Charles Thomas Newton

Charles Thomas Newton
Charles Thomas Newton
Born	16 September 1816 Bredwardine , Herefordshire
Died	28 November 1894 (1894-11-29) (aged 78)
Nationality	British
Fields	archaeology

Sir Charles Thomas Newton KCB (16 September 1816 – 28 November 1894) was a British archaeologist. He was made KCB in 1887.

He was born in 1816, the second son of Newton Dickinson Hand Newton, vicar of Clungunford, Shropshire, and afterwards of Bredwardine, Herefordshire.

He was educated at Shrewsbury School (then under Samuel Butler), and at Christ Church, Oxford (matriculating 17 Oct. 1833), where he graduated B.A. in 1837 and M.A. in 1840.

Already in his undergraduate days Newton (as his friend and contemporary, John Ruskin, tells in Præterita) was giving evidence of his natural bent; the scientific study of classical archaeology, which Winckelmann had set on foot in Germany, was in England to find its worthy apostle in Newton. In 1840, contrary to the wishes of his family, he entered the British Museum as assistant in the department of antiquities. As a career the museum, as it then was, can have presented but few attractions to a young man; but the department, as yet undivided, probably offered to Newton a wider range of comparative study in his subject than he could otherwise have acquired.

In 1852, he was named vice-consul at Mytilene, and from April 1853 to January 1854 he was consul at Rhodes, with the definite duty, among others, of watching over the interests of the British Museum in the Levant. In 1854 and 1855, with funds advanced by Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, he carried on excavations in Kalymnos, enriching the British Museum with an important series of inscriptions, and in the following year he was at length enabled to undertake his long-cherished scheme of identifying the site, and recovering for this country the chief remains, of the mausoleum at Halicarnassus.