Born, at Salisbury, 26 Aug. 1833. Educated at school at Alderbury, 1841 (?)–47; at Queenwood Agricultural Coll., 3 Aug. 1847–49; at King’s Coll. School, London, 1849–52. To Peterhouse, Cambridge, Oct. 1852; migrated to Trinity Hall, Oct. 1853; B.A., 1856; M.A., 1859. Fellowship at Trinity Hall, Dec. 1856. Entered at Lincoln’s Inn, 26 Oct. 1854; settled there as student, Nov. 1856. Visit to Paris, 1857. Accidentally blinded while shooting, 17 Sept. 1858. Returned to Trinity Hall. Read papers on Political Economy at British Assoc., Sept. 1859; Member of Polit. Econ. Club, 1861. Prof. of Polit. Econ., Cambridge, 27 Nov. 1863 to 1884. Resigned Fellowship, 1866, to be re-elected same year under new statutes permitting marriage. Married Millicent Garrett, 23 April, 1867. Life spent in London, except during lectures at Cambridge. Read paper on “Proportional Representation” at Social Science Assoc., 1859. M.P. for Brighton, 12 July 1865; re-elected, Nov. 1868. M.P. for Hackney, 24 April 1874; re-elected, 31 March 1880, as Postmaster-General. Contrib., at various times to “Macmillan’s Magazine,” and “Fortnightly Review” (List of articles is given in Leslie Stephen’s “Life” of Fawcett). Severe illness in Nov. 1882. Doctor of Polit. Econ. Würzburg, 1882. F.R.S., 1882. Lord Rector of Glasgow Univ., and Hon. LL.D., degree, 1883. Corresponding member of Institute of France, 1884. Died, at Cambridge, 6 Nov. 1884; buried at Trumpington. Works: “Mr. Hare’s Reform Bill, simplified and explained,” 1860; “The Leading Clauses of a new Reform Bill,” 1860; “Manual of Political Economy,” 1863; “The Economic Position of the British Labourer,” 1865; “Pauperism,” 1871; “Essays and Lectures” (with Mrs. Fawcett), 1872; “The Present Position of the Government” (from “Fortnightly Review”), 1872; “Speeches on Some Current Political Questions,” 1873; “Free Trade and Protection,” 1878; “Indian Finance” (from “Nineteenth Century”), 1880; “State Socialism” (from his “Manual of Polit. Econ,”), 1883; “Labour and Wages” (from “Manual of Polit. Econ.”), 1884. Life: by Leslie Stephen, 1885.

Personal

  No one can look upon him but he will see on his face the characters of courage, frankness, and intelligence. He is six feet two inches in height, very blonde, his light hair and complexion and his smooth beardless face giving him something of the air of a boy. His features are at once strongly marked and regular. He narrowly escaped being handsome, and his expression is very winning. His countenance is habitually serene, and no cloud or frown ever passes over it. His smile is gentle and winning. It is probable that no blind man has ever before been able to enter upon so important a political career as Professor Fawcett, who, yet under forty years of age, is the most influential of the independent Liberals in Parliament. From the moment that he took his seat in that body he has been able—and this is unusual—to command the close attention of the House. He has a clear fine voice, speaks with the utmost fluency, has none of the university intonation and none of the hesitation or uneasy attitudes of the average Parliamentary speaker. He scorns all subterfuges, speaks honestly his whole mind, and comes to the point. At times he is eloquent, and he is always interesting.

  I have made a new Acquaintance here. Professor Fawcett…. when Wright was gone called on me, and also came and smoked a Pipe one night here. A thoroughly unaffected, unpretending man; so modest indeed that I was ashamed afterwards to think how I had harangued him all the Evening, instead of getting him to instruct me. But I would not ask him about his Parliamentary Shop: and I should not have understood his Political Economy: and I believe he was very glad to be talked to instead, about some of those he knew, and some whom I had known.

  There were two or three questions on the papers this evening to Mr. Fawcett. Among others one by Mr. Sexton in reference to the negotiations between the Post Office and the Midland Great Western Railway. Mr. Shaw Lefevre announced that Mr. Fawcett was ill with pleurisy, and that probably he would not be able to resume his duties for some time. There was immediately a murmur of sympathy throughout the House, where Mr. Fawcett was the most popular of men and of Ministers. Within two hours after this announcement it was known that he was dead. The regret for this sudden and unexpected termination of a picturesque, useful, and manly career struck everybody with sorrow, and one could see how faces changed their expression as the information was passed from one member to another.

  Fawcett’s friends always spoke of him as a man to be loved, and no doubt they were right, but to those outside of that circle he seemed pre-eminently a man to be respected. What has been said of him since his death proves how universal the respect was, and how high was the opinion the world had formed of his character and abilities. It is sometimes said the world takes a man at his own valuation, and this is perhaps true enough in Fawcett’s case. It would he hard to name a man who had a more complete confidence in himself. This confidence was not a vain egotism. It sprang from a reasoned conviction. He had a habit of judging by the dry light of reason, and he applied this process to himself as to other subjects of interest. He had no doubts about anything. He was as sure of himself as of a proposition in geometry. His mind had a mathematical cast which to a certain extent unfitted him for politics. He argued in straight lines, and lacked the flexibility which is in most cases a condition of success in English public life. When he had demonstrated that a thing ought to be on principle, he became impatient of those who would have shown him it was impossible in the circumstances, or premature.

