Frederic Harrison

Frederic Harrison
Portrait of Frederic Harrison, by Bassano, 1901.
Born	(1831-10-18)18 October 1831 London, England
Died	14 January 1923(1923-01-14) (aged 91)
Occupation	Historian, jurist
Nationality	English
Spouse	Ethel Bertha Harrison

Frederic Harrison (18 October 1831 – 14 January 1923) was a British jurist and historian.

Born at 17 Euston Square, London, he was the son of Frederick Harrison (1799-1881), a and his wife Jane, daughter of Alexander Brice, a Belfast granite merchant. He was baptised at St. Pancras Church, Euston, and spent his early childhood at the northern London suburb of Muswell Hill, to which the family moved soon after his birth. His father later acquired a lease on the grand Tudor manor house Sutton Place near Guildford, Surrey, in 1874, which descended to his elder son Sidney, and about which Frederic jnr. wrote the definitive history Annals of an Old Manor House: Sutton Place, Guildford, first published in 1893. His paternal grandfather was a Leicestershire builder. In 1840 the family moved again to 22 Oxford Square, Hyde Park, London, a house designed by Harrison's father. Along with his siblings Sidney and Lawrence, Harrison received his initial education at home before attending a day school in St John's Wood. In 1843 he entered King's College School, graduating as second in the school in 1849.

He received a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford in 1849. It was at Oxford that he was to embrace positive philosophy, under the influence of his tutor Richard Congreve and the works of John Stuart Mill and George Henry Lewes. Harrison found himself in conflict with Congreve as to details, and eventually led the Positivists who split off and founded Newton Hall in 1881, and he was president of the English Positivist Committee from 1880 to 1905; he was also editor and part author of the Positivist New Calendar of great Men (1892), and wrote much on Comte and Positivism. For more than three decades, he was a regular contributor to The Fortnightly Review, often in defense of Positivism, especially Comte's version of it.