Charles Wycliffe Goodwin

Charles Wycliffe Goodwin (1817–1878) was a British Egyptologist, bible scholar, lawyer and judge. His last judicial position was as Acting Chief Judge of the British Supreme Court for China and Japan.

Goodwin was born in 1817 in King's Lynn, Norfolk. He studied at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and graduated, in 1838, 6th Classic and senior optime in Mathematics. He became a fellow of the College. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1843. He lost is fellowship of St Catharine's in 1847.

Goodwin contributed to the publications of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society and in 1860 wrote one of the articles in Essays and Reviews, to which he was the only lay contributor, writing alongside such great theologians as Rowland Williams and Henry Bristow Wilson.

In a speech, "The Growth and Nature of Egyptology: an inaugural lecture" by Stephen Ranulph Kingdon Glanville, Glanville said of Goodwin:

"By the time Goodwin left Cambridge, he was a first class Greek scholar, an accomplished Hebraist, and an authority on Anglo-Saxon with valuable editions of new texts to his credit. He also had a considerably knowledge of natural history, especially geology. In London, where his practice was not large, he wrote music and art criticism; was for a time editor of Literary Gazette; was the only layman among the seven contributors to the much talked of Essays and Reviews (1860); and, because of his Greek and Hebrew scholarship, was frequently consulted by the Revisers of the New Testament. But throughout his life, his main interest, begun when he was at school was in the elucidation of Ancient Egyptian and Coptic texts, more especially those Egyptian texts written in the cursive script called hieratic.

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