man, in 1855. In the same year Jowett was appointed to the regius chair of Greek. In the following decades he produced several volumes of translation of Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle. From 1866 until the year of his death he preached annually in Westminster Abbey, and three volumes of selected sermons have been published since his death. In 1870 he was elected to the mastership of Balliol. As Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, between 1882 and 1886, he was responsible for putting into effect reforms designed to redistribute college income, open fellowships to married and lay persons, and create faculty boards to control university lecturing. He died on 1 October 1893 and was buried in St Sepulchre's graveyard, Oxford.
Source: Peter Hinchliff and John Prest, 'Jowett, Benjamin (1817-1893)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/15143.
David Binning Monro (1836-1905), classical scholar, was born in Edinburgh on 16 November 1836. He entered Glasgow University in 1851 and matriculated as a scholar of Brasenose College Oxford on 16 June 1854. In November of the same year was elected to a scholarship at Balliol. He entered Lincoln's Inn as a student, but was not called to the bar, returning to Oxford in 1862 as a lecturer at Oriel College. He became tutor in 1863, and was elected vice-provost in 1874, on the retirement of Dr Edward Hawkins from Oxford. On Hawkins's death in 1882, Monro was chosen as provost of Oriel.
Monro devoted his literary interests and energies to the elucidation of the Homeric poems. In October 1868 he wrote in the Quarterly Review an article entitled 'The Homeric question', which he recast for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1880 edition). He collated the Venetian manuscripts of the scholia of the Iliad for Dindorf's edition (1875-7); published a school edition of book one of the Iliad (1878), a Grammar of the Homeric Language (1882), and a school edition of the entire Iliad (1884-9). A complete text of Homeri opera et reliquiae appeared in 1896. The later years of his life were given to an edition of the last twelve books of the Odyssey(1901). Monro was a founder member of the Oxford Philological Society in 1870, and was for many years its president; he took part in founding the Hellenic Society and the Classical Association, and was vice-president of both. He was a member of the council of the British School at Athens, officier de l'instruction publique in France, and an original fellow of the British Academy. He died suddenly at Heiden, Switzerland, on 22 August 1905, and was buried in Holywell cemetery, Oxford.
Source: L.R. Phelps, 'Monro, David Binning (1836-1905)', rev. Richard Smail, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/35070.
Sir Robert Samuel Wright (1839-1904), judge and jurist, was born at Litton, Somerset, on 20 January 1839. He was educated at King's School, Bruton, Somerset, before matriculating in 1856 at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was awarded a scholarship in 1857. He was a fellow of Oriel from 1861 to 1880 and was made an honorary fellow there in 1882. He became a student of the Inner Temple in London in November 1861 and, after proceeding BCL in 1863, he was called to the bar in June 1865.
He edited A Golden Treasury of Ancient Greek Poetry (1866) and, with J.E.L. Shadwell, A Golden Treasury of Greek Prose (1870). He served on several commissions and inquiries, and in 1870 he was appointed as secretary to the royal commission on the truck system, whose report (1871, C.326) he had a large part in writing. He also wrote a concise essay, The Law of Criminal Conspiracies and Agreements (1873) and, with Sir Frederick Pollock, published An Essay on Possession in the Common Law (1883). An Outline of Local Government and Local Taxation, written with Henry Hobhouse, followed in 1884. Wright stood for parliament as a Liberal, unsuccessfully, for Norwich in 1884 and for Stepney in 1886. He was appointed a judge in the Queen's Bench Division in 1890, and was knighted in the following year. He died on 13 August 1904.
Source: P.R. Glazebrook, 'Wright, Sir Robert Samuel (1839-1904)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/37039.
