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Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury: A Life. By Peter Hinchliff. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. viii + 311 pp. $75.00 cloth.
Frederick Temple (1821-1902) was successively an Oxford don, educational civil servant, headmaster of Rugby, bishop of Exeter, bishop of London, and archbishop of Canterbury. He was celebrated (but also criticized) as an educational reformer and Christian thinker. But celebrity in the nineteenth century has not translated into lasting fame in the twentieth century. Partly this is due to the fact that Frederick Temple's son William proved to be the memorable Archbishop Temple of the twentieth century. But the elder Temple's relative obscurity is partly due to his failure, unusual among Victorian eminences, to receive a full biography following his death. Temple, a private man, wanted no biography, and his friends obliged by publishing little more than personal recollections.
Peter Hinchliff's life of Temple is thus the first full biography as well as perforce the best, even though it comes nearly a century late. It is likely to remain the best biography for some time, because it is sound and thorough enough to deter a revision; graduate dissertations will have to focus on some episode or aspect of Temple's career. Hinchliff, who had published excellent biographies of Colenson and Jowett,...