John Mitchell Kemble

John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57), elder brother of the renowned actress Fanny Kemble, was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a prominent member of the free-thinking society known as ‘The Apostles’.  A trip to Germany in 1829-30 converted him from philosophy to philology, and, after a brief adventure as a revolutionary in Spain (1830-1), he settled down in Cambridge where he embarked upon his edition of Beowulf (published in 1833) and lectured to dwindling audiences on the history of the English language (1834).  Always a controversial figure, Kemble left Cambridge in 1835, and made his way as editor of a literary and political journal in London.  He continued his work as an Anglo-Saxonist, publishing a six-volume edition of Anglo-Saxon charters (Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici (1839-48)), an edition of the legend of St Andrew in the Vercelli Book (1843), an edition of Solomon and Saturn (1848), and a two-volume historical work on The Saxons in England (1849); but he was unable all the while to gain the kind of advancement he sought.  Kemble moved to Hanover in 1849, and undertook pioneering work on early Germanic archaeology, published posthumously as Horae Ferales (1863).  He returned to London in 1855, and died on a visit to Dublin in March 1857; he is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.  Kemble’s books and working papers, kept together by his family for many years, are now widely dispersed (see Kemble's Papers).

Bibliography

• William Bodham Donne and his Friends, ed. Catharine B. Johnson (London, 1905), with excerpts from Kemble's letters to WBD (see 'Kemble's Papers')
• Bruce Dickins, ‘John Mitchell Kemble and Old English Scholarship’ (1939), reptd in British Academy Papers on Anglo-Saxon England, ed. E. G. Stanley (Oxford, 1990), pp. 57–90
• R. A. Wiley, ed., John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm: a Correspondence 1832–1852 (Leiden, 1971)
• P. Allen, The Cambridge Apostles: the Early Years (Cambridge, 1978)
• R. A. Wiley, ‘Anglo-Saxon Kemble: the Life and Works of John Mitchell Kemble 1807–1857, Philologist, Historian, Archaeologist’, Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 1 (1979), 165–273
• Gretchen P. Ackerman, 'J. M. Kemble and Sir Frederic Madden: "Conceit and Too Much Germanism"?', Anglo-Saxon Scholarship: the First Three Centuries, ed. C. T. Berkhout and M. McC. Gatch (Boston, MA, 1982), pp. 167-81
• Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England 1780-1860 (Minneapolis, 1983)
• S. Keynes, Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge, OEN Subsidia 18 (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 54–61
• W. C. Lubenow, The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge, 1998)
• S. Keynes, ‘Kemble’, The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge, et al. (Oxford, 1999), p. 269 (see above)
• John D. Haigh, ‘John Mitchell Kemble’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
• Howard Williams, 'Heathen Graves and Victorian Anglo-Saxonism: Assessing the Archaeology of John Mitchell Kemble', Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 13 (2007), 1–18
• S. Keynes, 'J. M. Kemble and his Codex Diplomaticus Ævi Saxonici', in J. M. Kemble, Codex Diplomaticus Aevi Saxonici, 6 vols. (London, 1839-48), reprinted, 6 vols. (Cambridge, 2011), vol. I, pp. v-xxiv
• S. Keynes, John Mitchell Kemble (1807-57): Apostle, Revolutionary, and Anglo-Saxonist, 3rd Fell-Benedikz Lecture, University of Nottingham, 2005, and 5th Kemble Lecture, Trinity College Dublin, 2009 (forthcoming)

Page maintained by SDK

October 2011