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Robert Alexander Neil

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Robert Alexander Neil
Born(1852-12-26)December 26, 1852
Glengairn, Aberdeenshire, Scotland
DiedJune 19, 1901(1901-06-19) (aged 48)
Resting placeBridge of Giam, Aberdeenshire
OccupationClassical scholar
Academic background
Education
Academic work
DisciplineClassical studies, Sanskrit, comparative philology
InstitutionsPembroke College, Cambridge
Notable students

Robert Alexander Neil (26 December 1852– 19 June 1901), who published as R. A. Neil, was a Scottish classical scholar. He lectured in classics at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and was University Lecturer in Sanskrit. He was acknowledged as an authority on Greek literature and on comparative philology, and collaborated with scholars including Edward Byles Cowell and Jane Ellen Harrison, to whom he may have been engaged at the time of his death.

Neil was born near Ballater in Aberdeenshire, the second son of a parish priest, who taught him classics from a young age. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and received a scholarship to study classics at the University of Aberdeen, which he attended from the age of thirteen. After initially preparing himself for a medical career, he won a further scholarship in 1872 to read classics at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He graduated with the university's second-highest mark in tripos in 1876.

Shortly after his graduation, he took a post at Pembroke to lecture in classics, and began studying Indian languages, particularly Sanskrit. Though he published little, Neil was a prolific lecturer and collaborator, particularly with Cowell and Harrison. He was made University Lecturer in Sanskrit in 1884, and examined both the classical tripos and that of Indian languages. In 1900, he became Pembroke's Senior Tutor. He also served on the senate of Cambridge University, on the council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and on the syndicate of Cambridge University Press.

Neil died in 1901 of appendicitis. His final scholarly work, an edition of The Knights by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, was published posthumously in the same year.

Early life and education

A white, single-storey building in a rural setting
The church at Glengairn, where Neil's father was the parish priest

Robert Alexander Neil was born at on 26 December 1852.[1] He was the second son of Robert Neil, a minister in the Church of Scotland and the parish priest of Glengairn near Ballater in Aberdeenshire, and of Neil's wife, Mary Read.[2] The younger Robert Neil was born in the manse at Glengairn.[1] In an obituary of Neil published in 1912, his long-time friend Peter Giles recorded that Neil had been interested in books from a young age.[1]

Neil was initially educated at a local school, run by a Mr. Coutts, and taught classics by his father. He later attended Aberdeen Grammar School,[3] from which he was awarded a scholarship to the University of Aberdeen in 1866, at the age of thirteen. There, he was taught by the Hellenist William Duguid Geddes and was a contemporary of William Robertson Nicoll, later a journalist and writer. Neil placed top of Geddes's class at the end of his first year, and graduated from Aberdeen with a First in 1870.[1] He was jointly awarded the university's Simpson Greek Prize alongside Alexander Shewan, who later became a Homeric scholar, in 1870;[4] Neil was further awarded a Fullerton Scholarship in 1871.[3] During the winter of 1871–72, he worked as a library assistant at Aberdeen before taking up the study of anatomy and chemistry, intending to graduate as a medical doctor; however, he instead took a scholarship in 1872 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he read classics.[5]

Neil's teachers at Cambridge included the literary scholar A. W. Verrall and the ancient historians James Smith Reid and Richard Shilleto. Although Neil was initially disadvantaged by his limited experience of translation into Latin and Greek, which formed a major part of the Cambridge curriculum but had featured little at Aberdeen, he was awarded the Craven scholarship in 1875 and graduated as the second-highest-placed classicist in his year ("Second Classic") in 1876.[1]

Academic career

A green lawn with a red-brick building and a limestone chapel behind
The Old Court of Pembroke College, where Neil was a fellow for his entire academic career

