Robert Yelverton Tyrrell ( ; 21 January 1844 – 19 September 1914) was an Irish classical scholar who was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin. He was a prominent figure in the "Dublin School" of classical scholarship, responsible for Trinity's advancement in prestige in that subject from the late 1860s, known particularly for his seven-volume edition (largely made with his former student, Louis Claude Purser) of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero.
Born in Ballingarry, County Tipperary, Tyrrell was the son of a Church of Ireland curate, who died five years after Tyrrell's birth. His mother, Elizabeth, moved the family to Dublin, where Tyrrell was educated by his elder brothers and, briefly, at a local private school. He displayed an early talent for classical studies, particularly the composition of Greek and Latin verse, and entered Trinity College Dublin at the unusually young age of sixteen. He was a distinguished student, graduating in 1864 and attaining a fellowship in 1868.
Tyrrell became Professor of Latin in 1871 and Regius Professor of Greek in 1880. He played a leading role in the establishment of the literary journal Hermathena as well as the college miscellany , which collected humorous writings, often in Latin and Greek. After stepping down as Regius Professor in 1898, he became the college's Public Orator in 1899 and Professor of Ancient History in 1900. He was appointed as one of the founding fellows of the British Academy in 1901.
Several of Tyrrell's students went on to become influential in scholarship and the arts, including J. B. Bury, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth and William Ridgeway. He also taught Oscar Wilde, and supported him after Wilde was incarcerated for homosexual activity in 1895. As an academic, he promoted the detailed study of literary texts over that of historical and archaeological material, and was credited with a prominent role in improving the reputation and quality of classical studies at Trinity. He suffered from ill-health, brought on by an attack of thrombosis, from 1899, and died in 1914 at his home near Dublin.
Early life Robert Yelverton Tyrrell was born on 21 January 1844 in Ballingarry in County Tipperary, Ireland. His middle name was taken from his godmother's surname; she was a descendant of the judge, legal scholar and peer Barry Yelverton. Robert Tyrrell was a first cousin to the modernist writer and excommunicated Jesuit priest George Tyrrell.
Tyrrell was the son of Elizabeth Tyrrell () and of Henry Tyrrell, a curate in the Church of Ireland at Ballingarry. Soon after Robert's birth, Henry Tyrrell was appointed as rector of Kinnitty in County Offaly. He died in 1849 of cholera, having caught the disease in Dublin, where it had broken out the same year and to where he had travelled in order to administer the last rites to his brother-in-law. The remaining family, consisting of three sons, three daughters and Tyrrell's mother, moved to Dublin.
Tyrrell was mostly educated at home by his two elder brothers, though he spent six weeks at Flynn's School, a private school on Hume Street in Dublin. According to an 1893 portrait of Tyrrell by his former student, Henry Hinkson, in The Critic, he had an unhappy time at the school, partly due to his skill at composing verses in Latin and Greek: this attracted the ire of his teacher, who considered verse composition frivolous. Hinkson also wrote that it aroused the jealousy of Tyrrell's schoolmates, requiring him to "make amends for his superior attainments by a correspondingly deft use of his fists".
In 1860, at the unusually young age of sixteen, Tyrrell matriculated at Trinity College Dublin. All three Tyrrell brothers studied classics with distinction at Trinity; Robert Tyrrell obtained a classical scholarship at the end of his first year: a rare achievement for a first-year student, particularly one of seventeen. He graduated in 1864 with a Double First, achieving the college's top marks in classics and fourth-highest marks in logic and ethics, and was also awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Prize in Greek Verse for a play about the Alexandrian mathematician Hypatia. In 1867, alongside two fellow Trinity scholars (Thomas J. Bellingham Brady and Maxwell Cormac Cullinan), Tyrrell published (), a volume of English verse translated into Latin.
Academic career
Early career Tyrrell twice won prizes in the examinations to become a fellow of Trinity College, but did not secure the position until his third attempt in 1868. Classical studies had held relatively little prominence at Trinity until the 1860s; few classics graduates had applied for fellowships at the college, preferring instead to seek careers in law or public service. Tyrrell's appointment, along with those of John Pentland Mahaffy in 1864 and Arthur Palmer in 1867, marked the beginning of a period in which the subject expanded greatly in numbers, publications and prestige. These academics became known as the "Dublin School" of classics. Tyrrell was elected Professor of Latin in 1871, succeeding William Hugh Ferrar, who had died in office. Tyrrell's lecture style was spontaneous, relying on question-and-answer with his audience: his student Louis Claude Purser later wrote that the lectures were highly effective, but not "by any means highly systematic", and that they might have been condemned as mere "desultory conversations" by an educational inspector.
