1881 Cartoon from Punch: "PROFESSOR FAWCETT, M.P and P.M.G., A Politician of a certain stamp, and President of the Republic of
Letters at St. Martin-le-Grand's"
Henry Fawcett (1833 – 1884) was a blind English statesman and
economist.
He was born in Salisbury, and educated at the University of Cambridge, where he became Fellow of Trinity Hall. A statue of him stands in
Salisbury Market Square.
In 1858, when he was 25, he was blinded by a shooting accident, in spite of which he continued
with his studies, especially in economics, and in 1863 published his Manual of Political Economy, becoming in the same year Professor of Political Economy in Cambridge.
After repeated defeats he was elected member of Parliament (MP) for
Brighton in 1865. He campaigned for
women's suffrage, and through this he met Elizabeth
Garrett whom he proposed in 1865. She rejected the proposal to concentrate on becoming a doctor at a time when women
doctors were unheard of. Fawcett later married her younger sister Millicent Garrett in
1867.[1][2]
In 1880 he was appointed Postmaster-General. He introduced many innovations, including parcel post, postal
orders, and licensing changes to permit payphones and trunk lines.
His career was, however, cut short by his premature death from pleurisy, but not before he
had made himself a recognised authority on economics, his works on which include The Economic
Position of the British Labourer (1871), Labour and Wages, etc.
He was elected Rector of Glasgow University, 1883
Sir Leslie Stephen wrote a biography of him, Life of Henry Fawcett, in 1885.
References
External links
This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910).
A Short Biographical Dictionary of English
Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton.
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