After his graduation from Peterhouse, Neil was elected as a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge to lecture in classics,[6] though he opted to deliver his public lectures at Peterhouse rather than Pembroke.[1] His first publication, in 1877, was a series of corrections and comments upon the Greek dictionary first produced by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott in 1843.[7] After his appointment, Neil began to study the classical Indian languages of Pali and Sanskrit under Edward Byles Cowell, Cambridge's first professor of Sanskrit.[8] Neil and Cowell spent afternoons together, a few times each week, reading Sanskrit works;[9] they initially focused on the Hindu Rigveda, but gradually came to concentrate on Buddhist literature. Neil published an edition of the Divyavadana, an anthology of Sanskrit Buddhist literature, jointly with Cowell in 1886, and collaborated on Cowell's 1895 compilation and translation of the Jataka tales, stories from the Indian subcontinent concerning the birth of the Buddha.[10]

Alongside his classical post at Pembroke, Neil was appointed University Lecturer in Sanskrit in 1884.[11] He served as an examiner in the Indian Languages tripos as well as in classics, where students opting for classical philology ("Section E") in their final year had to sit a Sanskrit paper in order to achieve a First.[12] In addition to his work in Greek, Latin and Indian languages, Neil shared with Cowell an interest in the comparative linguistics of those languages and Celtic.[13] In his classical capacity, he lectured frequently on the history of Greek comedy, on the lyric poet Pindar, and on the philosopher Plato. In 1900, he took the post of Senior Tutor at Pembroke following the death of his predecessor, C. H. Pryor; according to Giles, Neil did so "with some hesitation". He was also a long-time member of the syndicate of Cambridge University Press, and served for four years on the council of the university senate.[11]

Neil became a close friend of James Adam, another Scottish classicist and Aberdeen alumnus who took a fellowship at Emmanuel College in December 1884.[14] The two kept a strict appointment for Sunday lunch together, which lasted from their meeting until Neil's death, sixteen years later.[15] Neil was best man at Adam's wedding to the classicist Adela Marion Kensington in 1890,[16] and in 1891 Adam named his first son, Neil Kensington Adam, after him.[17] Neil also befriended William Robertson Smith, another Scotsman and a theologian; he wrote Smith's obituary in the literary magazine The Bookman in 1905.[8] Among Neil's tutees at Pembroke was the future archaeologist Alan Wace; Neil suggested to Wace that he should study classical archaeology for part two, the final year of his degree:[18] Wace took this advice and achieved a First with distinction in the examinations of 1901.[19]

Neil supported the education of women and for a while delivered lectures at Cambridge's two women's colleges, Newnham and Girton.[20] Neil probably met the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the first women to make an academic career in England,[21] in 1892, when the two were both on the council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.[9] Harrison took a post as a resident lecturer at Newnham in 1898, and studied Sanskrit and the history of Indian religions under Neil. She began to collaborate on her academic work with him;[22] according to Robinson, his expertise in philology remedied what Harrison considered to be her greatest weakness in classical scholarship.[13] The two were probably engaged to marry at the time of his death.[24] Harrison later wrote, in 1913, that Neil's "sympathetic ... silences made the dreariest gatherings burn and glow";[25] her biographer Annabel Robinson has also highlighted Neil's being "physically attractive and strongly built" as a source of their romance.[13] Robinson has suggested that Harrison's relationship with Neil may have been a source of scandal immediately before his death, referencing a comment in the notebook of Harrison's companion and collaborator Hope Mirrlees that Harrison had been forced to leave Cambridge in order to distance herself from an unnamed man, following an unspecified "disaster" in their relationship.[26] She returned two weeks before Neil's death.[23]

Neil died on the morning of 19 June 1901, following a short bout of appendicitis.[27] He was buried at Bridge of Giam in Aberdeenshire, close to Glengairn.[11] His final work – an edition of the The Knights by the fifth-century Athenian playwright Aristophanes – was published posthumously in 1901, with the assistance of Neil's friend Leonard Whibley and another friend and colleague by the initials W. S. H.[28]

