Author: Wallis, Arthur Wellington
Biography:
WALLIS, Arthur Wellington (1812-71: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 17 Oct. 1812 at Sidmouth, Devon, and baptised the following year, the son of John Wallis (1784-1853), a bookseller who published important topographical books on the area and had been instrumental in opening the Marine Library at Sidmouth, and his wife Mary Susanna Sladen (1784-1815). His grandfather, John Wallis (1745-1818) was also a well-known bookseller and map-maker. Originally a non-conformist family attached to Carter Lane Presbyterian (Blackfriars), they must have conformed, probably post-1818 since Arthur Wellington Wallis was educated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford (matric. 1833; BA 1838). Shortly before going up he published, while still in Sidmouth, translations of Virgil and Lucan in Select Passages(1833) to which he appended his own miscellaneous poems. His historical-topographical poem The Hospice of St. Bernard(1834) was rejected for the Newdigate Prize at Oxford. He was Boden Sanscrit scholar 1837-39 and then entered the Established Church. He married Jane Watson (1818-42), at Christ Church, Pickering, Yorkshire, on 7 Jan. 1840, and in the same month was appointed Principal of Bishop’s College, Calcutta, by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK). They sailed for Australia in 1842 to improve her health. Their young son died en route and she died of consumption in Sydney. He returned to India and was soon remarried at Calcutta, on 10 Sept. 1843, to a fifteen-year-old girl from a distinguished military family, Eliza Wootton (1827-1905), with whom he had a family of four sons and a daughter. He was appointed prinicipal of the East India Company college in Benares in 1845. Perhaps surprisingly for a Sanscrit scholar, he appears to have favoured the teaching of English (first advocated in Macaulay’s famous Minute on Indian Education [1835]), and was dismissed in 1847. He then served various positions as EIC chaplain at Churnar, Uttar Pradesh, and Chinsurah. He later served as chaplain in Penang (1857-8) and Myanmar (1859-62) after which he returned to England. For reasons unknown he committed his wife Eliza to an asylum and in 1866 returned to India, serving as chaplain in Berhampore, West Bengal. In Apr. 1871 his only daughter, newly married, died in Aden. A few days before his death, he was reported as behaving strangely at a funeral, and on 8 July he hanged himself at Berampore. His wife was probably released soon afterwards and went out to Australia where she died in 1905. (ancestry.co.uk 26 Jun. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 26 Jun. 2021; CCEd 26 Jun. 2021; Oxford Journal 18 Jan. 1840; Oxford University Journal and City Herald 10 June 1837, 28 Dec. 1839, 1 Oct. 1842, 24 Nov. 1843, 3 May 1845; Times of India 27 Jul. 1871; Cambridge City Chronicle 1 Oct. 1842) AA
Other Names:
- Arthur W. Wallis