Oscar Browning

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Oscar Browning (January 17, 1837–October 6, 1923) was an English writer, historian and educational reformer, born in London, the son of a merchant, William Shipton Browning. He was educated at Eton College where he was a pupil of William Johnson (later "Cory").[1] From Eton he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where he became fellow and tutor, graduating fourth in the classical tripos of 1860, and where he was inducted into the exclusive Cambridge Apostles, a debating society for the Cambridge elite.

In 1868 he became the lover of Simeon Solomon.[1] He was for fifteen years a master at Eton College, until he was dismissed in the Autumn of 1875 following a dispute over his "overly amorous"[2] (but purportedly chaste) relationship with a pupil, George Curzon. He had taken Curzon on a trip through Europe with Curzon's father's permission, despite having been warned away from the boy by the Headmaster at Eton, F. W. Hornby.[3][4] His parents' church, St. Andrew's, in Clewer, describes the reasons for his dismissal as "his injudicious talk, his favourites, and his anarchic spirit."[2]

After Eton he took up a life Fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, where he achieved a reputation as a wit. He was universally known as "O.B." He traveled to India at Curzon's invitation after the latter had become viceroy. He resumed residence in 1876 at Cambridge, where he became university lecturer in history. He soon became a prominent figure in college and university life, encouraging especially the study of political science and modern political history, the extension of university teaching and the movement for the training of teachers.

He was principal of Cambridge University Day Training College for Teachers between 1891 and 1909, treasurer of the Cambridge Union Society between 1881 and 1902, founding treasurer of the Cambridge University Liberal Club between 1885 and 1908, and president of the Cambridge Footlights between 1890 and 1895.

He stood for Parliament three times as a Liberal.

His works include:

  • England and Napoleon in 1803 (1887)
  • History of England (4 vols. 1890)
  • Dante; Life and Works (1891)
  • Wars of the Nineteenth Century (1899)
  • History of Europe 1814-1843 (1901)
  • Guelphs and Ghibellines (1903)
  • Napoleon, the first Phase (1905)
  • Memories of Sixty Years at Eton, Cambridge and Elsewhere (1910), ISBN 1-4021-8433-6

He left Cambridge in 1908 and retired to Bexhill-on-Sea. In 1914 he was visiting Italy when World War I broke out. He decided to stay there and spent his later years in Rome where he died in 1923 at the age of eighty-six.

A large part of his papers disappeared. These include "all Browning's letters to his mother, diaries that covered the whole of his career from his arrival at Eton in 1851, much of his correspondence as an Eton master, and no doubt also a number of his subject files." This disappearance has been attributed to Hugo Wortham, Browning's nephew and sole executor and legatee, who took the materials to produce a biography of his uncle, Victorian Eton and Cambridge: being the life and times of Oscar Browning.[3]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Brien Reade, Sexual Heretics, p.17
  2. ^ Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford p.115
  3. ^ Bart Schultz Henry Sidgwick: Eye of the Universe - An Intellectual Biography p.411
  4. ^ Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times p.107

[edit] Further reading

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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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