Robert Yelverton Tyrrell

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell FBA
Born	(1844-01-21)21 January 1844 Ballingarry, County Tipperary, Ireland
Died	19 September 1914(1914-09-19) (aged 70) Dublin
Occupation	Classical scholar
Spouse	Ada Shaw ​ (m. 1874)​
Relatives	George Tyrrell (cousin) Richard Hanson (grandson) Lucius Thompson-McCausland (grandson)
Academic background
Alma mater	Trinity College, Dublin
Academic work
Institutions	Trinity College, Dublin
Notable students	Ernest Alton J. B. Bury Francis Ysidro Edgeworth Louis Claude Purser William Ridgeway W. J. M. Starkie Oscar Wilde
Influenced	Oliver St John Gogarty
Regius Professor of Greek, University of Dublin
In office 1880–1898
Preceded by	John Kells Ingram
Succeeded by	J. B. Bury

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell FBA (/ˈtɪɹ.əl/ TIRR-əl; 21 January 1844 – 19 September 1914) was an Irish classical scholar who was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin.

Early life

Robert Yelverton Tyrrell was born on 21 January 1844 in Ballingarry in County Tipperary, Ireland. His middle name was taken from his godmother's surname; she was a descendant of the judge, legal scholar and peer Barry Yelverton. Robert Tyrrell was a first cousin to the disgraced modernist writer and excommunicated Jesuit priest George Tyrrell.

Tyrrell was the son of Elizabeth Tyrrell (née Shea) and of Henry Tyrrell, a curate in the Church of Ireland at Ballingarry. Soon after Robert's birth, Henry Tyrrell was appointed as rector of Kinnitty in County Offaly. He died in 1849 of cholera, having caught the disease in Dublin, where it had broken out the same year and to where he had travelled in order to administer the last rites to his brother-in-law. The remaining family, consisting of three sons, three daughters and Tyrrell's mother, moved to Dublin.

Tyrrell was educated at home by his two elder brothers, then for six weeks at a private school on Hume Street in Dublin, before matriculating at the city's Trinity College, in 1860, aged sixteen. All three Tyrrell brothers studied classics with distinction at Trinity; Robert Tyrrell obtained a classical scholarship at the end of his first year: an unusual achievement for a first-year student and particularly rare for one of seventeen.

Tyrrell graduated in 1864 with a Double First, achieving the university's top marks in classics and fourth-highest marks in logic and ethics, and was also awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize in Greek Verse for a play about the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia. In 1867, alongside two fellow Trinity scholars (Thomas J. Bellingham Brady and Maxwell Cormac Cullinan), Tyrrell published Hesperidum susurri ('Whispers of the Hesperides'), a volume of English verse translated into Latin.

Academic career

The cover of the first edition of Kottabos, published in 1869 under Tyrrell's editorship. The wine-cup on the cover and the epigraph (from a fragment by Euripides) reference the ancient game of kottabos, played by flicking the dregs of a wine-cup at other participants.

Tyrrell twice won prizes in the examinations to become a fellow of Trinity College, but did not secure the position until his third attempt in 1868. He was elected Professor of Latin in 1871, succeeding William Hugh Ferrar. In 1869 he co-founded (with Edward Sullivan) and became the first editor of the Trinity literary magazine Kottabos, which Stanford describes as "a polyglot miscellany of jeux d'ésprit", and remained its editor-in-chief for all the editions of its first run, which ended in 1881. His contributions to Kottabos included reports on college cricket matches written in the style of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.

Tyrrell was also a founding member of the editorial board of Hermathena, a more serious academic journal, established in 1873. He contributed to the first issue a review of John H. Hogan's edition of Euripides's Medea: the review was, in Stanford's words, "a savagely sarcastic scarification of Hogan's grammatical and metrical lapses": Tyrrell wrote that his intention was to discourage Hogan from editing any further works of the playwright "until he has made himself acquainted with the rudiments of Greek accidence and the structure of an iambic trimeter".

