Professor of Democracy: The life of Charles Henry Pearson 1830-1894, Oxford Don and Australian Radical by John Tregenza (Secondhand Book)

SECONDHAND BOOK

This is the first critical biography of Charles Henry Pearson, an Anglo-Australian of the generation which grew up during the turbulent years of the 1830s and 1840s, flourished during the long Pax Britannica and died as the nations were preparing for World War I. As a very youthful professor of Modern History at King’s College, London, Pearson travelled widely and wrote many articles for the Spectator, including an eye-witness account of the Polish insurrection of 1863. When he settled in Australia Pearson was already forty, and ready to contribute the fruits of his varied experience to the new country. After marrying and living briefly as a scholar-farmer in the South Australian bush, he was in quick succession a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, founding headmaster of the Presbyterian Ladies’ College and author of an influential Royal Commission report on education in Victoria. In 1878 he entered the Victorian Parliament on the ‘popular’ side and soon became a leading figure in a bitter campaign for constitutional reform. From 1886 to 1890 he was Minister of Public Instruction. With his proposed educational and political reforms, his numerous contributions to the Age, and his lasting influence on such architects of the Commonwealth as Alfred Deakin, John Quick and Henry Bournes Higgins, he made a significant contribution to the shaping of modern Australian society. His last, and greatest, book, National Life and Character, a remarkable forecast of the end of European domination in Asia and North Africa and the coming of the centralized ‘welfare state’, attracted attention throughout the world, especially in America where it was reviewed at length by Theodore Roosevelt.

Specifications:

Condition: Fair – yellowed pages, foxing to edges of dustjacket

Publisher: Melbourne University Press

Year: 1968

Format: Hardback, with dustjacket

Pages: 279pp

ISBN: 522838944

$14.00

2 in stock