Author: Cox, George
Biography:
COX, George (1810-38: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 29 Mar. 1810 and baptised on 21 Apr. at St. Peter’s in the East, Oxford, the eldest child of George Valentine Cox (1786-1875), Fellow of New College, Esquire Bedel and Coroner, and Maria Beckwith (1786-1844), daughter of the organist and composer John Christmas Beckwith, who had married at Norwich in 1807. He was a scholar from 1822 at Winchester where he won two gold medals in 1826-7 and wrote a “Reply to Cowper’s Tirocinium” which was admired by his contemporaries and preserved in manuscript but never published. He proceeded to New College Oxford (matric. 1827, Scholar 1828, BA 1831, MA 1835, Fellow 1830-38). He also entered the Inner Temple. He died from smallpox on 24 Feb. 1838 at 3 Inner Temple Lane, and was buried at Temple Church, City of London. He never married. William Tuckwell later recalled him as “an extraordinarily promising man.” Although the attribution of Black Gowns and Redcoats (1834) is generally credited to a statement by Cox’s father in 1868, his authorship was widely known in Oxford circles before then. His translation of Friedrich Otto’s History of Russian Literature, With a Lexicon of Russian Authors (1839) appeared posthumously. (ancestry.co.uk 4 Mar. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 4 Mar. 2024; Globe 28 Feb. 1838; GM Apr. 1838, 442; N&Q 3 Apr. 1852, 332, 14 Sept. 1878, 213-14; William Tuckwell, Reminiscences of Oxford [2nd ed. 1908], 114; George Valentine Cox, Recollections of Oxford [1868], 257; The Wykehamist 32 [June 1870], 3-4; winchestercollegearchives.org; GRO death cert.) AA