All Scholars

Thomas Gaisford began his career when the German impetus for the correction and emendation of texts had been stirred in England first and most notably by Richard Porson 1759-1808) at Cambridge and continued in Oxford by Peter Elmsley (1773-1825). Though Gaisford began his career by making textbooks of Cicero and Euripides, he became a prodigious editor of texts and an associate of Europeans in that practice, particularly Immanuel Bekker (1785-1871) on Aristotle, Karl Wilhelm Dindorf (1802-83) and his brother Ludwig (1805-71) on Homer. Chiefly he removed emendations and glosses added to manuscripts by medieval and Renaissance scholars. He published his colleague Elmsley’s text of the scholia of Sophocles without adding a comment or a reading. Wilamowitz notes that his “Herodotus and his Scriptores metrici are essentially resumés of other men’s work, but they are serviceable and sensibly designed.” He became a prodigious editor of texts without producing any significant emendations and often relying on the collations of others. His chief value to scholars lay in his editions of ancient works of reference such as Stobaeus’s Anthology, The Suda, Choeroboscus’s commentary on Theodosius’s grammatical treatise, minor Greek poets, Latin metricians, patristic texts. and his invaluable work, the Etymologicum Magnum (1848), still a valuable tool. In all, he produced between 40 and 50 editions of ancient works.

Gaisford spent his academic life at Christ Church as both student and professor and administrator. He had been a brilliant student, but as professor he never gave lectures and never met with students, claiming that his research consumed all of his time. Upon the retirement of William Jackson (1751-1815) in 1811, he won the Regius Professorship over Elmsley. Jackson had also served as Bishop of Oxford but Gaisford declined the bishopric, as had his teacher, Cyril Jackson (1746-1819) years earlier. With the Regius Professorship, which he gained upon the publication of his Hephaestion, came not only degrees of B.D. and D.D., but supervision of the Bodleian Library and a role in the expansion of the Oxford Classical Texts series. In the former position he acquired numerous manuscripts and scholars’ libraries to support his editorial work and by 1806 had produced the first catalogue of the library’s holdings and the recently acquired library of Jacques Philippe D’Orville (1696-1751), enabling scholars outside Oxford to know exactly what manuscripts were at the Bodleian. His catalogues appeared with each new major acquisition. In the latter he persuaded European scholars like Dindorf to edit texts and scholia (Homer) and Bekker to contribute a complete Aristotle. He supported Henry Liddell (1811-98) in his efforts to create a comprehensive Greek dictionary. 

His appointment as dean signaled a change in the object of his scholarship: he moved toward patristic texts, but by most accounts his elevation to the Deanship did no favors for Christ Church: he was aloof, curt with students and colleagues, and imposed draconian rules with hard-line conservatism in an era of change that set him apart from his predecessor and changed the tone of Christ Church. In over 20 years of service, he made few additions to the physical structure of the College. Consequently, many jokes and stories, largely apocryphal as such stories usually are, circulated among the students. At bottom, though he imposed more rigorous testing, the academic standards did not rise, and discipline collapsed.  Hugh Lloyd-Jones quotes Gladstone’s assessment: “a splendid scholar, but a bad dean.” (Lloyd-Jones, 83) In 1856 the Gaisford Prize for Greek verse and prose composition was established. Originally intended for Oxford students, it is now a competition in the schools and funds a lecture.