Mark Pattison (academic)

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Mark Pattison
Mark Pattison
Born(1813-10-10)October 10, 1813
Hauxwell, North Riding of Yorkshire
DiedJuly 30, 1884(1884-07-30) (aged 70)
Harrogate, Yorkshire
NationalityEnglish
Alma materOriel College, Oxford
Occupation(s)Author, Priest
PredecessorJames Thompson
SuccessorWilliam Walter Merry
SpouseEmily Francis Strong (Lady Dilke)

Mark Pattison (10 October 1813 – 30 July 1884) was an English author and a

Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford
.

Life

He was the son of the rector of

Puseyite College. Pattison was at this time a Puseyite, and greatly under the influence of John Henry Newman, for whom he worked, helping in the translation of Thomas Aquinas's Catena Aurea, and writing in the British Critic and Christian Remembrancer
.

He was ordained a priest in 1843, and in the same year became tutor of Lincoln College, where he rapidly made a reputation as a clear and stimulating teacher and as a sympathetic friend of youth. The management of the college was practically in his hands, and his reputation as a scholar became high in the university. In 1851 the rectorship of Lincoln became vacant, and it seemed certain that Pattison would be elected, but he was edged out. The disappointment was acute and his health suffered. In 1855, he resigned the tutorship, travelled to Germany to investigate Continental systems of education, and began his researches into the lives of the philologist Isaac Casaubon and the historian Joseph Justus Scaliger, which occupied the remainder of his life.

In 1861, he was at last elected rector of Lincoln College in

Lady Dilke). As rector, he contributed largely to various reviews on literary subjects, and took a considerable interest in social science, even presiding over a section at a congress in 1876. However, he avoided the routine of university business, and refused the vice-chancellorship. But while living the life of a student, he was fond of society, and especially of the society of women. In later life he formed a close friendship with Meta Bradley, a young woman 40 years his junior. On his death he left her £5,000, much to his wife's displeasure.[2] Pattison died at Harrogate
, Yorkshire.

His biography of Isaac Casaubon appeared in 1875; he also wrote about John Milton in Macmillan's "English Men of Letters" series in 1879. The late nineteenth-century English author George Gissing wrote in his diary in 1891 that he "was astonished to find [the biography of Casaubon] on the shelves" of a circulating library in the small north Somerset seaside resort of Clevedon.[3] The 18th century, alike in its literature and its theology, was a favourite study, as is illustrated by his contribution (Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688–1750) to the once famous Essays and Reviews (1860), and by his edition of Pope's Essay on Man (1869), etc. His Sermons and Collected Essays, edited by Henry Nettleship, were published posthumously (1889), as well as the Memoirs (1885), an autobiography deeply tinged with melancholy and bitterness. His projected Life of Scaliger was never finished.

Posterity has not been kind to Mark Pattison. For many he remains the stereotypical Mr DryasDust and/or the original of George Eliot's Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch; and his best-known twentieth-century commentator and critic, John Sparrow, did little to alter that picture. ...[4]

His extensive personal archive—comprising 63 archival boxes and including diaries, correspondence, journals, sermons and working papers, including material relating to Scaliger, Pierre-Daniel Huet and Claude Saumaise—is held in Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts, the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MSS. Pattison 7*, 79-144).

Publications

Selected articles

Notes

  1. ISSN 0006-4335
  2. ISBN 9780304322190
    .
  3. ^ Coustillas, Pierre ed. London and the Life of Literature in Late Victorian England: the Diary of George Gissing, Novelist. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1978, p.250.
  4. doi:10.1093/ehr/ceq071
    .
  5. ^ Fisher, Devon (2013). Roman Catholic Saints and Early Victorian Literature. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, p. 70.
  6. ^ Shattock, Joanne (1999). The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: 1800-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 2265.
  7. Ward, A. W. (October 1889). "Review of Essays by the late Mark Pattison, sometime Rector of Lincoln College. Collected and arranged by Henry Nettleship, 2 vols"
    . The English Historical Review. 4: 787–789.

Sources

  • Green, V.H.H. (1985). Love in a Cool Climate: Letters f Mark Pattison and Meta Bradley. Oxford University Press.
  • Jones, H.S. (2007). Intellect and Character in Victorian England: Mark Pattison and the Invention of the Don. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Sparrow, John
    (1967). Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

External links

Wikisource has original works by or about:
Mark Pattison
Academic offices
Preceded by
Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford

1861–1884 		Succeeded by
William Walter Merry
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