Thomas Hodgkin

Tottenham, 1831 - 1913, Mawnan

BiographyLC name authority rec.n80060663
LC Heading: Hodgkin, Thomas, 1831-1913.

Biography:
Hodgkin, Thomas (1831–1913), historian, was born on 29 July 1831 at Bruce Grove, Tottenham, the second son of John Hodgkin (1800–1875), barrister of Lincoln's Inn, and his first wife, Elizabeth (d. 1836), daughter of the meteorologist Luke Howard. The Hodgkins were Quakers, and Thomas, debarred from Oxford and Cambridge by the university tests, was educated at Grove House, Tottenham, and University College, London, where he graduated BA with honours in classics in 1851. He had entered Lincoln's Inn in 1850 to read for the bar, but found life in London deleterious to his health.

Hodgkin's connections readily opened a career in banking to him, and he moved first to Pontefract, and then to Whitehaven. In 1857 the failure of the Northumberland and District Bank in Newcastle upon Tyne created an opening for a new enterprise there, and the firm of Hodgkin, Barnett, Pease and Spence took up the opportunity in 1859. Hodgkin was the longest-lived of the partners, but he retired from business well before the bank was absorbed into Lloyds Bank in 1902, and from 1874 devoted his time to literary work.

On 7 August 1861 Hodgkin married Lucy Ann (1841–1934), daughter of Alfred and Sarah Ann Fox (née Lloyd) of Falmouth. They had six children: three sons and three daughters. Though he had added the care of a family to his daily business, and was involved in a variety of civic activities, Hodgkin found time and energy for intellectual pursuits, and they became an absorbing interest. As an undergraduate he had written a prize essay on the classical historians, and in Northumberland he readily immersed himself not only in Roman archaeology but also in topography and general antiquities. He was not active in national politics, but as a liberal he supported the cause of Italian unification, and his first visit to Italy in 1868 fired him with a desire to write a major history of that country. There was, however, more than democratic enthusiasm in his resolution. Under the Italian sky and sun he understood, he said, why medieval emperors and princes had readily ventured from their northern territories for the prizes that the peninsula offered.

The vigorous commerce and culture of Newcastle were a decisive influence in Hodgkin's life. On his return he gave a series of lectures in Newcastle on Renaissance Italy. His first thoughts were of a general history that would come down to his own day, but he soon turned to a more specialized though no less ambitious project. He proved well matched to the task, and the first edition of Italy and her Invaders (4 vols.) came out in 1870. The second edition (8 vols.) appeared between 1892 and 1899. The theme of the work, the end of the Roman hegemony and the emergence of the culture and institutions of medieval Italy, derives plainly enough from Hodgkin's early studies. His interest in historiography was matched by literary scholarship. His book on Claudian (1875), an accomplished author and observer of the late empire who first wrote in Greek, has lasted well. Hodgkin's enthusiasm for the light and landscape of Italy speaks for itself, but his eventual decision to concentrate upon the collapse and the complex legacy of Roman power also owes something to the landscape of northern England. He saw that country not only as an imperial frontier but also as the setting of the Anglian kingdom of Northumbria, a perception which enabled him to break new ground in the History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest, which he contributed in 1906 to the series edited for Longmans by R. L. Poole and T. F. Tout.

Italy and her Invaders, despite an intricate publishing history, did not completely fill Hodgkin's time. He contributed more than fifty articles and notes to Archaeologia Aeliana, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, and many occasional pieces to Quaker and other publications besides pamphlets and reviews. He translated the letters of Cassiodorus (1886), wrote a life of Theodoric (1891), and was instrumental in establishing the monumental History of the County of Northumberland, published in fifteen volumes between 1893 and 1940. He was a founder fellow of the British Academy, and received honorary doctorates from the universities of Durham and Oxford.

From 1864 to 1894 the Hodgkins lived at Benwell Dene, Newcastle, a house designed by Alfred Waterhouse, a fellow pupil at Grove House, who had married Thomas's sister Elizabeth. They later moved to rural Northumberland, first to Bamburgh, and in 1899 to Barmoor Castle, at Beal. Hodgkin died on 2 March 1913, while on holiday at Treworgan, Mawnan, near Falmouth, and was buried in the Quaker burial-ground at Budock, Cornwall.

In an age of nascent professionalism Hodgkin made himself a professional. His work was based upon an extensive knowledge of literary and narrative sources, Italian topography, and the continental scholarship of his day. He bears comparison with Gibbon, on his own terms, and with Grote, a fellow banker, and his history of Italy held its own until the middle of the twentieth century. Though it is no longer of commanding authority, its humane and balanced narrative can still be read with pleasure and some advantage.

G. H. Martin
(“Hodgkin, Thomas (1831–1913),” G. H. Martin in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, 2004, accessed September 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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Last Updated8/7/24

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