George Finlay
George Finlay was born in 1799 and spent most of his youth in Scotland. From a family of Protestant merchants and bureaucrats, he went on to study law at Glasgow and Göttingen. As a young man he became actively involved in various liberal societies in Glasgow, such as the Institution for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts, the Literary and Commercial Society and the Speculative Society. Papers contained in his archive include some of the essays he read to these Societies, which demonstrate an early interest in many of themes on which he would elaborate in his History of Greece, prominently civil liberty and political economy.
His enthusiasm for liberal causes, combined with a sense of romantic idealism and adventure, prompted Finlay’s first visit to Greece as a philhellene in 1823. In his involvement with the Greek struggle for independence, he worked with Byron in the last months of the poet’s life and served on board the Karteria with Frank Abney Hastings. He settled in Athens in 1829, married and remained there for the rest of his life.
He became actively involved in the development of the city – he was appointed by Kolettis to assist the nomarch in the rehabilitation of Athens in 1834, for instance; was a member of the Tax Commission and the Provincial Council of Attica in the 1840s; was involved in setting up the Ionian Bank; and actively supported the foundation of the University and the National Library. In tandem with this practical political activity, he wrote prolifically as a journalist in addition to working on his major historical enterprise. Throughout his life, he retained his great enthusiasm for the study of Greece in all her periods, in antiquities, epigraphy, numismatics, archaeology, travel and topography, as well as in the politics and economics of the developing nation state.
BRITISH PHILHELLENISM AND THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF GREECE: A CASE STUDY OF GEORGE FINLAY (1799-1875)
by Liz Potter
The article offers a case study of George Finlay, a British philhellene whose intellectual make-up deserves more attention than it has previously been given. Unlike many Western European philhellenes who returned home disillusioned with Greece, Finlay spent his life in Athens; and unlike the overwhelmingly classicising Hellenism of his British contemporaries, his was a Hellenism that insisted on the interest and instructiveness of the history of Greece from the Roman period onwards. From a study of his History of Greece BC 146 to AD 1864, and an analysis of its influences and its uses, the article portrays Finlay as a complex, supple and interesting thinker. He is of particular interest to the nineteenth-century historian of political ideas for the ways in which he inherited and re-shaped ideas associated with civic virtue, philosophic history and contemporary liberalism.
American educator and philanthropist, born at Boston, Massachusetts, on the 10th of November 1801. His father, Joseph N. Howe, was a shipowner and cordage manufacturer; and his mother, Patty Gridley, was one of the most beautiful women of her day. Young Howe was educated at Boston and at Brown University, Providence, and in 1821 began to study medicine in Boston. But fired by enthusiasm for the Greek revolution and by Lord Byron's example, he was no sooner qualified and admitted to practice than he abandoned these prospects and took ship for Greece, where he joined the army and spent six years of hardship amid scenes of warfare. Then, to raise funds for the cause, he returned to America; his fervid appeals enabled him to collect about $60,000, which he spent on provisions and clothing, and he established a relief depot near Aegina, where he started works for the refugees, the existing quay, or American Mole, being built in this way. He formed another colony of exiles on the Isthmus of Corinth. He wrote a History of the Greek Revolution, which was published in 1828, and in 1831 he returned to America. Here a new object of interest engaged him.
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