Connop Thirlwall

Connop Thirlwall (11 January 1797 – 27 July 1875) was an English bishop (in Wales) and historian.

Thirlwall was born at Stepney, London, of a Northumbrian family. He was a prodigy, learning Latin at three, Greek at four, and writing sermons at seven.

He went to Charterhouse School, where George Grote and Julius Hare were among his schoolfellows. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1814. gained the Craven university scholarship and the chancellor's classical medal and served as Secretary of the Cambridge Union Society in the Lent term, 1817. In October 1818 he was elected to a fellowship, and went for a year's travel on the Continent. In Rome he made friends with Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, which had a most important influence on his life. On his return, "distrust of his own resolutions and convictions" led him to abandon for the time his intention of being a clergyman, and he settled down to study law, though he did not lose interest in other subjects. In the meantime, he took on the task of translating and prefacing Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher's essay on the Gospel of St Luke. He further rendered two of Johann Ludwig Tieck's most recent Novellen into English. In 1827 he made up his mind to finish with law, and was ordained deacon the same year.

Thirlwall now joined Hare in translating Niebuhr's History of Rome; the first volume appeared in 1828. The translation was attacked in the Quarterly as favourable to scepticism, and the translators jointly replied. In 1831 they established the Philological Museum, which lasted only six numbers. Among Thirlwall's contributions was his masterly paper On the Irony of Sophocles, which pioneered the concept of dramatic irony.

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