Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Shadwell, Charles Lancelot
SHADWELL, CHARLES LANCELOT (1840–1919), college archivist and translator of Dante, the eldest surviving son of Lancelot Shadwell [q.v.], barrister-at-law, and grandson of Sir Lancelot Shadwell [q.v.], the last vice-chancellor of England, was born in London 16 December 1840. Educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he became a junior student in 1859, he was a fellow of Oriel College from 1864 to 1898, and lecturer in jurisprudence there from 1865 to 1875. In 1898 he was elected an honorary fellow. From 1874 to 1887, as treasurer of the college, he managed with care and ability the property of the institution, for which he felt an ardent affection that amounted almost to religious fervour. Of its past history, traditions, and muniments he was an indefatigable and competent explorer. The results were shown in the Registrum Orielense, 1500–1900, 2 vols. (1893, 1902), in a chapter of A. Clark's Colleges of Oxford (1891), and in privately printed papers. It was characteristic of Shadwell that in the Colleges of Oxford he should dwell at length on the remote original foundation, forgotten benefactors, recondite incidents, and unknown earlier developments of the college, and dismiss in two brief sentences the work of Thomas Arnold and John Henry Newman, and ignore all that has happened since the Oxford Movement. Elected provost of Oriel in 1905, he brought to this office, held for nine years, the same intense loyalty, with a stately presence which stirred awe rather than invited closer advance. Yet, once captured, he was a firm and hearty friend, never failing to display for those whom he liked an appreciation that ignored popular prejudice and palliated individual blemish. He enjoyed dispensing a magnificent hospitality, and was also a generous benefactor of the college. Resigning the provostship in 1914 owing to ill-health, he died at Oxford 13 February 1919. He was never married.
In the affairs both of the university and of the city of Oxford Shadwell took a large share; a comprehensive grip of minute detail, a fond adherence to immemorial tradition and official form, and a high sense of fit conduct and public duty were inseparable features of his useful service in this connexion. To the study of chess problems and chronograms, his chief recreation, he joined a literary interest and aptitude that made him pursue assiduously an ‘experiment in literal verse translation’ of Dante's Purgatorio (in a metre favoured by Marvell) which was described by Walter Pater as ‘full of the patience of genius’. This bent also gave him the privilege of being, in Mr. Arthur Benson's words, the ‘closest friend’ and ‘lifelong companion’ of Pater himself. They visited Italy together, and Pater's early studies on the Renaissance were dedicated to Shadwell, who, as his literary executor, fulfilled the duty, Mr. Benson says, ‘with a rare loyalty and discretion’. In one of the later books thus issued, it should be added, Shadwell's own ‘temperament’ was finely delineated as that of an ‘intellectual guilelessness or integrity that instinctively prefers what is direct and clear’ and ‘seeks to value everything at its eternal worth’.
There is a portrait of Shadwell by Fiddes Watt at Oriel College.
[A. C. Benson, Walter Pater, 1906; obituary notices; private information; personal knowledge.]