Born in 1834 into a family of publishers, it is unsurprising that John Seeley took very early to literary and philosophical learning. Upon graduation in 1857, he was made a fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and in 1859 published his first book, a collection of poems under the pseudonym John Robertson. In 1863 he took the chair of Latin at University College London. He made a stir with his anonymous Ecce Homo (1865), a doctrinal tract influenced by positivism; the resultant controversy was entered into by the likes of A. P. Stanley, Cardinal Newman and Gladstone. In 1869, despite having never published a historical work, he was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge; in his inaugural lecture, he made clear his …
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Citation: Nixon, Mark. "John Seely". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 21 March 2002 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3998, accessed 25 November 2024.]
