John Hewitt Jellett

John Hewitt Jellett (1817–1888) was a college head, provost of Trinity College, Dublin. He was also a priest in the Church of Ireland during the Victorian Era.

Jellett was the son of Rev. Morgan Jellett (d.1832) and his wife Harriet, daughter of Hewitt Baldwin Poole (d.1800) Esq. of Mayfield, Co. Cork. He was born at Cashel in Tipperary, Ireland on Christmas Day 1817, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin, of which he became a fellow in 1840. He graduated B.A. 1838, M.A. 1843, B.D. 1866, and D.D. 1 March 1881. He had been ordained a priest in 1846. In 1848 he was elected to the chair of natural philosophy, and in 1868 he received the appointment of commissioner of Irish national education. A year later the Royal Irish Academy elected him president.

In 1870, on the death of Dr. Thomas Luby, he was co-opted by the senior fellows of Trinity College as a member of their board. Mr. Gladstone's government in February 1881 appointed Jellett provost of Trinity; in the same year he was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society.

After the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland he took an active part in the deliberations of the general synod and in every work calculated to advance its interests. He was an able mathematician, and wrote A Treatise of the Calculus of Variations in 1850, and A Treatise on the Theory of Friction in 1872, and several papers on pure and applied mathematics, as well as articles in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, and some theological essays, sermons, and religious treatises, of which the principal were An Examination of some of the Moral Difficulties of the Old Testament, 1867, and The Efficacy of Prayer, 1878. He died at the provost's house, Trinity College, Dublin, on 19 February 1888, and was buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery on 23 February.

References

Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Jellett, John Hewitt". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.