See also

Family of Charles BADHAM and Georgiana Margaret WILKINSON

Husband: Charles BADHAM (1813-1884)
Wife: Georgiana Margaret WILKINSON (1831-1888)
Children: Julia BADHAM (1858- )
Lewis Barrett Lennard BADHAM (1860-1890)
Margaret Georgiana BADHAM (1862- )
George Charles BADHAM (1865- )
Robert BADHAM (1866- )
Marriage 1857

Husband: Charles BADHAM

Name: Charles BADHAM
Sex: Male
Father: Charles BADHAM (1780-1845)
Mother: Margaret CAMPBELL (c. 1778-1818)
Birth 18 Jul 1813 Ludlow, Shropshire
Occupation Clergyman & Classical Scholar
Census 1851 (age 37-38) Greenwich London
12 Stainton Place
Living with his first wife and sons Charles and Herbert
Census 1861 (age 47-48) Harborne, Staffordshire
Metchley Abbey (part of)
Emigration Apr 1867 (age 53) from England to Sydney Australia
Death 27 Feb 1884 (age 70) Sydney Australia

Wife: Georgiana Margaret WILKINSON

Name: Georgiana Margaret WILKINSON
Sex: Female
Father: -
Mother: -
Birth 5 May 1831 Islington, London
Death 30 Jul 1888 (age 57) Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia

Child 1: Julia BADHAM

Name: Julia BADHAM
Sex: Female
Birth 7 Nov 1858 Harborne, Staffordshire

Child 2: Lewis Barrett Lennard BADHAM

Name: Lewis Barrett Lennard BADHAM
Sex: Male
Spouse: Helen O WOOD ( - )
Birth 18 May 1860 Harborne, Staffordshire
Death 21 Dec 1890 (age 30) Crows Nest, New South Wales, Australia

Child 3: Margaret Georgiana BADHAM

Name: Margaret Georgiana BADHAM
Sex: Female
Birth 23 Apr 1862 Harborne, Staffordshire

Child 4: George Charles BADHAM

Name: George Charles BADHAM
Sex: Male
Birth 14 Sep 1865 Harborne, Staffordshire

Child 5: Robert BADHAM

Name: Robert BADHAM
Sex: Male
Birth 30 Dec 1866 Harborne, Staffordshire

Note on Husband: Charles BADHAM

Badham, Charles (1813 - 1884), classical scholar and promoter of education, was born on 18 July 1813 at

Ludlow, Shropshire, the fourth son of Charles Badham (1780 - 1845), regius professor of medicine in the

University of Glasgow from 1827 and amateur classicist, and his first wife, Margaret Campbell, a relation of

Lewis Campbell (1830 - 1908), Greek scholar and one of Badham's obituarists.

Because of his father's long periods in Europe as physician to English travellers, and his distrust of British

schooling, Badham was educated first under Pestalozzi at Yverdun, where he became Pestalozzi's favourite pupil

and began his mastery of both classical and modern languages. He was next a pupil in England of Dr Charles

Mayo, formerly chaplain at Yverdun, and then at Eton of the famous classical teacher E. C. Hawtrey. In 1831 he

entered Wadham College, Oxford, where he graduated BA in 1837 but with only third-class honours because,

the family believed, the teaching did not suit his independent temperament; he took his MA in 1839.

The foundation and direction of Badham's Greek scholarship were formed during seven years of travel and

study of manuscripts in European libraries, chiefly Italian; he began acquaintance with many scholars, especially

the eminent Grecist G. C. Cobet of Leiden, who became a lifelong friend. In 1846 Badham returned to England

and was incorporated MA at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he went because of the Cambridge tradition of

textual scholarship, and took holy orders (deacon 1846, priest 1848) to qualify himself for a college fellowship.

He was always to be disappointed, however, and his marriage in January 1848 to Julia Matilda, daughter of John

Smith of Dulwich Common, further prevented his election owing to the celibacy restrictions then in force. He

failed also to gain preferment in the church, despite taking the degree of DD in 1852. His religious liberalism

made him suspect, his friendship with F. D. Maurice in particular being held against him; his irascibility was also

alleged. He achieved only headmasterships of minor schools, at Southampton (1851), Louth (1854), and

Edgbaston proprietary school, Birmingham (1856), patronized largely by nonconformist parents. In Birmingham

he won the esteem of the future Cardinal Newman. In 1857 after the death of his first wife, with whom he had

a son and a daughter, Badham married his second wife, Georgiana Margaret Wilkinson, with whom he had four

sons and four daughters.

