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Henry Jackson
Portrait of Henry Jackson, 1889
Born	(1839-03-12)12 March 1839 Sheffield, England
Died	25 September 1921(1921-09-25) (aged 82) Bournemouth, England
Occupations	Writer scholar

Henry JacksonOM FBA (12 March 1839 – 25 September 1921) was an English writer and scholar. He served as the vice-master ofTrinity College, Cambridge from 1914 to 1919, praelector in ancient philosophy from 1875 to 1906 andRegius Professor of Greek (Cambridge) at theUniversity of Cambridge from 1906 to 1921. He was elected a Fellow of theBritish Academy in 1903. He was awarded the Order of Merit on 26 June 1908. From 1882 to 1892 he sat on the Council of the Senate of the University of Cambridge and was an active member of a number of the university boards. He lived within the walls of Trinity College for over 50 years. Born inSheffield, he lived mainly inCambridge, but died inBournemouth.

Born on 12 March 1839 in Sheffield, the son of an eminent Sheffield surgeon of the same name and his wife, Frances, third daughter of James Swettenham, of Wood End, near Winksworth. He attendedSheffield Collegiate School andCheltenham College before enteringTrinity College, Cambridge, in 1858; he graduated BA in 1862 as third Classic.^[1] He joined theCambridge Apostles in 1863.^{[citation needed]} He became a fellow at Trinity College in 1864, and became Assistant Tutor in 1866, Praelector in Ancient Philosophy in 1875 and Vice-Master in 1914. In 1875, he married Margaret, daughter of the Reverend Francis Vansittart Thornton, vicar of South-Hill with Callington, Cornwall. They had two sons and three daughters.

Jackson's married life was clouded by the illness of his wife, for many years bedridden and unable to live at Cambridge; his wife spent time in a nursing home.

Together withHenry Sidgwick and others he essentially established Cambridge University's supervisory system by introducing it to the classical side at Trinity. Other disciplines and other colleges soon followed suit. He was interested in university reform including the reform of Triposes (including the Classical Triposes), the admission of women for university education, the abolition of tests, and for the general reform of university and college statutes, and voted for women's degrees. He became Regius professor of Greek at Cambridge University, a post he was appointed to in 1906, followingSir Richard Jebb; after 1879 he became one of the editors of theJournal of Philology until his death. In July 1919, Jackson was honoured on the occasion of his eightieth birthday and his retirement as Vice-Master of Trinity College, with an address presented by the Master and Fellows.

Jackson's area of study wasGreek philosophy, but he did not publish greatly – editing book 5 of theNicomachean Ethics and writing a series of pieces onPlato's later theory of ideas in theJournal of Philology. His important work was in translating and commenting uponAristotle'sEthics. His favourite author wasWilliam Makepeace Thackeray and, long before his death, it was said he had read Thackeray'sHenry Esmond forty times apparently.^{[citation needed]}

His greater achievement was in his lectures and his ability to train the next generation of classical scholars. His more eminent students included R. K. Gaye,Francis Cornford andR. G. Bury. He was a founder member ofCambridge University Liberal Club in 1886, ultimately serving as its President from 1897 to 1899.^[2]

Henry Jackson died at Bournemouth on 25 September 1921, having been a great reformer, both within his college and the university. His funeral service took place at Trinity College Chapel on 28 September 1921 which many of his colleagues and friends attended.

He is buried at theParish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge, where his predecessor as Regius Professor of Greek, Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, a fellow member of the Order of Merit, is also buried.^[3]

He was a Member of theCambridge Apostles, the intellectual secret society, from 1863; on 19 February 1898, the Cambridge Apostles had a gala meeting, with a paper delivered by Henry Jackson as one of its oldest members, who had been elected thirty-five years earlier (1863). A full dozen,Desmond MacCarthy,J.M.E. McTaggart,Frederic William Maitland (who had himself been an Apostle for twenty-five years: 1873),Nathaniel Wedd,Bertrand Russell,Robin John Grote Mayor,G.E. Moore,G.M. Trevelyan,Austin Edward Smyth, and both Llewelyn Davies brothers met that night, and Henry Jackson read on ‘Shall we write and re-write and re-write again?’^{[citation needed]}

There is an article on Jackson inProceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society suppl. vol. 28 (Cambridge 2005), 87–110. It is in a special volume entitledThe Owl of Minerva: The Cambridge Praelections of 1906.

Jackson received the honoraryDoctor of Laws (LL.D) from theUniversity of Glasgow in June 1901.^[4]

InAttractive and Nonsensical Classics: Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere by Christopher Stray, Stray says "Then there were the joint dining clubs like the Ad Eundem and the Arcades, set up to link members of the two universities. Finally, some men moved from one place to the other, like the archaeologist Percy Gardner, who went from a Cambridge to an Oxford chair. All these mechanisms facilitated mutual learning – as did the railway line. Henry Jackson, who succeeded Richard Jebb as professor of Greek at Cambridge in 1906, belonged to the Ad Eundem club. In 1913 he responded to a comment from a friend that Gilbert Murray was a "very attractive person" by saying that "Oxford is very successful in breeding 'attractive' scholars: more so than Cambridge. And this is not surprising. For we dare not talk our shop in a mixed company, and even in a scholars' party we are very conscious of our limitations as specialists." Henry Jackson declared that he always regarded the Ad Eundem "as one of Henry [Sidgwick]'s good works", and claimed that it has been very useful as a link between Oxford and Cambridge Universities.^[5]

He published a series of articles on "Plato's Later Theory of Ideas" (Journal of Philology); alsoAbout Edwin Drood (1911),The Fifth Book ofNicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (1879), andTexts to illustrate a Course of Elementary Lectures on the History of Greek Philosophy from Thales to Aristotle (1901).

• Parry, Reginald St. John: Henry Jackson, O M, Vice-Master of Trinity College and Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge University Press 1926. Republished as a paperback by Cambridge University Press in November 2013.
• Martin, Stanley (2007).The Order of Merit: One Hundred Years of Matchless Honour. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd.ISBN 978-1-86064-848-9.

EnglishWikisource has original works by or about:

Henry Jackson (1839-1921)

• Henry Jackson letters at the Public Services Department, Lilly Library, Indiana University.
• Papers at Trinity College Library, Cambridge
• The Apostles of Cambridge at theWayback Machine (archived 10 October 2008)
• extract/37/12/566; The Expository Times: Entre Nous (at bottom); The Expository Times, Vol. 37, No. 12, 566–568 (1926)doi:10.1177/001452462603701208.
• Trinity College Chapel
• Henry Jackson atFind a Grave

• 1839 births
• 1921 deaths
• English classical scholars
• Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Fellows of the British Academy
• Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Members of the Order of Merit
• People educated at Sheffield Collegiate School
• Regius Professors of Greek (Cambridge)
• British scholars of ancient Greek philosophy
• Aristotle scholars

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