Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Pears, Edwin
PEARS, Sir EDWIN (1835–1919), barrister-at-law, publicist, and historical writer, was born 18 March 1835 at York, the younger son of Robert Pears, of York (descendant of a younger branch of the family of Piers, formerly of Piers Hall, Ingleton, Yorkshire), by his wife, Elizabeth Barnett. After being educated privately, he graduated at London University with distinction in Roman law and jurisprudence. On a voyage to Australasia in 1857 he married Mary, daughter of John Ritchie Hall, surgeon in the royal navy, by whom he had four sons and three daughters. In 1870 he was called to the bar at the Middle Temple, and began to practise in London. In addition to his legal practice, he undertook literary and administrative work. He was for a time private secretary to Frederic Temple, at that time bishop of Exeter; he was also general secretary of the Social Science Association from 1868 to 1872, and of the International Prison Congress in 1872, and edited the transactions of both those bodies. In 1872 he was also editor of the Law Magazine. This accumulation of activities began to tell upon his health, and when, in January 1873, he learnt accidentally that the practice of Sir Charles Parker Butt [q.v.] at the Constantinople bar was vacant, he went out to Constantinople to take up this work provisionally. This accident determined his career. He became a permanent resident in Turkey, rose to the highest position open to him in that country in his own profession (becoming president of the European or consular bar in Constantinople in 1881), and made a name for himself as a newspaper correspondent and as an historian of his adopted city. He became perhaps the best-known member of the British colony in Turkey since Sir Paul Rycaut.
Pears's political attitude and activity in the Levant were determined by the facts that he was not born there and did not settle there till his thirty-ninth year, when he had already made in England political and personal connexions which he always kept up. Consequently, though he rapidly rose to be one of the leaders of the British colony, he retained an independent and critical point of view in regard to local affairs and to the Eastern Question. Holding, as he did, strong liberal convictions, he did not become imbued with that complacency towards the Turks—right or wrong—to which there has often been a tendency among Western residents in the Levant, particularly in the British and French colonies since the Crimean War. He had no more illusions regarding Sultan Abdul Hamid's intelligence than others had in regard to his character, and he expressed his views of that sovereign in his Life of Abdul Hamid (1917). Here he showed himself as accomplished a student of contemporary history as he was of the Middle Ages, on which he wrote two standard monographs, The Fall of Constantinople [in 1204] (1885) and The Destruction of the Greek Empire [in 1453] (1903). He played a part of European importance in 1876, when, as correspondent of the Daily News, he had the judgement and the courage to expose the Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria. His statements were confirmed both by diplomatic and by journalistic investigators; and on the strength of this information, Mr. Gladstone launched a celebrated political campaign. During a long career, Pears invariably acted with frankness and uprightness towards the many and diverse communities in his adopted country and yet remained in good relations with each and all of them; though his extensive practice at the local bar involved delicate relations with them and especially with the ruling race. He was knighted in 1909. Pears stayed on in Constantinople after Turkey's intervention in the European War, but was forced to leave the country in December 1914. He returned in April 1919, but died at Malta (from an accident at sea) on 27 November of the same year.
[Sir E. Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople, 1916; private information.]