Pattison, MARK, scholar, was born in 1813 at Hornby in Yorkshire, but brought up mostly at Hauxwell, of which parish his father had become rector. The eldest of twelve children, of whom ten were daughters, he grew up amid the Yorkshire moors, with a close knowledge of nature and a love for field-sports, which in the one form of fishing lingered with him till the last. He was educated at home until he entered Oriel College at Oxford in 1832. A shy and awkward lad, diffident and hesitating, without the wholesome discipline of public school life, he suffered much in his first years as an undergraduate, but his snifflings were the fruit of his own lack of self-reliance, his morbid self-consciousness, and hyper-sensitiveness of temperament. He took his bachelor's degree in 1836 with a second-class in classics, and was elected Fellow of Lincoln College in 1839. Under the dominant influence of Newman he gave himself first to the study of theology, twice (1841-42) carried off the Denyer prize, wrote two Lives of the Saints, translated for the 'Library of the Fathers' the Matthew in the Catena Aurea of Aquinas, and almost followed his master into the fold of Rome, being saved only, as he himself explains, by his habits of study and a constitutional slowness to act. Fortunately we have his own account of his spiritual growth, out of the Puritanism of his home into the wider atmosphere of Anglicanism, and how that in its turn fell from him as the larger horizon of the Catholic Church opened itself up before his eyes, only to disappear before 'the highest development, when all religions appear in their historical light as efforts of the human spirit to come to an understanding with that Unseen Power whose presence it feels, but whose motives are a riddle.' His reaction from Newmanism reawakened within him all his zeal for pure scholarship, and, no less lofty in his ideal of the teacher than the student, he soon became a tutor of altogether exceptional devotion and influence, and acting head of the college as sub-rector, under the aged Dr Radford. On the death of the latter in 1851 Pattison was kept out of the headship which was his right by a discreditable obscurantist intrigue, which gave an almost paralysing blow to his sensitive nature. A further unsuccessful attempt was made to deprive him of his fellowship on the technical plea that he had not proceeded in time to the degree of B.D., and the result of his disappointment was that for ten years he took little real interest in the life of Oxford, while his ideas of university reform henceforth grew rather towards an increase of the professorial than the tutorial system. But his educational sympathies soon extended far beyond mere college life; he published an article on education in the Oxford Essays, acted as assistant-commissioner on the Duke of Newcastle's Commission of Inquiry into Elementary Education in Germany, rambled in the long vacations through England, Scotland, and Germany, visiting most of the universities of the latter country, and served for three months of 1858 as Times correspondent at Berlin. Meanwhile he gave himself with rare devotion to severe and unbroken study, and scholars soon came to recognise his Roman hand in the columns of the Quarterly, the Westminster, and the Saturday Review. His luminous and thoughtful Report on Elementary Education in Protestant
Germany appeared in 1859; his equally learned and temperate paper on 'Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750,' in Essays and Reviews (1860). At length in 1861 he was elected Rector, but, though he made an exemplary head, the spring and elasticity of earlier days were gone. In 1862 he married the accomplished Emilia Frances Strong, afterwards Lady Dilke, who helped him to make Lincoln a social and intellectual centre for a world much wider than the walls of Oxford. Down to his last illness and his death at Harrogate, 30th July 1884, he lived wholly for study, maintaining a mediæval rather than modern ideal of the life of the scholar as a sufficient end in itself.
Everything Mark Pattison wrote was characteristic; nowhere else among contemporaries could be found such fullness of knowledge and earnestness of thought, shaped ever into terse and vigorous English. Yet his standard of perfection was so high that his actual achievement is far more suggestive than demonstrative of his powers, and the greatest project of his life—the study of Scaliger—remains a fragment, printed by Professor Nettleship in vol. i. of Pattison's collected Essays (1889).
Besides the books already named he published Suggestions on Academical Organisation (1868); admirably annotated editions of Pope's Essay on Man (1869) and Satires and Epistles (1872); Isaac Casaubon, 1559-1614 (1875), which grew out of his Scaliger studies; Milton, almost the best book in the 'English Men of Letters' series (1879); the Sonnets of Milton (1883); and Sermons (1885). His posthumous Memoirs (1885) was a strikingly frank judgment of himself and others—even his own father—and a remarkable revelation of a singular moral and intellectual personality, describing, 'without restraint, the whole current of his thoughts and feelings from 1832 to 1860.'
DORA WYNDLOW PATTISON, his sister, was born at Hauxwell, January 16, 1832, the youngest but one of her father's family. She grew up amid her native Yorkshire moors a handsome and healthy girl of remarkable humour, spirit, and vigour, and had her young enthusiasm kindled by the heroic devotion of Florence Nightingale. In October 1861, against the advice of all her family, she started a life of labour for others as schoolmistress at Little Woolston, near Bletchley, and in the autumn of 1864 joined the sisterhood of the Good Samaritans at Coatham, near Redcar. Here 'Sister Dora' underwent severe discipline, but found solace in devoted labours as a nurse, first at North Ormesby, near Middlesborough, and in 1865 at Walsall. Ere long she gave herself entirely to hospital work, and her absolute self-forgetfulness, patience, gentleness, and skill quickly brought her the adoration of the saint from the rough men and women for whom she spent her strength. In 1874 she left the Good Samaritan Community, and in 1877 took charge of the municipal epidemic hospital at Walsall, where the cases were mainly of smallpox. She also found time for exertions on behalf of unfortunate women, and did much for her poor neighbours in every way. But even her strength at last gave way, and she died a true martyr for Christ's sake at Walsall, December 24, 1878. The whole population of the town followed her body to the grave, and the working-men erected a monument to her memory in 1886.
See Sister Dora: A Biography, by Margaret Lonsdale (1880)—which Mark Pattison, with a characteristic touch, terms 'Miss Lonsdale's romance.' Tollemache's Recollections of Pattison (1895).