Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Hodgkin, Thomas
HODGKIN, THOMAS (1831–1913), historian, was the second son of John Hodgkin, conveyancer, by his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Luke Howard. He was born on 29 July 1831 at Bruce Grove, Tottenham. His parents were quakers by descent and profession, and he received his early education at Grove House, Tottenham, a quaker school. Proceeding to University College, London, he took his B.A., with honours in classics, in 1851. He was originally intended for the bar, and was admitted at Lincoln's Inn in 1850, but within a short time he abandoned legal studies owing to weak health, and turned to banking, which he studied at Pontefract and Whitehaven. In 1859 he became a partner in the new banking firm of Hodgkin, Barnett, Pease, and Spence, at Newcastle. His connexion with this concern continued until it was absorbed (in 1902) by Lloyds Bank. In 1861 he married Lucy Anna, daughter of Alfred Fox, of Falmouth, by whom he had three sons and three daughters; they lived until 1894 at Benwell-dene in Newcastle, but in that year removed to Bamburgh Castle; finally, in 1899, they settled at Barmoor Castle in the same county. Hodgkin was at all times a devoted and active member of the quaker community and a public-spirited citizen of Newcastle. But from an early age he contrived to find time for archaeological and historical studies. He was a leading member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and contributed many papers to that society's journal, Archaeologia Aeliana. Some fruits of this local work are to be seen in his History of England from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest (1906), probably the first history of the origins of Great Britain to be written from a Northumbrian point of view. But even in this work his antiquarian learning is subordinated to humaner interests. He resisted, for instance, the temptation to make his chapter on the Roman period a monograph on excavations and inscriptions. His English History is, however, overshadowed by the larger work, Italy and Her Invaders, the first two volumes of which appeared in 1879, the last in 1899. To the whole work we may apply the author's description of the first and second volumes; it was the fruit of ‘happy labour’ pursued without haste or rest in hours snatched from more practical activities. Hodgkin traversed a field which Gibbon had already surveyed, but described it in a new perspective. Sensitive to the urbanity of Roman culture, admiring the solidity of the Roman administrative system, he nevertheless accorded to the wreckers of the culture and the system a more genial treatment than Gibbon would have approved. Hodgkin's imagination was fired by the epic element in his theme and in the Teutonic character. He does not altogether neglect the slow and obscure developments of legal principles and political institutions. But the story is for him the main thing. He enlivens and illuminates the story with vignettes from contemporary life, and with finely drawn sketches of men of action and men of letters. As an historian he is almost inevitably to be compared with Grote. Both were bankers by trade and scholars by inclination. Both desired to write books of scholarship for the delight and the information of the general public. Hodgkin was, however, less interested in political theories than Grote, and more interested in plain humanity and the vicissitudes of human society. A full bibliography of Hodgkin's minor writings is given in the ninth volume of the third series of Archaeologia Aeliana; but his reputation rests on his two principal works. He died at Falmouth on 2 March 1913.
[Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Thomas Hodgkin, 1917; Archaeologia Aeliana, u.s.]