HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE

(1821-1862)

Henry Thomas Buckle was born at Lee, in Kent, on November 24th, 1821, the son of a wealthy London merchant.  A delicate child, he participated in none of the ordinary sports of children, but sat instead for hours listening to his mother’s reading of the Bible and the ‘Arabian Nights.’  She had a great influence on his early development.  She was a Calvinist, deeply religious, and Buckle himself in after years acknowledged that to her he owed his faith in human progress through the dissemination and triumph of truth, as well as his taste for philosophic speculations and his love for poetry.  His devotion to her was lifelong.  Owing to his feeble health he passed but a few years at school, and did not enter college.  Nor did he know much, in the scholar’s sense, of books.  Till he was nearly eighteen the ‘Arabian Nights,’ the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ and Shakespeare constituted his chief reading.

But he was fond of games of mental skill, and curiously enough, first gained distinction, not in letters but at the chessboard, and in the course of his subsequent travels he challenged and defeated the champions of Europe.  He was concerned for a short time in business; but being left with an independent income at the death of his father, he resolved to devote himself to study.  He traveled for a year on the Continent, learning on the spot the languages of the countries he passed through.  In time he became an accomplished linguist, reading nineteen languages and conversing fluently in seven.

By the time he was nineteen he had resolved to write a great historic work, of a nature not yet attempted by any one.  To prepare himself for this monumental labor, and to make up for past deficiencies, he settled in London; and, apparently single-handed and without the advice or help of tutors or professional men, entered upon that course of voluminous reading on which his erudition rests.

He is a singular instance of a self-taught man, without scientific or academic training, producing a work that marks an epoch in historical literature.  With a wonderful memory, he had, like Macaulay, the gift of getting the meaning and value of a book by simply glancing over the pages.  On an average he could read with intelligent comprehension three books in a working day of eight hours, and in time mastered his library of twenty-two thousand volumes, indexing every book on the back, and transcribing many pages into his commonplace-books.  In this way he spent fifteen years of study in collecting his materials.