Recognition of Badham's scholarship came more quickly on the continent than at home and in 1860 Cobet

secured him an honorary DLitt at Leiden. In 1863, however, he was appointed to the prestigious post of external

examiner in classics to the University of London, where the lexicographer Dr W. Smith was among his

colleagues. Smith liked him personally and perceived his quality, describing him as ‘the greatest of our living

scholars’ in an unsigned article, ‘Dr. Badham and the Dutch school of critics’, in the Quarterly Review (120, 1866,

324 - 55). In 1867 the University of Sydney, Australia, was looking deliberately in England for a new professor of

classics and logic. Badham accepted appointment, with a panoply of testimonials from home and abroad

(including Cobet, Newman, Smith, and W. H. Thompson, master of Trinity College, Cambridge; some are cited in

the Dictionary of National Biography). Others' lack of judgement or their hostility denied Badham a comparable

post in England, a wrong memorably expressed by A. E. Housman: ‘the one English scholar of the mid-century

whose reputation crossed the Channel - but at home was excluded from academical preferment, set to teach

boys at Birmingham, and finally transported to the Antipodes’ (Manilius, I, 1937, xlii).

Badham's excellence as a Greek scholar lay in acute textual conjecture, in the highest tradition of philology. He

set out his principles in the introductions to his editions of Euripides' Ion and Helen (both 1851) and in

prefatory letters to those of Plato's Euthydemus and Laches (1865), Symposium (1866), and Philebus (1878). He

insisted on firmness towards texts demonstrably corrupt through scribal confusion, interference, or

interpolation. Decrying vain conservatism, he advocated common sense as the foundation of critical method in

general (Criticism Applied to Shakespeare, 1866, a pamphlet). Thompson wrote of him as ‘a better emender

than Porson, but lacking Porson's caution’ (Badham and Campbell, 97). The ‘Prefatory letters’ contain illustrative

emendations to both Greek dramatists and prose writers. Badham also published long series of papers on the

21 DEC 2014 Family of Charles Badham #9095 - continued Page 7

text of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato (Laws) in the Dutch journal Mnemosyne, and on these and other

authors in German periodicals, but very little in British journals.

In Australia, Badham and his family found the climate congenial and he responded immediately to a society

without inbred hierarchies and to a young university without religious conformism. At home, the routines of

schoolteaching had frustrated him; but now he had an academic position, there was paradoxically much less

time for scholarship. Instead, there was endless opportunity for Badham's ideals and energy as promoter of

education, and for powers of organization, advocacy, and influence hardly needed or perceived in England. For

the rest of his life he worked selflessly to enhance the university's standing and funding. He crusaded for those

disadvantaged for education through distance or poverty, persuading the New South Wales state government to

provide bursaries and himself teaching by correspondence, and not only in classics. He urged opportunities for

women students, and greater tolerance for non-Anglicans. For many years dean of arts and then of the new

faculty of laws, and also principal, his last success in the university was to establish evening lectures for working

people. He engaged forcefully in reform of the curriculum, examinations, and inspection in schools, arguing

from direct experience of visits throughout the state. He put special weight on English language and literature,

and developed proposals to encourage pupils towards ‘either arts or science’ according to their natural

inclination and talent—ideas he had urged already in England (Thoughts on Classical and Commercial Education,

1864). His overriding ideal was to give all citizens ‘together with a consciousness of being educated … a

conscience’. His work on the Birmingham library committee from 1860 to 1867 qualified him as trustee and

tireless chairman of the Sydney Free Public Library from its foundation in 1870 until his death. In all these

activities he canvassed and cajoled, often at parliamentary level, wrote countless reports and papers, led by

example, and exploited the influence of his offices in university and city. During a visit to Australia, Anthony

Trollope captured his public image as ‘the prince of professors and greatest of Grecians’ (A. Trollope, Australia,

1873, chap. 2). The mixture in him of volatile temper, wit, eloquence, artistic taste, prodigious memory, and

formidable intellect made him an exceptional personality. University, city, and state honoured him with a

banquet on his seventieth birthday in 1883. His death on 27 February 1884 was announced by extraordinary

public gazette, and government offices in Sydney closed to permit attendance at his funeral. He is buried under

a simple stone in St Thomas's churchyard, north Sydney. His public speeches were admired and posthumously

published.