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Robert Alexander Neil

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Robert Alexander Neil
Born(1852-12-26)December 26, 1852
DiedJune 19, 1901(1901-06-19) (aged 48)
OccupationClassical scholar
Academic background
Education
Academic work
InstitutionsPembroke College, Cambridge
Notable students

Robert Alexander Neil (26 December 1852– 19 June 1901), who generally published as R. A. Neil, was a Scottish classical scholar.

Life

Early life and education

Robert Alexander Neil was born 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] 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, where he was taught by the Hellenist William Duguid Geddes; 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] and was awarded a Fullerton Scholarship in 1871.[3] During the winter of 1871–72, Neil 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

After his graduation from Peterhouse, Neil was elected as a fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge to lecture in classics.[6] After his appointment, he began to study the classical Indian languages of Pali and Sanskrit under Edward Byles Cowell, Cambridge's first professor of Sanskrit.[7] Neil and Cowell spent afternoons together, a few times each week, reading the Rigveda and other Sanskrit works.[8] Neil also collaborated on Cowell's 1895 compilation and translation of the Jataka tales, stories from the Indian subcontinent concerning the birth of the Buddha.[7]

Alongside his classical post at Pembroke, Neil was appointed University Lecturer in Sanskrit. 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.[9] 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.[10]

Neil became a close friend of James Adam, another Scottish classicist and Aberdeen alumnus who had taken a fellowship at Emmanuel College in December 1884.[11] The two kept a strict appointment for Sunday lunch together, which lasted from their meeting until Neil's death, sixteen years later.[12] Neil was best man at Adam's wedding to the classicist Adela Marion Kensington in 1890,[13] and in 1891 Adam named his first son, Neil Kensington Adam, after him.[14] Neil also befriended William Robertson Smith, another Scotsman and a theologian; he wrote Smith's obituary in the literary magazine The Bookman in 1905.[7] 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:[15] Wace took this advice and achieved a First with distinction in the examinations of 1901.[16]

Neil supported the education of women and delivered lectures at Cambridge's two women's colleges, Newnham and Girton.[7] Neil probably met the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, one of the first women to make an academic career in England,[17] in 1892, when the two were both on the council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.[8] 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;[18] according to Robinson, his expertise in philology remedied what Harrison considered to be her greatest weakness in classical scholarship.[10] The two were probably engaged to marry at the time of his death.[20] Harrison later wrote, in 1913, that Neil's "sympathetic ... silences made the dreariest gatherings burn and glow";[21] her biographer Annabel Robinson has also highlighted Neil's being "physically attractive and strongly built" as a source of their romance.[10] 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.[22] She returned two weeks before Neil's death.[19]

Neil died on the morning of 19 June 1901, following a short bout of appendicitis.[23] His 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.[24]

Assessment and legacy

Neil 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".[25]

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.[10]

Selected works

  • 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 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. ^ a b c d e Maier 2009, p. 223.
  8. ^ a b Robinson 2002, p. 126.
  9. ^ The Cambridge Review, 20 June 1887, p. 405; Clackson 2021, p. 139.
  10. ^ a b c d Robinson 2002, p. 127.
  11. ^ Giles 1912a, p. 13; Oakley 2011, p. 26.
  12. ^ Oakley 2011, p. 26.
  13. ^ Oakley 2011, p. 26. For the date, see Giles 1912a, p. 13.
  14. ^ Carrington, Hills & Webb 1974, p. 2; Oakley 2011, p. 26.
  15. ^ Gill 2004.
  16. ^ Gill 2004; Wills 2015, p. 148 (for the date).
  17. ^ Smith 2017.
  18. ^ Schlesier 2015.
  19. ^ a b Robinson 2002, p. 141.
  20. ^ Maier reports their engagement as fact;[7]; Robinson traces the suggestion to Hope Mirrlees and considers it plausible but uncertain.[19]
  21. ^ Harrison 1913, pp. 22–25, quoted in Robinson 2002, p. 126.
  22. ^ Robinson 2002, p. 142.
  23. ^ The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Numismatic Society 1901, p. 24. For the cause, see Robinson 2002, p. 141.
  24. ^ Aberdeen University Calendar, 1961–1962, p. 319.
  25. ^ The Journal of Hellenic Studies 1901, p. xxxvi.

Works cited

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