James Anthony Froude

James Anthony Froude (born April 23, 1818 in Dartington , Devon , England , † October 20, 1894 in Kingsbridge , Devon) was a British historian , novelist and editor of Fraser's Magazine . Because of his works ( History of England ) he was one of the best known and because of his polemical tendencies one of the most controversial English historians of his era. He was the brother of the Anglican cleric Hurrell Froude (1803-1836) and the hydrodynamics researcher William Froude (1810-1879).

Life

Froude came from an Anglican clerical family and was the youngest of eight siblings. When he was three years old, his mother and five of his siblings died of consumption . He grew up motherless.

Froude was very interested in the literary classics as well as in works of history and theology. He studied at Oriel College from 1836 until his graduation in 1840 . In 1842 he won an Oxford Literature Prize for his essay on political economy and was elected a Fellow of Exeter College .

Title page of The Nemesis of Faith 2nd edition

At first he wanted to become a cleric himself. In 1845 he was ordained an Anglican priest. But his doubts about faith grew. He published them dressed as semi-autobiographical novels. First the story collection Shadows of the Clouds appeared in 1847 under the pseudonym "Zeta". Two years later, the title The Nemesis of Faith followed under its own name . This cost him his fellowship at Exeter College, so that he had to live from journalistic work for a time. Froude did not give up the Christian faith, but he did leave the Anglican Church. He turned to history.

Froude became widely known for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada . Inspired by Thomas Carlyle , his historical writings were extremely polemical , which earned him many academic and personal opponents and enmities.

Caricature in Punch of December 30, 1882

The book "The English in the West Indies" (published by Longmans in London in 1888) after a trip through the Caribbean in 1886 and 1887 offers a vivid, elegantly written portrait of the British colonies there, but it is also, especially in its passages about Haiti (Chapter 12), one of the most depressing examples of British racism in the late 19th century.

In 1892 he received the Regius Professorship of Modern History at Oxford University as the successor to Edward Freeman . Froude gave his lectures mainly on the subject of the English Reformation. When the efforts of the teaching company became too much for his health, he retired to Devonshire in 1894.

Since 1862 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and since 1874 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

Froudacity

After Froude completed Life of Carlyle , he traveled through the English colonies, particularly to South Africa , Australia , New Zealand , the United States and the Caribbean . This resulted in two books, Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886) and The English in the West Indies (1888), in which he mixed personal anecdotes, colonial history and his ideas about the British Empire . Froude wanted to spark enthusiasm for the colonial idea and the British Empire. His books attracted a great deal of public debate by accusing him of Froudacity (an imperialist mindset) by the intellectual John Jacob Thomas. When John Astley Cooper publicly promoted pan-British exhibitions and sporting events, it was Froude who suggested in letters to the editor that this should be named the Pan-British Olympic Games and held every four years. The Olympic Games , the Commonwealth Games and the Rhodes Scholarship grew out of these ideas .

Works

Novels

• Shadows of the Clouds (1847)
• The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
• The Two Chiefs of Dunboy (1889)

Non-fiction

• History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1856-1870)
• Short Studies on Great Subjects (1867–1882)
  • "The Oxford Counter-Reformation" (1881)
• English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (1872–1874)
• Caesar: A Sketch (1879) (Biography of Julius Caesar )
• Bunyan (1880) (biography of John Bunyan )
• Life of Carlyle (1882-1884)
• Luther: A Short Biography (1883) (Biography of Martin Luther )
• Oceana, or, England and Her Colonies (1886)
• The English in the West Indies or The Bow of Ulysses (1888)
• Lord Beaconsfield (1890) (Biography of Benjamin Disraeli )
• Divorce of Catherine of Aragon (1891)
• English Sea-Men in the Sixteenth Century (1895)
• Life and Letters of Erasmus (1895)
• My Relations with Carlyle (written 1887, published 1903)

Translations

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe : Elective Affinities ( The Elective Affinities ) (published anonymously in 1854)

Quotes

• What can education do for a man, "he once asked," except enable him to tell a lie in five ways instead of one?

literature

• Herbert Paul: The Life of Froude . Isaac Pitman & Sons, London 1905
• Wolfgang Binder: "From someone who pretended to get to know the Caribbean and thereby tried to save the Empire." Imperial mechanisms of justification in James Anthony Froude's "The English in the West Indies" (1888) . In: Walther Bernecker, Gertrut Krömer (ed.): The rediscovery of Latin America. The experience of the subcontinent in travelogues of the 19th century . Vervuert, Frankfurt am Main 1997. 3-89354-738-XS 291-307.

Web links

• Literature by and about James Anthony Froude in the catalog of the German National Library

Commons : James Anthony Froude  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

supporting documents

1. ↑ Wolfgang Binder: "From someone who pretended to get to know the Caribbean and try to save the Empire." Imperial mechanisms of justification in James Anthony Froude's "The English in the West Indies" (1888) , here p. 291.
2. ↑ Wolfgang Binder: "From someone who pretended to get to know the Caribbean and thereby tried to save the Empire." Imperial mechanisms of justification in James Anthony Froude's "The English in the West Indies" (1888) , here pp. 291-292.
3. ^ Paul 110
4. ↑ Wolfgang Binder: "From someone who pretended to get to know the Caribbean and thereby tried to save the Empire." Imperial justification mechanisms in James Anthony Froude's "The English in the West Indies" (1888), especially pp. 301-303.
5. ↑ London Gazette edition = 26280 page = 2318 Date April 19, 1892
6. ^ Member History: James A. Froude. American Philosophical Society, accessed August 12, 2018 . 
7. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed December 6, 2019 . 
8. ^ Paul, Herbert (1906). The Life of Froude. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, p. 364.
9. ↑ Arnd Krüger (1986): Was John Astley Cooper the inventor of the modern Olympic Games? In: Louis Burgener u. a. (Ed.): Sport und Kultur, Vol. 6. Bern: Lang, 72 - 81.
10. ^ Paul 1905, p. 166
11. ↑ Full text in English freely available from Gutenberg