George Birkbeck Norman Hill (7 June 1835 – 24 February 1903) was an English editor and author.

Life

He was the son of Arthur Hill, headmaster of Bruce Castle School, and was born at Bruce Castle, Tottenham, Middlesex. He dropped his third name, Norman, publishing as just George Birkbeck Hill; to family and friends he was known as Birkbeck, not as George. His mother died when he was four years old; on her father's side, she was related to Frederick Denison Maurice.

Arthur Hill, with his brothers Rowland Hill, the postal reformer and Matthew Davenport Hill, afterwards recorder of Birmingham had worked out a system of education which was to exclude compulsion of any kind. The school at Bruce Castle, of which Arthur Hill was head master, was founded to carry into execution their theories, this editorial role arose from a family connection. Birkbeck Hill's wife Annie was the sister of Sir John Scott (1841–1904), who was judicial advisor to the Khedive from 1891 to 1898 and a close personal friend of Charles George Gordon. Birkbeck Hill's sister Laura was the second wife of Sir John Scott's father.

His wife Annie died in Aspley Guise on 30 October 1902, and he died shortly thereafter, at Hampstead, London, on 27 February 1903.

Hill and his wife are buried at Aspley Guise, and he bequeathed his Johnsonian library to Pembroke College, Oxford. Three of their five sons were knighted: Sir Maurice Hill, a judge on the High Court, Sir Norman Hill, a well-known legal authority on shipping, and Sir Leonard Erskine Hill, a physiologist made F.R.S. Their elder Margaret daughter married Sir William James Ashley.

Works

George Birkbeck Hill's works include:

  • Footsteps of Dr Johnson (Scotland), illus. Lancelot Speed (London: Sampson Low, Marston, et al, 1890)
  • ; volume II
  • Johnsonian Miscellanies, 2 v. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897)
  • Memoirs of the Life of Edward Gibbon, with Various Observations and Excursions by Himself, ed. by Hill, George Birkbeck (London: Methuen, 1900)
  • Johnson's Lives of the Poets, 3 v. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905)

See a memoir by his nephew, Harold Spencer Scott, in the edition of the Lives of the English Poets (1905), and the Letters edited by his younger daughter, Lucy Crump, in 1903.

References

Further reading

  • <!-- A Critical Examination of Dr G. Birkbeck Hills "Johnsonian" Editions -->