Biography of Goldwin Smith

Goldwin Smith was a British historian and journalist,

who was active in the United Kingdom and Canada. He was
born on August 13th 1823 in Reading, Berkshire, United
Kingdom. He was the son of Richard Pritchard Smith and
Elizabeth Berton. His father was an Oxford-educated physician,
railway promotors, and director. Goldwin was the only one of
their seven children who survive to adulthood.

He first attending a private school before he was

educated in Eton Collage and Magdalene Collage at Oxford.
He was awarded a first class in literae humaniores and obtained
a BA in 1845 and an MA in 1848. He also carried off a series of
prizes in classical studies, including one for a Latin essay on
the position of women in ancient Greece. And after a brilliant undergraduate career he was
elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford. On the Royal Commission of 1850 to
inquire into the reform of the university, Smith served as assistant-secretary and he was then
secretary to the commissioners appointed by the act of 1854.

He began contributing to the Morning Chronicle in 1850 and the Saturday Review of
Politics, Literature, Science, and Art in 1855, which both were published in London. He was
reviewing poetry and advocating university reform. He held the regius professorship of
Modern History at Oxford from 1858 to 1866. In 1861 he showed his intention to withdraw
from active journalism and devote himself to his new profession as an historian. His later
historical publications and literary biographies including histories of the United States,
histories of the United Kingdom, and studies on William Cowper and Jane Austen.

He had resigned his chair at Oxford in 1866 in order to attend to his father, who had
suffered permanent injury in a railway accident. In the autumn of 1867, when Smith was
briefly absent, his father comitted suicide. Possibly blaming himself for the tragedy, and
without an Oxford appointment, he decided to move to North America. He held the
professorship of English and Constitutional History in the Department of History at Cornell
University for several years. Goldwin Smith Hall, which is located in Cornell's Arts Quad, is
named in his honour. In 1871, he moved to Toronto, where he edited the Canadian Monthly,
founded the Week and the Bystander, and spent the rest of his life living in The Grange
manor.

In his later years he expressed his views in a weekly journal, The Farmer's Sun, and
published in 1904 My Memory of Gladstone. He died at his residence in Toronto, The Grange.
Goldwin Smith is credited with the quote "Above all nations is humanity," This quote is the
motto of the University of Hawaii and other institutions around the world. After his death, a
plaque in his memory was erected outside his birthplace in the town centre of Reading. This
still exists, outside the entrance to the Harris Arcade.