Background
Birrell was born January 19, 1850, in Wavertree, near Liverpool, England, United Kingdom, the son of The Reverend Charles Mitchell Birrell (1811-1880), a Scottish Baptist minister and Harriet Jane (Grey) Birrell.
Birrell caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1906.
Sketch of Augustine Birrell.
Birrell with his son Anthony and Katharine Asquith.
Augustine Birrell c 1895.
Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK
Augustine was educated at Amersham Hall school, later he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and received Bachelor of Arts in 1872.
Senate House, Malet St, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HU, UK
Augustine also studied at the University of London.
biographer essayist lawyer politician
Birrell was born January 19, 1850, in Wavertree, near Liverpool, England, United Kingdom, the son of The Reverend Charles Mitchell Birrell (1811-1880), a Scottish Baptist minister and Harriet Jane (Grey) Birrell.
Augustine was educated at Amersham Hall school, later he entered Trinity College, Cambridge and received Bachelor of Arts in 1872. He also studied at the University of London.
Augustine Birrell began his literary career by falling in love, or rather by finally succumbing to an irrepressible urge to express his love to one Margaret Mirrlees. It was in 1874, two years after Birrell graduated from college and had taken a sober position as a barrister in London, that an anonymous essay titled “A Curious Product” appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine. While “A Curious Product” was Birrell’s first appearance in print, it was not representative of the works that would later bring him literary recognition.
Indeed, Birrell would never again take pen in hand to effuse about the transports of love. However, his more typical works were presaged by yet another anonymous foray into the world of letters. In the early 1880s, he put together a collection of his own essays, to which he added a single contribution by a friend, and in 1884 he had the collection published at his own expense. That collection, titled Obiter Dicta, quickly found an appreciative audience, much to its authors’ (and self-publisher's) surprise. As a result, Birrell would go on to produce several further collections, including Obiter Dicta: Second Series, (1887), Essays about Men, Women, and Books (1894), two volumes of Collected Essays (1899), More Obiter Dicta (1924), and Et Cetera: A Collection (1930).
Having “taken the silk” (become a queen’s counsel) in 1885, Birrell duly set about fulfilling the rest of the social requirements of a member of his class. As a widower, he had already set up a household in which his sister, a spinster, ruled as a housekeeper, and he prepared to enter politics. In his first two attempts to be elected to Parliament, in 1885 and 1886, he won the Scottish constituency of West Fife and took his seat as a Liberal Member in 1889.
Birrell’s next writings would be centered upon the subject of the law; he released Res Judicatae: Papers and Essays in 1892. In this and in his later legal writings, Birrell approached his subjects with an admirable insistence on clarity. Birrell’s literary interest in the law was varied and wide-ranging: he covered topics as disparate as copyright law and employer liability, leaving aside his writings on particular issues of the law (inspired by his career as a barrister).
At the same time that Birrell was earning his reputation as a man of letters, he was also nurturing his career in politics. He served his first constituency, in Scotland, well throughout the 1890s, but in 1900 he was asked by his party to try instead to win in Manchester. He was unsuccessful, but his absence from Parliament was brief. In 1906 he ran again, this time for North Bristol, and returned to government victorious. In 1906 he was appointed Minister of Education, and his political success seemed assured. But in 1907 he accepted a very difficult appointment, to the position of chief secretary of Ireland. This thankless task could easily have spelled disaster for Birrell, given the contentious relations between England and Ireland then, as now. He left the office under something of a cloud in 1916 and retired from Parliament, and political life in general, two years later. From that time onward, he would concentrate solely on his literary endeavors.
He died in London on 20 November 1933, aged eighty-three.
Birrell was sympathetic to the Irish people, taking the post of chief secretary of Ireland. He strongly disapproved of the militancy and violence of the Women's Social and Political Union.
Augustine Birrell joined the Sylvan Debating Club in 1872.
Birrell was a man of his time and his class.
Quotes from others about the person
One reviewer from the New York Tribune described Birrell as ''the patron essayist of the ‘saving remnant’ who make-of literature a graceful garment, and who remain now, as always, a constant if not very energetic influence upon the writing and publication of literary criticism.''
His first wife, Margaret Mirrielees, died in 1879, only a year after their marriage, and in 1888 Augustine Birrell married Eleanor Tennyson, daughter of the poet Frederick Locker-Lampson and widow of Lionel Tennyson. They had two sons, one of whom, Frankie (1889–1935) was later a journalist and critic and associated with the Bloomsbury Group.