Life
He was the son of William Buckland, the noted geologist and palaeontologist and Mary Buckland, a fossil collector, fossil geologist and illustrator.
Frank Buckland was born and brought up in Oxford, where his father was a Canon of Christ Church. After education by his mother, he went, at eight and a half, to a boarding school in Cotterstock, Northamptonshire. From 1837–39, he went to a preparatory school in Laleham, near Chertsey. This was run by his uncle, John Buckland, who, unfortunately for Frank, was a brutal master who flogged his pupils quite excessively. Relief came with a scholarship to Winchester College, a school with an unbroken history of six hundred years. Here Frank Buckland was taught by the Second Master, Charles Wordsworth, who sent letters of praise to Frank's father. Winchester had a harsh regime, but was much preferable to his previous school. Frank was not a first-rate scholar, but managed to gain entrance to Christ Church, Oxford, after failing to get a scholarship to the smaller Corpus Christi.
Frank studied at Christ Church from 1844–48, obtaining the BA at the second attempt. At once he travelled to London to begin training in surgery. His father had the advice of Richard Owen and Sir Benjamin Brodie. Brodie personally escorted Frank to St. George's Hospital and enrolled him as a student under Mr. Caesar Hawkins FRS, Surgeon to the hospital.
Buckland had a liaison with a woman of humble birth, Hannah Papps, who bore him a son in 1851. They married in 1863, but the son died early.
Buckland's early death was presaged by lung haemorrhages, which might suggest tuberculosis or perhaps lung cancer. His death certificate is, as so often in those days, unhelpful. He is buried in Brompton Cemetery, London.
Read more about this topic: Francis Trevelyan Buckland
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Among the earliest institutions to be invented, if I read the stars right, is a Protestant monastery, a place of elegant seclusion where melancholy gentlemen and ladies may go to spend the advanced session of life in drinking milk, walking the woods & reading the Bible and the poets.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All my life I’ve been running, from welfare officers, thugs, my father. See, there they are [the killers]. There on the bridge. I’m a dead man. Nosseros told me that. He told me. He said, “You got it all, but you’re a dead man, Harry Fabian.””
—Jo Eisinger, and Jules Dassin. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark)