Background
When he was six years old his mother died, and he was brought up by a step-mother, a woman of Huguenot descent who had been reared in France, and to whom, he felt later, he owed much.
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Richard Green Moulton
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He attended schools at Northampton and Bath, and in 1869 received the degree of A. B. from London University, and in 1874, from Christ College, Cambridge.
Just at this time the university extension movement was developing, and Cambridge was a center of its influence.
Soon after his graduation young Moulton became one of its most enthusiastic representatives, giving hundreds of lectures.
In 1890 he visited America, where he also had immediate success as a lecturer and shared in the organization of the American Society for the Extension of University Teaching.
Career
Retired from his professorship in July 1919 because of having reached the age limit, he returned to England, where he lived until his death, five years later, at Hallauleigh, Tunbridge Wells.
By lecture and by published volume he sought to interest all classes of persons in understanding literature as an interpretation of life and as a source of spiritual culture.
To him form was an important element in the interpretation of literature, but literature to him was much more than form.
His early writings dealt with Shakespeare and the classical drama, but throughout his life he emphasized the literary study of the Bible.
Among his other publications were Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist (1885); Shakespeare as a Dramatic Thinker (1907); The Ancient Classical Drama (1890); The Literary Study of the Bible (1895); World Literature and Its Place in General Culture (1911); The Modern Study of Literature (copr.
1915).
[W. F. Moulton, Richard Green Moulton (1926); Biog.
Reg.
of Christ's Coll. , vol.
II (1913); Who's Who in America, 1918-19; Univ.
Record (Univ. of Chicago), Oct. 1924; Times (London), Aug. 16, 1924. ]
Interests
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Technical Biblical scholarship has not altogether accepted his ideas or methods, but the wide circulation of this work shows that, as in his lectures and university work, he popularized literature as an aid to culture, and stimulated interest in an intelligent reading of the Bible as an instrument of culture rather than as a quarry for systems of theology.
