Benjamin Hall Kennedy

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"Benjamin Kennedy" redirects here. For other people with the name, see Ben Kennedy.

Benjamin Hall Kennedy (Walter William Ouless, 1883)

Benjamin Hall Kennedy (6 November 1804 – 6 April 1889) was an English scholar and schoolmaster, known for his work in the teaching of the

Girton College
as Cambridge University colleges for women.

Biography

He was born at

Holy Orders the following year. In 1830, he became an assistant master at Harrow.[2]

In 1836, he, his wife and his first child Charlotte Amy May Kennedy returned to Shrewsbury when he became headmaster. While they were there Charlotte was joined by Marion, Julia, Edith and Arthur.[3] In 1841 he became

J. E. B. Mayor
.

In 1867, Kennedy was elected Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and canon of Ely Cathedral, serving in both posts until his death. From 1870 to 1880 he was a member of the committee for the revision of the New Testament. In 1870 he also became a member of the University Council.

He supported the access of women to a university education, and took a prominent part in the establishment of

Mary Paley and Amy Bulley were among the first women to take tripos examinations they did it in the Kennedys' drawing room. Paley described him as excitable, but he would sometimes doze whilst nominally invigilating. He was nicknamed "the purple boy".[4] In politics, he had liberal sympathies. He died near Torquay[2] and is buried in Mill Road Cemetery, Cambridge
.

F. D. How included Kennedy in the 1904 book Six Great Schoolmasters.[5]

Writings

Kennedy wrote a number of classical and theological works, but he is most famous today for his primer of Latin grammar. This began as the Elementary Latin Primer (1843), which became the Public School Latin Primer (1866), the Public School Latin Grammar (1871), and finally the Revised Latin Primer (1888).[6] The latter was further revised by J. F. Mountford in 1930 and is still widely used today.[7] The medieval way of writing Latin noun tables, starting with the nominative and then proceeding to the genitive was used in England prior to Kennedy's Primer and is still widely used in America (e.g. in the Wheelock's Latin course). Kennedy changed the order of writing the noun endings so that the nominative was always followed by the vocative and accusative, in order to bring out more effectively the similarities between these cases in many nouns. Kennedy's Primer was so widely used and was so influential that this led to a permanent change in the way that Latin is taught in the UK. Modern books such as the Cambridge Latin Course still follow this approach.

In 1913, there was a problem with the copyright on the Revised Latin Primer[3] which had been published in 1888. His daughter Marion Kennedy, a Latin scholar, revealed that the book was written by herself, her sister Julia and two of her father's former students, G. H. Hallam and T. E. Page.[3] It is unlikely that Kennedy had any hand in the revision of 1888, and the Shorter Latin Primer of the same year.[6] The BBC Radio 4 programme in December 2018 Amo, Amas, Amusical, presented by Mary Beard, explained the background to the primer and the sisters' significant part in writing it, as well as the resistance to women's higher education at Cambridge and elsewhere during their lifetime.[8]

Other works include:

  • Christian Peaceableness: a Sermon (1839)
  • An Elementary Grammar of the Latin Language (1847)
  • Palaestra Latina; or, A Second Latin Reading-Book (1850)
  • The Psalter in English Verse (1860)
  • Elementary Greek Grammar (1862)
  • The Public School Latin Grammar (1871; 4th ed., 1876)
  • Studia Sophoclea, ... Being a Critical Examination of Lewis Campbell's edition of Sophocles (1874)
  • Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus (2nd ed., 1885)
  • Aristophanes, Birds (1874)
  • Agamemnon
    , with introduction, metrical translation and notes (2nd ed., 1882)
  • A commentary on Virgil (3rd ed., 1881)
  • Plato, Theaetetus, English translation (1881)

He contributed largely to the collection known as Sabrinae Corolla (John Bell, London, 1850), and published a collection of verse in Greek, Latin and English under the title of Between Whiles (2nd ed., 1882), with many autobiographical details.[2]

Family

His brother Charles Rann Kennedy was a barrister and wrote original works as well as translating and editing classical works. His younger brother The Rev. William James Kennedy (1814-1891) was a prominent educator, and the father of Lord Justice Sir William Rann Kennedy (1846–1915), a distinguished Cambridge scholar.

Notes

  1. ^ "Kennedy, Benjamin Hall (KNDY822BH)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  2. ^ a b c  One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Kennedy, Benjamin Hall". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
  3. ^ a b c Christopher Stray, 'Kennedy, Marion Grace (1836–1914)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 17 November 2017
  4. ISBN 978-0-521-86155-7
    .
  5. ^ "Review of Six Great Schoolmasters by F. D. How". The Athenaeum (4031): 102. 28 January 1905.
  6. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/15363. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  7. ISBN 0-582-36240-7
    .
  8. ^ "Amo Amas Amusical". BBC. Retrieved 2 August 2023.

External links

References

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