John Henry Piggin 1861-1932

The first successful literary man born Piggin was John (1861‑1932), son of the Methodist New Connexion minister and leader Henry Piggin. The Manchester Guardian reported 1880/01/29 that Mr J.H. Piggin of St Peter's School, York had been elected to a classical scholarship at Trinity College, Oxford. During his studies, he seems to have reverted to Anglicanism and forsaken his surname by adopting his mother's maiden name, Fowler, in 1884 (inviting the acid comment from his Piggin relations that “he at least remained in the farmyard!”). Thereafter he went under the name John Henry Fowler. He does not seem to have been related to a more famous Fowler, his contemporary and fellow Oxonian H.W. Fowler (1858‑1933), author of the Concise Oxford Dictionary. John won the Chancellor's Prize for English Essay at Oxford University in 1886 with The influence of the theatre on life and character (his first published work) and became a secondary school teacher. Within four years he brought out his first anthology for schools, Sportella, or Unseen Passages for Higher Forms (1890), followed by XIX. Century Prose (1897). He had by this time been appointed to a position at Clifton College (website), a boys' boarding school in Bristol, and had married in 1896. The 1901 census shows the couple living at 16 Canynge Square in Bristol and employing a cook and a housemaid.

His literary ability was distilled for pupils in A Manual of Essay‑Writing (1899). About 1905 Fowler was made general editor of Macmillan & Co.'s series English Literature for Secondary Schools, and did the selections for it from the authors Addison, Byron, Gibbon, Hawthorne, Stevenson and Tennyson. He also brought out various annotated versions of the Palgrave/Binyon Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. According to the obituary below, he unsuccessfully sought a university professorship about 1912. In 1919 he became a member of the British government's Departmental Committee on English Studies. Over many years, Fowler wrote a series of pamphlets for the English Association, a slightly nationalist organization of teachers which he had helped to found. The pamphlets included English Literature in Secondary Schools (1907), The Teaching of English Composition (1910), School Libraries (1915), De Quincey as Literary Critic (1922) and The Novels of Thomas Hardy (1928).

From around 1920 (when the Literary Who's Who reports him still living at 16 Canynge Square, Clifton, Bristol), he appears to have been established as a minor author, though his focus remained on the 19th century, rather than contemporary literature of the day. In 1922 he wrote The Life and Letters of Edward Lee Hicks, Bishop of Lincoln 1910‑1919 (a celebrated left-leaning bishop who had been a minister in the Mancester slums) and he edited a book of sermons by his local vicar, John Gamble, in 1930. His final work, a legacy of his teaching experience, appears to have been The Art of Teaching English. Lectures and Papers (1932), but his school editions continued to appear in fresh impressions until at least 1967. Hesperides Press re-published his notes to Palgrave and Binyon, which are now in the public domain, in 2006.

His obituary, headed "Died 16th January, 1932," appeared in the Cliftonian Magazine the following month, February 1932. It appears to have been written by one of the older masters, and concedes that Fowler was not popular with most pupils:

A wide circle of friends, not only among Cliftonians, will have heard with regret of the death of J.H. Fowler. He had already established contact with Clifton before he actually became a master, for as a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, in the early 'eighties, he was a contemporary and close friend of several of that remarkable circle of Cliftonians, including Cannan, Quiller-Couch, Newbolt and Paton, who made the Clifton of those days more than usually distinguished. His first teaching post was at Manchester Grammar School, but in 1894 Glazebrook appointed him at Clifton, and here he remained until his retirement in 1920.

Later generations of Cliftonians probably think of him primarily as a modern-side master, but by upbringing he was a classical scholar, and for more than half his time at Clifton he taught the Classical Lower Sixth. Later he developed an increasing interest in the teaching of English Literature, and in his last years as a master, besides taking the Modern Sixth and Upper Fifth, he was generally responsible for the English and historical work of the whole Sixth. In this probably lay his most valuable work at Clifton, and his numerous publications on the teaching of English made his name widely known in the educational world. He always stood for a liberal view of education, and in particular he believed firmly in the value of a regular English essay: the "essay-notes" which (following the practice of S.T. Irwin) he distributed to his pupils were models of their kind. The purity and severity of his taste were obvious in the exact, unpretentious and scholarly style of his own writing -- the papers that he read to learned societies and the sermons that he preached in Chapel.

His standards, both intellectual and moral, were so high, not to say exacting, that some, less conscientious and persevering than he, may have thought him, if not a pedant, at any rate better fitted to be a professor than a schoolmaster. It was, perhaps, a pity that he was unsuccessful when, shortly before the war, he stood as a candidate for the Chair of English at one of the modern Universities; but it would be a great mistake to suppose that he was out of place in a Public School. It was not to be expected that he would be appreciated by those who were in the habit of making no effort to understand what was not immediately obvious, and wanted to have their literature made easy for them. His appeal was to relatively few, but in those individuals who were prepared to take pains, his knowledge, his scholarship and his taste exercised, in a modest and unobtrusive way, an influence which they will value all through their lives.

After his retirement Fowler continued to live at Clifton, and devoted his leisure to literary work of various kinds, and notably to the English Association, for which he gave lectures that were appreciated up and down the country. This brought him the satisfaction of a wider recognition of his merit, and helped him to bear, with a quiet and cheerful courage, the domestic anxiety which unhappily overshadowed his later years. To some men old age brings increasing narrowness and lack of contact with the world, but the contrary was true of Fowler, as, released from the routine and restrictions of school life, he felt freer to express his views. He developed his interests in many subjects, social and religious as well as literary and educational, and every year that passed brought him increasing breadth and mellowness.

From: The Cliftonian, February 1932, pages 193-194.

Most of the dates above are those in the British national bibliography, and are not always of first publication. Given that Fowler has been dead for more than 70 years, all his work is in the public domain. Google Books has a downloadable version of his Golden Treasury Notes. Some samples of his writing are on a separate page. For a review of the Hicks book, which is probably the most substantial work he edited, see the Times Literary Supplement 1922 p. 795