From 1880 to 1898, Tyrrell was Regius Professor of Greek, succeeding John Kells Ingram. His lecture style was highly spontaneous, relying on question-and-answer with his audience: his student Louis Claude Purser later wrote that the lectures were highly effective, but not "by any means highly systematic", and that they might have been condemned as mere "desultory conversations" by an educational inspector. In 1893, he delivered a series of lectures at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, which he later published as Latin Poetry. Tyrrell handed his chair in 1898 to his former student J. B. Bury, and was appointed in 1899 as the university's Public Orator and in 1900 as Professor of Ancient History. The move was not regarded as a good fit with Tyrrell's academic interests – he was a literary scholar rather than a historian – but may have been intended to prevent Bury from leaving Trinity to seek a professorship elsewhere. William Stanford, Tyrrell's biographer, further explains it through the belief that "in those days, Fellows of Trinity were deemed to be omniscient".

Tyrrell suffered from thrombosis of the legs from 1899, which forced him to give up his previous participation in sport (particularly rackets and tennis), affected his physical and mental energy and, in Stanford's words, "ravaged his fine features". In 1904, he was considered for the position of college provost, though ultimately passed over in favour of Anthony Traill, who was appointed by the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in March. In the aftermath of Traill's appointment, Tyrrell was co-opted as a Senior Fellow, which required him to resign both his professorship and his office as Public Orator. Tyrrell was also elected as the college registrar in the same year, with a total salary (in 1906) of £1,386 14s (equivalent to £188,400 in 2023). In 1913, by which point his health was in decline, he was not re-elected as registrar, and was instead appointed senior dean and catechist, responsible for the religious education of the student body.

Tyrrell was a lifelong friend and supporter of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Professor of Greek initially at the University of Glasgow and, from 1889, at Cambridge, and often sided with him in academic debates, particularly against Tyrrell's Dublin colleague, John Pentland Mahaffy. In a letter to Jebb of February 1883, Tyrrell congratulated him for "show[ing] Mahaffy in his true light, with slovenly Greek and disingenuous arguments"; from 1884, Tyrrell and Mahaffy quarrelled over the edition of the Greek historian Herodotus made by the historian Archibald Sayce, leading to what Stanford calls a "minor civil war" between their respective acolytes at Trinity.

Tyrrell was a Commissioner of Education for Ireland and was chosen in 1901 as one of the founding fellows of the British Academy. He died on 19 September 1914, in Dublin, after what Purser describes as a "tedious illness".

Personal life

Tyrrell married the poet Ada Shaw, the daughter of his Trinity colleague, the economist and journalist George Ferdinand Shaw, in 1874; they had three sons and three daughters. His grandsons included the bishop Richard Hanson and, by his daughter Ada, the economist Lucius Thompson-McCausland.

Tyrrell was agnostic, though Stanford describes him as a "mild agnostic". In 1935, Newport J. D. White, who also served as catechist of Trinity, recalled giving one of Tyrrell's sons a failing grade in his religious examination: while Traill, whose son had received the same result, castigated White for daring to fail a fellow's son, Tyrrell thanked him, saying that "a gentleman's education" should include a grounding in Christianity.

In 1903, during a period of debate over the "Irish University Question", Tyrrell published a sonnet called "Holy Ireland", in which he denigrated the influence of Catholicism upon the country. He expressed the same opinion in a book review of the same year, and attracted further censure when he attempted to write to defend himself from complaints against his words.

Tyrrell was known for his sarcastic wit and opposition to temperance hotels, which served no alcohol; he compared the concept with "a celibate brothel". His writings were often parodic in nature, including pastiches of Herodotus and, frequently, of the English poet Robert Browning. He was a friend of the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who described him as "a fine scholar and an amiable man, free from every touch of pedantry".

Honours, legacy and assessment

Tyrrell was awarded honorary degrees by Queen's University of Ireland, Edinburgh (in 1884), Cambridge (in 1892), Oxford (in 1893), St Andrew's (in 1906) and Durham (in 1907). He is most remembered for his seven-volume edition of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, which Tyrrell produced, largely with Purser, from 1879. The Cambridge Concise History of English Literature describes Tyrrell's "devotion to ancient and modern literature ... combined with a keen wit and a felicitous style". In 1941, Stanford described Tyrrell's as "the finest career in classical literature that the College [Trinity] has yet known". As an academic, Tyrrell disapproved of the over-reliance of classical scholars upon the discoveries of archaeologists, writing negatively of "Schliemannism" and ironically comparing the Linear B tablets discovered at Knossos by Arthur Evans with the "baleful signs" given to the hero Bellerophon in the Iliad.

