Jarvis was born on December 20, 1837, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father, Charles Jarvis, an Englishman from Leicester, was for twenty years prominent in Philadelphia musical circles as a pianist and teacher, and served as organist at the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Epiphany.
When Charles was four years old, his father began teaching him to play the piano. It was his purpose to make his son an accomplished sight-reader and in this he succeeded to a remarkable degree. He also insisted that any passage that was to be played with the right hand must be practiced with the left hand as well until equal facility with the latter was achieved. This discipline made the boy practically ambidextrous. His education was obtained in the public schools of Philadelphia while he continued his piano study with his father and studied theory with Leopold Meignen. In February 1854 he was graduated from the Philadelphia high school, where he had excelled in mathematics.
In December 1844, at the age of seven, Jarvis appeared in his first concert, at Musical Fund Hall. His father had arranged for four hands a potpourri of themes from Don Pasquale by H. Rosselen, and the treble part of this arrangement young Jarvis played, with Caroline Branson, while standing up at the piano. His father died in 1854, and, though the son was only seventeen years old, he began at once a career as a teacher which continued throughout his life. In 1857 Thalberg toured the United States, and his quality of tone and great technique strongly impressed Jarvis, who made the great pianist his model for both playing and teaching. In addition to winning fame as a teacher, Jarvis was undoubtedly one of the best American pianists of his time. He had almost unlimited capacity for work and was an untiring recitalist. He played often with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Society, and the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, and had a large concert repertoire. In 1862 he instituted and financed a series of chamber music and historical piano recitals, the latter with Dr. Hugh A. Clarke as lecturer. These and other series of recitals were continued for over thirty years, the last one taking place on February 9, 1895, a few weeks before his death. During this time he performed some eight hundred different compositions. He was a decided classicist and though he played Liszt compositions now and then, he spoke of them as being too cacophonous. He seemed to lack the breadth of vision which an open-minded study of Romanticism would have given him. Jarvis died on February 25, 1895.
Jarvis was married in New Haven, Connecticut, July 17, 1861, to Lucretia Hall Yale of Wallingford, Connecticut. She died in 1875, and in 1879 he married Josephine E. Roebling.