  Various proposals were immediately made to honour Fawcett’s memory. A statue is to be erected in the market-place of Salisbury, near a statue previously erected to Sydney Herbert, on the spot where he took his first childish steps, and to which he always returned with fresh affection. In Cambridge there is to be a portrait by Mr. Herkomer of the figure so familiar for a generation. Measures are still in progress for some appropriate memorial in India to the man who showed so unique a power of sympathy with a strange race. A national memorial is in preparation, which is to consist of a scholarship for the blind at Cambridge, some additional endowment for the Royal Normal College for the Blind at Norwood, and a tablet is to be erected in Westminster Abbey. A memorial is also to be erected in recognition of his services to women; and the inhabitants of Trumpington are placing a window to his memory in their church. Such monuments are but the outward symbols of the living influence still exercised upon the hearts of his countrymen by a character equally remarkable for masculine independence and generous sympathy.

  His commanding form would have been noticeable under any circumstances…. Not less familiar was his well-known form to boaters on the Cam, or to skaters on the Fens in times of frost. His marvellous courage was seen in things small as well as great. Swimming, rowing, and skating, as well as riding, were amongst his accomplishments, and whatever skill he possessed was pardonably exaggerated by the admiration of sympathising beholders. When to this general familiarity with his stalwart figure is added the unfailing kindliness and cheerfulness of his manner to every one, whether high or low, it becomes easy to understand why in his case the public loss has been mourned with something of the tenderness of private sorrow. His memory for the tones of a voice was remarkable, and people who had only spoken to him once or twice were astonished, as well as gratified, to find that when they addressed him again they had no need to remind him of their names, for scarcely had a word been spoken before the hearty response showed the readiness of his recognition.

  The member for Brighton was soon a popular member. The tall, manly figure, led about by an attendant, was gazed at with reverence in the House of Commons. His political creed gave an emphasis of individuality to a man who could so completely master himself. Nor were his politics—such as he put before the House—calculated to give offence to honest adversaries. Perhaps his views upon India—a subject which was so dear to him, that he got the sobriquet of the “Member for India”—were more likely to stir party hostility than his views upon toleration or upon Reform…. It is, however, to Fawcett’s management of the Post Office that we naturally turn with the greatest interest; for it was as Post Master General that he won the highest laurels which were bestowed on him by the national gratitude.

  Mr. Henry Fawcett, the blind spectacled Postmaster-General, is one of the tallest and most sinewy looking men in the House. He is a man of great intellectual vigor, tenacity of purpose, and courage mingled with caution, and a trenchant parliamentary debater as well as an admirable platform-speaker. On account of his profound knowledge of Indian affairs and sympathy with the people of that country, he is sometimes called “the member for India;” and when, with little money, he was trying to force the portals of “the rich man’s club” at Westminster, a great number of very poor Hindoos subscribed a sum sufficient to defray the cost of his return for Hackney.

General

  The language was lucid, the arrangement good, the ideas just. You read with pleasure, because you felt yourself in the hands of a man who thoroughly understood his subject and instructed you; but the light had little warmth, and seemed to shine with equal monotony on every part. There was even in his way of applying economic doctrines to practical problems a touch of what people called pedantry, but which might be better described as an extreme rigidity, a disposition to see only the blacks and whites of a question, and not to appreciate the subtler considerations which come in, and must be allowed to modify the broader conclusions of economic science.

  Fawcett’s writings display a keen and powerful, if rather narrow, intellect. He adhered through life to the radicalism of J. S. Mill; he was a staunch free-trader in economic questions, an earnest supporter of co-operation, but strongly opposed to socialism, and a strenuous advocate of the political and social equality of the sexes. His animating principle was a desire to raise the position of the poor. He objected to all such interference as would weaken their independence or energy, and though generally favourable on this account to the laissez-faire principle, disavowed it when, as in the case of the Factory Acts, he held that interference could protect without enervating.

  Certainly, nobody has less rubbish in his mind than Fawcett. But he did not escape the dangers which attend an exclusive devotion to work which promises to yield a directly useful result. As his biographer frankly admits, he had some of that narrowness and rigidity from which the practical man seldom escapes. He was not an original thinker. Even in political economy he did no more than illustrate and spread the ideas of minds broader and subtler than his own. But he had a healthy love of facts, and a power of using them which made him, wherever a calm judgment was needed, a man to lean upon. If, moreover, his intellectual interests were comparatively few, there was no trace of narrowness in his moral nature.

  This book [“Manual of Political Economy”] probably did more to popularise the study than almost any other that has been published.

  With great thinkers of the eighteenth century Fawcett firmly believed in Reason, and was prepared to make Reason, as far as she would carry him, the guide of his life. This earnest desire to follow out in practice the truths which his mind grasped, is visible both in his dealings with others and in his conduct of his own life, and it is this simple acting upon simple convictions which so greatly distinguishes him from the crowd who have neither definite beliefs nor fixed courses of action…. It is curious to see, as one follows Fawcett’s political career, what simplicity and vigor the genuine adherence to very elementary economical or moral axioms could give to the conduct of a member of Parliament.

  He published, besides his manual, “Pauperism: Its Causes and Remedies,” “Speeches on Some Current Political Questions,” and “Free Trade and Protection,” etc. In his economic writings Professor Fawcett was an uncompromising advocate of free trade and the individualistic economic doctrines with which that party is associated; in politics he was a Liberal.