Fitzedward Hall

Background

Fitzedward Hall was born on March 21, 1825, at Troy, New York, United States, the eldest son of Daniel, a well-to-do lawyer, and Anjinette (Fitch) Hall, who represented distinguished colonial families. Fitzedward’s paternal grandfather served as a naval officer in the Revolution and went from Cape Cod to Vermont, where he was judge of the supreme court, and died in 1809; he was a descendant of John Hall of Coventry, England, who came to Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1630 and settled at Yarmouth some years later. On the mother’s side the boy was descended from Thomas Fitch, whose ancestor came to America in 1637.

Education

After preliminary schooling at Walpole, New Hampshire, and in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Fitzedward entered Harvard College as a member of the famous class of 1846 and eventually received from Harvard the degrees of A. M. and LL. D.

Career

Fitzedward Hall was sent by his father to India to find a brother who had run away to sea. This accident determined Fitzedward’s career, for, being wrecked in the Hugh River and detained at Calcutta, he remained there for three years, occupying himself with teaching and newspaper work, and took up the study of the local dialects. Language, always his favorite study, now became his lifework.

After drifting to Ghazipur, where he stayed about half a year, he settled down in Benares, January 16, 1850, and was soon made instructor at the local Government College. Three years later he became professor of Anglo-Sanskrit in the same college and occupied this position till July 1855, when he was appointed inspector of public instruction for Ajmere-Merwara. In December 1856 he was transferred as inspector of public instruction to the Central Provinces, with headquarters at Saugor. The next year he helped personally to defend the fort there, during the Mutiny, and then took a vacation of eighteen months, visiting France, England, and his native country.

In 1862 he left India permanently and became professor of Sanskrit, Hindustani, and Indian jurisprudence at King’s College, London. He was also librarian to the India Office and after 1864 acted as examiner for the Civil Service Commissioners, first in Hindustani and Hindi, and then, succeeding Max Müller, in Sanskrit (1880), and a few years later in English. In 1869 he retired to Marlesford, not far from London, where he devoted himself for eight years to the completion of a task begun some years before: the editing of Sir Horace Hayman Wilson’s translation of The Vishnu Purand (1864-1877), with an enormous mass of new elucidatory material.

Hall’s interest, even in boyhood and markedly so in college, had been centered on linguistic phenomena, though he had also studied mathematics and dipped into medicine. In India, from the first, he gave his whole life to philological studies and, while he kept up his collection of English idioms, devoted most of his time to work in Sanskrit, publishing in rapid succession over thirty volumes of translations, texts, and commentaries, at the rate of one or two a year, while performing the onerous duties of inspector of public instruction during part of this time.

He discovered in 1859 new manuscripts of the Brihaddevata and Natyashastra (poetics), which he edited, and in the same year completed the publication of both the Surya-Siddhanta (astronomy) and the famous romance of Subandhu, Vasavadattd. These were but the outstanding contributions made during his sixteen years in India. But his interest in India did not cease when he retired. Besides the great Vishnu Purand, he edited Ballantyne’s Hindu Grammar (1868), wrote Benares Ancient and Medieval (1868), and published a Hindu Reader (1870).

This was but one side of his prodigious activity. Hall soon became as a writer on English philology no less authoritative than he already was in the field of Sanskrit. His countless contributions as editor of the Oxford English Dictionary continued to the time of his death, when Dr. Murray recorded in most appreciative terms how great a loss English philology had thereby suffered. He was an indefatigable contributor of critical linguistic notes and articles to many journals in England and America, notably the Academy, Spectator, Dial, and New York Nation, besides writing more elaborate theses and books on philological topics, and editing for the Early English Text Society the works of William Lauder and Sir David Lyndesay (1864).

He was a caustic polemic writer and easily dominated opponents both in Great Britain and America. His Recent Exemplifications of False Philology (1872) treated Richard Grant White with the same ruthlessness as that later employed in Doctor Indoctus (1880) to the discomfiture of Professor John Nichol of Glasgow. Hall’s Modern English (1873), his philological articles, such as “On English Adjectives inable” (1877), and a series of papers published in the American Journal of Philology (1881) and in Modern Language Notes (1883), besides the constant casual notes referred to above, united in making him in the last decade of the nineteenth century almost the supreme judge of English usage, one whose verdicts were never questioned with impunity.

Achievements

• Fitzedward Hall was the first American to edit a Sanskrit text - two treatises on Vedanta philosophy, The Atma-Bodha, with Its Commentary; and the Tattva-Bodha (1852). He was an early collaborator in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) project. He also supplied Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary with some two thousand linguistic notes. In 1860, Hall received from Oxford the degree of D. C. L.

Works

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  • A Contribution Towards an Index to the Bibliography of the Indian Philosophical Systems

    ( About the Book Military history texts discuss the histo...)

  • Hindî Reader

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Ane compendious and breue tractate concernyng ye office and Dewtie of Ryngis, spirituall pastories, and temporall iugis

    ( About the Book The history of religion refers to the wr...)

  • The Vishnu Purana

    (The Vishnu Purana - A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradi...)

  • Recent Exemplifications of False Philology

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • The Sánkya Aphorisms of Kapila

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • On English Adjectives in -Able: With Special Reference to Reliable

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Sankhya-Sara: A Treatise Of Sankhya Philosophy (1862)

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Americana.

Personality

Till his death, when Fitzedward Hall was almost seventy-six, he remained physically and mentally active and if not engaged in writing spent much of his time raising flowers and angling. He had a host of admirers, many warm friends, and some exasperated enemies.

His learning and industry were immense. He was neither a philosopher nor a scientist, but a collector of idioms, a critic of linguistic usage, a purist, and a grammarian. His style was too subject to his own criticism to be natural; it was self-conscious and pedantic. He was a better scholar than writer, though as a writer, if somewhat ungainly, he was trenchant and powerful. As an opponent in philological disputes he was aggressive and irritating; but he often seemed to be captious when he only asked for precision.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Time would fail to tell of the splendid assistance rendered to the Dictionary by Dr. Fitzedward Hall, who devotes nearly his whole day to reading the proofs. .. and to supplementing, correcting, and increasing the quotations taken from his own exhaustless stores. When the Dictionary is finished, no man will have contributed to its illustrative wealth so much as Fitzedward Hall. Those who know his books know the enormous wealth of quotation which he brings to bear upon every point of English literary usage; but my admiration is if possible increased when I see how he can cap and put the cope-stone on the collections of our 1500 readers. ” - Murray

Connections

In 1854 Fitzedward Hall married Amy, the daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Shuldham.

Father:

Daniel Hall

Mother:

Anjinette (Fitch) Hall

Spouse:

Amy (Shuldham) Hall

References

• The Halls of New England: Genealogical and Biographical (Classic Reprint)
• Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886; Their Parentage, Birthplace and Year of Birth, with a Record of Their Degrees. ... of the University; Volumen 2 (Latin Edition)