Frederic William Farrar
| Frederic William Farrar | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
7 August 1831 Bombay, India |
| Died | 22 March 1903 (aged 71) Canterbury, Kent, England |
| Occupation | Cleric, writer |
| Nationality | English |
| Alma mater | |
| Period | 19th century |
| Genre | Theology, children's literature |
Frederic William Farrar (Bombay, 7 August 1831 – Canterbury, 22 March 1903) was a cleric of the Church of England (Anglican), schoolteacher and author. He was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin in 1882. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society.
Farrar was born in Bombay, India, and educated at King William's College on the Isle of Man, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry in 1852. He was for some years a master at Harrow School and, from 1871 to 1876, the headmaster of Marlborough College.
Farrar became successively a canon of Westminster and rector of St Margaret's, Westminster (the church next to Westminster Abbey), archdeacon of Westminster Abbey and the Dean of Canterbury; he also served as chaplain in ordinary. He was an eloquent preacher and a voluminous author, his writings including stories of school life, such as Eric, or, Little by Little and St. Winifred's about life in a boys' boarding school in late Victorian England, and two historical romances.
Farrar was a classics scholar and a comparative philologist, who applied Charles Darwin's ideas of branching descent to the relationships between languages, engaging in a protracted debate with the anti-Darwinian linguist Max Müller. While Farrar was never convinced by the evidence for evolution in biology, he had no theological objections to the idea and urged that it be considered on purely scientific grounds. On Darwin's nomination, Farrar was elected to the Royal Society in 1866 for his philological work. When Darwin died in 1882, Farrar helped get the church's permission for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey and preached the sermon at his funeral.
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