Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Bode, John Ernest
BODE, JOHN ERNEST (1816–1874), divine, was born in 1816. His father was William Bode, of the post office; his mother was Mary, only daughter of the Rev. T. Lloyd, of Peterly House, Oxon. He was educated at Eton and the Charterhouse, 1830-4, where he became a scholar on the foundation. From the Charterhouse he proceeded to Christ Church, Oxford, and was the first to gain, in 1835, the Hertford scholarship, instituted the year before. He took his B.A. degree in 1837, when he was first class in classics, and his M.A. in 1840. He became a student and a tutor of his college, 1841-7, of which he was appointed censor in 1844, and acted as one of the public examiners in classics for the years 1846-1848. He was ordained deacon in 1841, and priest in 1843. In 1847 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Westwell, Oxfordshire; and on 22 July in the same year was married to Miss Hester Charlotte Lodge, of St. Nicholas, Guildford. In 1848 Bode was appointed one of the select preachers in the university, and on 12 Dec. 1850, being Founder's Day, preached a sermon at the Charterhouse Chapel, which was afterwards published as 'Our Schoolboy Days viewed through the Glass of Religion,' 8vo, London, 1850. In 1855 he preached the Bampton Lectures before the university of Oxford, published as 'The Absence of Precision in the Formularies of the Church of England, scriptural and favourable to a State of Probation,' 8vo,Oxford, 1855. In 1857 Bode contested unsuccessfully with Mr. Matthew Arnold the chair of poetry at Oxford; his claims rested mainly on a volume of poems suggested by a course of reading of the old English and Scotch ballads from 1841, and published as 'Ballads from Herodotus, with an Introductory Poem,' 8vo, London, 1853; second edition,'with four additional poems,' 1854. Bode also published 'Short Occasional Poems,' 8vo, London, 1858, and a smaller volume entitled 'Hymns from the Gospel of the Day, for each Sunday and the Festivals of Our Lord,' 12mo, Oxford, 1860. In 1860 Bode was presented by the governors of the Charterhouse to the living of Castle Camps, Cambridgeshire, at the rectory house of which he died suddenly, at the age of fifty-eight, on 6 Oct. 1874.
[Charterhouse, Lists of Scholars, 5 May 1830, and 2 May 1832; Charter-House, its Foundation and History. 1849; Graduates of Oxford, 1851; Honours Register of Oxford. 1883; Gent. Mag. September, 1811, &c; Sussex Advertiser, 27 July 1847; Men of the Time, 1872; Crockford's Clerical Directory, 1874; English Churchman and Clerical Journal 15 Oct. 1874.]