Green, JOHN RICHARD, historian, was born at Oxford in December 1837, and had his education at Magdalen College School and at Jesus College there. The atmosphere of his native city had filled him, while still a boy, with sympathetic interest in the past, but the reading of Gibbon at sixteen shaped him into a historian. His earliest writing was a striking series of papers in the Oxford Chronicle on 'Oxford in the last Century.' He took orders, and was in succession curate and vicar of two East-end London parishes, where he gave himself with characteristic unselfishness and enthusiasm to the pressing social problems around him. Yet he snatched time from his busy life to pursue his studies and to contribute historical articles to the Saturday Review. In 1868 he became librarian at Lambeth, and next year he was struck down with an attack of consumption, a disease which darkened all his remaining years, and made any kind of active work hereafter impossible to him. Yet he toiled on with noble and uncomplaining heroism, and at last the instant popularity of his Short History of the English People (1874) justified the patience and endurance with which he had laboured to bring his work up to his own ideal.
It was the first complete history of England from the social side, and showed at once marvellous grasp of the real significance of great historic movements, fine sense of historical perspective and proportion, and startling dramatic force in the realisation of men and motives; while its style was fluent and unforced, yet ever vigorous and effective. His vast yet intimate topographical and antiquarian knowledge of England added life and truth to the narrative to a degree hitherto unexampled among English historians. The work attained an unparalleled success, as many as 150,000 copies having been sold within fifteen years. He issued also a larger and independent edition of the work as A History of the English People (4 vols. 1877-80); Stray Studies from England and Italy (1876), the fruit of his winters in Capri; and a Short Geography of the British Islands (1879), written in conjunction with his wife, and lightened up by his genius for topography. In 1879 he received the degree of LL.D. from the university of Edinburgh. He brought out in 1880 a selection of essays of Addison, with an introduction. He also prepared for Macmillan's educational series a selection of readings from English history, in three parts, and was general editor of their well-known series of historical and literary primers. In 1881 his feeble health finally gave way, yet he continued to the last his heroic struggle against hopeless disease, publishing in 1882 his Making of England, and leaving The Conquest of England to be edited by the pious care of his widow. His death took place in March 1883. His last two books are fragments of a projected history of England to the Conquest. See the admirable memoir prefixed to the 1888 edition of the Short History, by his wife (born 1849), who with Miss Norgate edited a richly illustrated edition of the Short History (3 vols. 1892-93). Mrs Green is the author of Henry II. (1888) and of Town Life in the 15th Century (1894).