The New Student's Reference Work/Green, John Richard

JOHN R. GREEN

Green, John Richard, English historian, was born at Oxford, in December, 1837, and was educated there. His first work was a series of papers on Oxford in the Last Century in the Oxford Chronicle. He then entered the ministry, became a curate and then vicar, all the time contributing to the London Saturday Review. When he became librarian at Lambeth Palace in 1868, he was stricken with consumption, yet he did not stop writing, although his condition prevented any active labor. In 1874 his Short History of the English People became popular at once, and reached a sale of 150,000 copies. Creighton, himself a great historian, declared that Green had done for all English history what Macaulay had done only for a period: he had unified it. Later he brought out a larger edition of the work, the well-known History of the English People. He worked steadily on, struggling with hopeless disease, bringing out his Making of England the year before he died, and leaving his Conquest of England to be edited by his widow. He died at Mentone, March 7, 1883.