The publication of Kottabos was credited with helping to shift Trinity's reputation as the "silent sister", a disparaging nickname granted on account of the college's comparatively small record of scholarly work by comparison with the other ancient universities of the British Isles. Similarly, his 1867 co-publication of Hesperidum susurri – its name referring to the nymphs who lived at the far western edge of the world in Greek mythology – was the first substantial work of translation from English into Latin to come from Dublin: such exercises were considered a hallmark of the most prestigious classical education in the period.

Among Tyrrell's students was the future economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, who graduated from Trinity in 1865, and the Jesuit priest John Sullivan. He also taught the archaeologist William Ridgeway, the translator and educationalist W. J. M. Starkie, the classicists J. I. Beare, W. A. Goligher and G. W. Mooney, the papyrologist Josiah Gilbert Smyly, and Ernest Alton, later provost of Trinity. Other future literary figures, including the poets Arthur Perceval Graves, and T. W. Rolleston, the folklorist John Millington Synge and the writer William Kirkpatrick Magee, studied at Trinity during his tenure and may have attended his lectures.

Along with Mahaffy and other fellows, Tyrrell was a mentor of Oliver St. John Gogarty, a medical student with a penchant for poetry and classical literature, who later became a noted poet. On hearing an obscene limerick, said to have been composed by Gogarty, Tyrrell replied with a quotation from Hamlet praising Gogarty for his "service of the antique world". Tyrrell appears in Gogarty's semi-autobiographical novels As I Was Going Down Sackville Street and Tumbling in the Hay: in the latter, Gogarty describes him as a finely dressed epicure, popular with the students, and as "a worthy, if ever there was one – kalos k'agathos, which ... is the Greek for a gentleman".

Tyrrell also taught the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, who read classics at Trinity between 1871 and 1874. According to Wilde's friend and biographer Frank Harris, Wilde described Mahaffy as a greater influence upon him, but Tyrrell as a better scholar: Harris quotes Wilde as calling him "intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge" and joking that "if he had known less, he would have been a poet". After Wilde was imprisoned in May 1895 for homosexuality, Tyrrell signed Harris's petition of November of that year to Aretas Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, calling for his release; he later wrote a positive review of De Profundis, Wilde's letter-memoir of his imprisonment.

Works

Tyrrell's published works included:

• Brady, Thomas J. Bellingham; Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton; Cullinan, Maxwell Cormac (1867). Hesperidum Susurri [Whispers of the Hesperides] (in Latin). London: Rivington. OCLC 2763307.
• Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton (1871). The Bacchae of Euripides: A Revision of the Text and Commentary. London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer. OCLC 5040927.
• — (1873a). "Notes on the Letters of Cicero to Atticus". Hermathenea. 1 (1): 195–209. ISSN 0018-0750. JSTOR 23036315.
• — (1873b). "Mr. Hogan's Edition of the Medea". Hermathenea. 1 (1): 251–253. ISSN 0018-0750. JSTOR 23036322.
• — (1881). The Miles Gloriosus of Plautus: A Revised Text, with Notes. London: Macmillan & Co. OCLC 504226469.
• — (1883). The Archanians of Aristophanes Translated into English Verse. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co. OCLC 504226469.
• —, ed. (1883). Dublin Translations into Greek and Latin Verse. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co. OCLC 858849467.
• an edition of Cicero's Letters (7 vols., the later vols. with Dr. Purser, 1879–1900)
• — (January 1888). "The Old School of the Classics and the New: A Dialogue of the Dead". Fortnightly Review: 42–59. ISSN 2043-2887.
• — (1895). Latin Poetry. New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. OCLC 705983768.
• —, ed. (1897). Sophoclis Tragoediae [Sophocles's Tragedies] (in Latin). London: Macmillan & Co. OCLC 801028957.
• — (1897). The Troades of Euripides: A Revised Text, with Notes. London: Macmillan & Co. OCLC 776758061.
• — (1901). Anthology of Latin Poetry. London: Macmillan & Co. OCLC 1435723545 – via Internet Archive.
• —, ed. (1902). Terence. Oxford Texts. Oxford University Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• —; Sullivan, Edward, eds. (1906). Echoes from Kottabos. London: E. Grant Richards. OCLC 1042931508.
• — (1909). Essays on Greek Literature. London: Macmillan & Co. OCLC 1045391337.