Assessment, honours and legacy

Black-and-white image of a woman in late middle age with tied-up hair, in formal Victorian dress
Jane Ellen Harrison, photographed in 1900

In 1891, the University of Aberdeen awarded Neil an honorary Doctor of Letters degree.[11] He served for several years on the council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. On Neil's death, the society's president, Richard Jebb, described him as "a classical scholar of rare learning and acumen".[29]

Neil's record of publications was comparatively short, though Robinson has noted that he instead focused his scholarly energies on assisting friends with their own work. Jane Ellen Harrison described Sunday lunches with Neil as "the best intellectual thing in Cambridge" in a letter to the archaeologist Jessie Crum, her sometime student and travel companion.[13] According to Giles's obituary, Neil's intellectual interests were broad, including ancient and medieval architecture, western European cathedrals, and Scottish history; he was a member of the Franco-Scottish Society.[11]

Neil's sisters, Mary E. and Catherine G. Neil, endowed in 1953 the R. A. Neil prizes at the University of Aberdeen – two awards of £35 (equivalent to £1,234 in 2023) for examination results in classics.[30]

Selected works

As sole author

  • Neil, Robert Alexander (1877). "Notes on Liddell and Scott". The Journal of Philology. 7 (13): 200–204.
  • Neil, Robert Alexander, ed. (1901). The Knights of Aristophanes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 556755370.

As co-author

  • Cowell, Edward Byles; Neil, Robert Alexander (1886). The Divyâvadâna: A Collection of Early Buddhist Legends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. OCLC 490000929.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Giles 1912b, p. 1.
  2. ^ Giles 1912b, p. 1; Maier 2009, p. 223.
  3. ^ a b The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society 1901, p. 24.
  4. ^ Giles 1912b, p. 1; The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society 1901, p. 24. For Shewan's later career, see Bierl 2012, p. 135.
  5. ^ Giles 1912b, p. 1; The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society 1901, p. 24.
  6. ^ Robinson 2002, p. 126. For the discipline of Neil's fellowship, see Maier 2009, p. 223.
  7. ^ Giles 1912b, p. 1; the article is Neil 1877. On Liddell and Scott's dictionary, see Stray 2019.
  8. ^ a b c Maier 2009, p. 223.
  9. ^ a b Robinson 2002, p. 126.
  10. ^ Giles 1912b, p. 1 (for the Divyavadana); Maier 2009, p. 223 (for the Jataka tales).
  11. ^ a b c d e f Giles 1912b, p. 2.
  12. ^ The Cambridge Review, 20 June 1887, p. 405; Clackson 2021, p. 139.
  13. ^ a b c d Robinson 2002, p. 127.
  14. ^ Giles 1912a, p. 13; Oakley 2011, p. 26.
  15. ^ Oakley 2011, p. 26.
  16. ^ Oakley 2011, p. 26. For the date, see Giles 1912a, p. 13.
  17. ^ Carrington, Hills & Webb 1974, p. 2; Oakley 2011, p. 26.
  18. ^ Gill 2004.
  19. ^ Gill 2004; Wills 2015, p. 148 (for the date).
  20. ^ Maier 2009, p. 223. Giles's obituary says that Neil stopped these lectures when his "college work became very heavy", but does not specify the date.[11]
  21. ^ Smith 2017.
  22. ^ Schlesier 2015.
  23. ^ a b Robinson 2002, p. 141.
  24. ^ Maier reports their engagement as fact;[8]; Robinson traces the suggestion to Hope Mirrlees and considers it plausible but uncertain.[23]
  25. ^ Harrison 1913, pp. 22–25, quoted in Robinson 2002, p. 126.
  26. ^ Robinson 2002, p. 142.
  27. ^ The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society 1901, p. 24. For the cause, see Robinson 2002, p. 141.
  28. ^ Zacher 1903, column 769.
  29. ^ The Journal of Hellenic Studies 1901, p. xxxvi.
  30. ^ Aberdeen University Calendar, 1961–1962, p. 319.

Works cited

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