In 1869, Tyrrell co-founded (with Edward Sullivan) and became the first editor of the Trinity literary magazine , which William Stanford, Tyrrell's biographer, describes as "a polyglot miscellany of ". He remained its editor-in-chief for all the editions of its first run, which ended in 1881. His contributions to included reports on college cricket matches written in the style of the ancient Greek historian Thucydides. He was also a founding member of the editorial board of Hermathena, a more serious academic journal, established in 1873. He contributed to the first issue a review of John H. Hogan's edition of Euripides's Medea: the review was, in Stanford's words, "a savagely sarcastic scarification of Hogan's grammatical and metrical lapses". Tyrrell wrote that his intention was to discourage Hogan from editing any further works of the playwright "until he has made himself acquainted with the rudiments of Greek accidence and the structure of an iambic trimeter".
In 1879, Tyrrell published the first volume of an edition of the letters of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. This was the first attempt in an English-language work to establish the date of each of Cicero's letters and to arrange them in chronological order, though German scholars had attempted the same project and previous studies had attempted to date individual letters within the corpus. Unusually for the time, Tyrrell's edition rejected the traditional practice of grouping letters by their addressee, referring to each of the 931 letters by a number.
Regius Professor of Greek From 1880 to 1898, Tyrrell was Regius Professor of Greek, succeeding John Kells Ingram, who became the college librarian. From 1885, Purser began to work with him on his editions of Cicero's letters, though only Tyrrell was credited on the 1886 publication of the second volume, and he remained the "senior partner", listed before Purser, for all succeeding volumes. In 1887, he used his own name to have a textual note on the Frogs of Aristophanes, written by A. E. Housmanwho had failed his degree at Oxford and was working at the Patent Officepublished in The Classical Review; in 1892, he sponsored Housman's successful application to be Professor of Latin at University College London. In 1893, Tyrrell delivered the Percy Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which he published as Latin Poetry.
Tyrrell was a lifelong friend and supporter of Richard Claverhouse Jebb, professor of Greek initially at the University of Glasgow and, from 1889, at Cambridge, and often sided with him in academic debates, particularly against Mahaffy. In a letter to Jebb of February 1883, Tyrrell congratulated him for "show[ing] Mahaffy in his true light, with slovenly Greek and disingenuous arguments"; from 1884, Tyrrell and Mahaffy quarrelled over the edition of the Greek historian Herodotus made by the historian Archibald Sayce, leading to what Stanford calls a "minor civil war" between their respective acolytes at Trinity.
Later career Tyrrell left the Regius Professorship in 1898; he was succeeded by his former student J. B. Bury, then appointed in 1899 as the university's Public Orator and, in 1900, as Professor of Ancient History. The move was not regarded as a good fit with Tyrrell's academic interests – he was a literary scholar rather than a historian – but may have been intended to prevent Bury from leaving Trinity to seek a professorship elsewhere. Stanford further explains it through the belief that "in those days, Fellows of Trinity were deemed to be omniscient".
Tyrrell suffered from thrombosis of the legs from 1899, which forced him to give up his previous participation in sport (particularly rackets and tennis), affected his physical and mental energy and, in Stanford's words, "ravaged his fine features". In 1904, he was considered for the position of college provost, though ultimately passed over in favour of Anthony Traill, who was appointed by the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, in March. In the aftermath of Traill's appointment, Tyrrell was co-opted as a Senior Fellow, which required him to resign both his professorship and his office as Public Orator. Tyrrell was also elected as the college registrar in the same year, with a total salary (in 1906) of £1,386 14s (). In 1913, by which point his health was in decline, he was not re-elected as registrar, and was instead appointed senior dean and catechist, responsible for the religious education of the student body.
Tyrrell was a Commissioner of Education for Ireland; he was called to testify in 1899 before a royal commission on the state of education on the island and the possibility of reforming it. He was also chosen, in 1901, as one of the founding fellows of the British Academy. He died on 19 September 1914, at his home in Greystones, in County Wicklow near Dublin, after what Purser describes as a "tedious illness".
Personal life
Tyrrell married the poet Ada Shaw, the daughter of his Trinity colleague, the economist and journalist George Ferdinand Shaw, in 1874; they had three sons and three daughters. His grandsons included the bishop Richard Hanson and, by his daughter Ada, the economist Lucius Thompson-McCausland. Tyrrell was known for his sarcastic wit and opposition to temperance hotels, which served no alcohol; he compared the concept with "a celibate brothel". His writings were often parodic in nature, including pastiches of Herodotus and, frequently, of the English poet Robert Browning. He was a friend of the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who described him as "a fine scholar and an amiable man, free from every touch of pedantry". Who's Who listed his chief recreation as "light literature and the drama": he expressed regret, in one of his commentaries on Cicero, that no historical romance had yet been written on the relationship between the poet Catullus and his lover Lesbia.