Men of the Time, eleventh edition/Brodrick, George Charles
BRODRICK, The Hon. George Charles, Warden of Merton College, Oxford, is the second son of the late Viscount Midleton, formerly Dean of Exeter, and was born at Castle Rising, Norfolk, May 5, 1831. He was educated at Eton school, and at Balliol College, Oxford, taking his degree in 1854, and being elected a Fellow of Merton College in 1855. He obtained a double first-class at Oxford, as well as the English Essay Prize and the Arnold Historical Prize. He also carried off, in 1858, the Law Scholarship at the University of London, where he took the degree of LL.B. He was called to the bar from Lincoln's Inn in 1859, and for some years practised as a barrister on the Western circuit. In conjunction with Mr. Fremantle, he edited "The Ecclesiastical Judgments of the Privy Council." Mr. Brodrick was unanimously elected by the School Board for London to fill a death vacancy, being the first member so elected; and he has from the first been on the Council of the London Society for the Extension of University Teaching. He took an active part in promoting the University Tests Act, and other measures of academical, and generally of educational, interest. Mr. Brodrick made several unsuccessful attempts to enter the House of Commons. He contested Woodstock in the Liberal interest in 1868, and again in 1874; and he stood for Monmouthshire at the general election of 1880. In Feb., 1881, he was elected Warden of Merton College in the place of the late Dr. Bullock-Marsham. Mr. Brodrick is known to have contributed largely, but for the most part anonymously, to the daily Press and leading periodicals. A selection of articles published under his own name, together with two more elaborate Treatises on "Primogeniture" and "Local Government," and other occasional essays, were re-published in a volume entitled "Political Studies" in 1880. In the following year he published a work entitled "English Land and English Landlords," being an inquiry into the origin, structure, and proposed reform of the English Land-system; and he afterwards discussed the Irish Land-question, and the claim of Tenant-right for British Farmers, in three articles, which appeared in Fraser's Magazine for 1881–2.