Further reading

• T. (1914). "Robert Yelverton Tyrrell". Hermathenea. 18 (40): v–xvi. ISSN 0018-0750. JSTOR 23036913. (obituary in Hermathenea)

Works cited

• Barbe, Lluis (2010). Francis Ysidro Edgeworth: A Portrait with Family and Friends. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84980-322-9.
• Breathnach, Caoimhghin S. (2015). "Anthony Traill (1838–1914), the First Provost to Confer Degrees on Women Graduates" (PDF). Ulster Medical Journal. 84 (3): 179–181. ISSN 0041-6193.
• Browne, Sarah (14 October 2023). "A Record of Trinity's Mind". The University Times. Archived from the original on 29 August 2024. Retrieved 25 December 2024.
• Chisholm, Hugh (1922). "Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton" . In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). London & New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company. p. 827.{{cite encyclopedia}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• Ellmann, Richard (1988). Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-55484-1.
• Gibbs, A. M., ed. (1990). Shaw: Interviews and Recollections. London: Macmillan. ISBN 1-349-05402-X.
• Gogarty, Oliver St. John (1939). Tumbling in the Hay. London: Constable & Co. OCLC 531198.
• Harris, Frank (1916). Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. New York: Brantano's. OCLC 904345488 – via Internet Archive.
• Jebb, Richard Claverhouse (1871). "Tyrrell's Bacchae". The Dark Blue: 651–656.
• Jeffares, A. Norman (1982). Anglo-Irish Literature. MacMillan International Higher Education. ISBN 9781349168552.
• Lyons, J. B. (December 1984). "Oliver St. John Gogarty". Dublin Historical Review. 38 (1): 2–13. ISSN 0012-6861. JSTOR 30100748.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• Morell, Thomas; Maltby, Edward (1815). Lexicon Graeco-prosodiacum (in Latin). Vol. 1. Cambridge: J. Smith. OCLC 1048312270 – via Google Books.
• O'Connor, Ulick (1964). Oliver St. John Gogarty: A Poet and His Times. London: Jonathan Cape. OCLC 1150982569 – via Internet Archive.
• Pašeta, Senia (1999). "Trinity College, Dublin, and the Education of Irish Catholics, 1873–1908". Studia Hibernica. 30: 7–20. JSTOR 20495087.
• Purser, Louis Claude (1916). "Robert Yelverton Tyrrell". Proceedings of the British Academy. 7: 533–539.
• Purser, Louis Claude (1927). "Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton" . In Davis, Henry William Carless; Weaver, John Reginald Homer (eds.). Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement . p. 541 – via Wikisource.
• Sampson, George (1972) [1941]. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Revised by R. C. Churchill (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-07385-5.
• Stanford, William Bedell (May 1941). "Classical Studies in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation". Hermathena. 57: 3–24. JSTOR 23037614.}
• Stanford, William Bedell (Summer 1973). "Articles on Classical Subjects in Hermathena". Hermathena. 115: 1–12. JSTOR 23041893.}
• Stanford, William Bedell (Winter 1978). "Robert Yelverton Tyrrell" (PDF). Hermathena. 125: 7–21. JSTOR 23040586. Archived from the original (PDF) on 20 October 2021.}
• Stray, Christopher, ed. (2020). Sophocles' Jebb: A Life in Letters. Cambridge Philological Society. ISBN 978-1-913701-01-7.
• Sturgeon, Sinéad; Clinton, Georgina (2009). "Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton". Dictionary of Irish Biography. doi:10.3318/dib.008703.v1. Retrieved 17 December 2024.
• White, Newport J. D. (1935). Some Recollections of Trinity College, Dublin. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, & Co. OCLC 22572277.