Paget Jackson Toynbee

Wimbledon, 1855 - 1932, Burnham, Buckinghamshire

BiographyLC name authority rec. n50014642.
LC Heading: Toynbee, Paget Jackson, 1855-1932.

Biography:
Toynbee, Paget Jackson (1855–1932), Dante scholar, was born on 20 January 1855 at Beech Holme, Wimbledon, the third of four sons of the ear surgeon Joseph Toynbee (1815–1866) and his wife, Harriet, daughter of Nathaniel Holmes, and niece of the antiquary John Holmes (1800–1854). He was younger brother of the social reformer Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883), and a second cousin of the painter and critic Sir Charles John Holmes (1868–1936). Paget Toynbee was educated at Haileybury College and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he read classics (1874–8) and in 1901 obtained a DLitt. He worked for some years as a private and travelling tutor, visiting Cape Colony in 1881, and Japan and Australia in 1886–7. In 1892 he abandoned teaching and devoted himself entirely to research, particularly to the study of Dante. On 23 August 1894 he married Helen Wrigley (1868/9–1910), scholar, and daughter of Edwin Grundy Wrigley, of Bury, Lancashire, who spent her life editing the letters of Horace Walpole.

Toynbee's first publications were two philological textbooks, Specimens of Old French (1892), and A historical grammar of the French language (1896), an expanded version of Auguste Brachet's work. In 1895 he became a member of the Oxford Dante Society, founded by Edward Moore. His first massive contribution to Dante scholarship was the Dictionary of Proper Names and Notable Matters in the Works of Dante (1898; latest edition by C. S. Singleton in 1968), which, with its revised and abbreviated edition, the Concise Dante Dictionary (1914), became an indispensable handbook for Dante students. After 1900 he assisted Moore in revising the text for the Oxford Dante, and in 1909 he published Dante in English Literature from Chaucer to Cary (2 vols.), which brought together practically all that was written in English about Dante, in an ‘amazingly minute survey’ (Oxford Magazine, 721). For Toynbee, Dante was a ‘treasure house full of obscurities and difficulties which needed elucidation and solution, and he spared no pains to provide them’ (ibid.). Although he confined himself to the accumulation and elucidation of facts, making no attempt at literary appreciation, his exhaustive memory and tireless energy won him a worldwide reputation as a Dantist (he was a corresponding member of the Reale Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere from 1909). His life of Dante, first published in 1900, ‘painstakingly’ sifted details to ‘add so many items of solid information to our knowledge of Dante’ (ibid., 722).

After his wife's death in 1910 Toynbee took up her unfinished task of editing Walpole's letters, and Horace Walpole, to whom Dante was ‘extravagant, absurd, disgusting, in short a Methodist parson in Bedlam’ (letter to William Mason, 1782), from then on shared Dante's place in his activities, which resulted in three supplementary volumes of Letters (1918–25) and the Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West and Ashton (2 vols., 1915). Toynbee was described as being both physically and mentally ‘ponderous and forceful’ in later life, as if ‘he intentionally limited his field of activity in order to probe deeper into it’ (Oxford Magazine, 722). After 1910 Toynbee, who had no children, and who suffered the consequences of typhoid fever, lived the life of a recluse at Fiveways, the house which he built at Burnham, Buckinghamshire, in 1907. Although he rarely had more than a tame robin for companionship, he was never really lonely. He emerged occasionally to stay with his friend and fellow Dantist William Walrond Jackson for meetings of the Oxford Dante Society, of which he was honorary secretary, ‘guiding spirit, and almost the benevolent despot’ (ibid., 721) from 1916 to 1928. He was one of the very few Englishmen to be made a corresponding member of the Italian Reale Accademia della Crusca in January 1918, and of the Accademia Lucchese di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in 1920. His very valuable emended text of Dante's Epistolae, with introduction and notes, appeared in 1920.

Toynbee was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1919, and was awarded the Serena medal in 1921. He was made an honorary fellow of Balliol College in 1922, and in 1923 the University of Edinburgh conferred on him the honorary degree of LLD. Among his last services to Dante scholarship were the revision of the Oxford Dante for its fourth edition (1924) and the bequest of a valuable collection of books, such as early editions of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, to the Bodleian Library to which he had made notable benefactions between 1912 and 1917 and in 1923. He died at Fiveways on 13 May 1932. He was recognized by his contemporaries as one of the great English Dantists, and a ‘giant of scholarship’ (Oxford Magazine, 723).

C. M. Ady, rev. Diego Zancani

(C. M. Ady, ‘Toynbee, Paget Jackson (1855–1932)’, rev. Diego Zancani, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2006 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/36545, accessed 21 Dec 2015])

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Last Updated8/7/24

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