Augustus Jessopp

Augustus Jessopp (20 December 1823 – 12 February 1914) was an English cleric and writer. He spent periods of time as a schoolmaster and then later as a clergyman in Norfolk, England. He wrote regular articles for The Nineteenth Century, variously on humorous, polemical and historical topics. He published scholarly work on local Norfolk history and on aspects of English literature. A good friend of the academic and ghost-story writer M. R. James, he is described by James' biographer R. W. Pfaff as "a fine specimen of the learned but somewhat eccentric country parson."

Early life

Born in Cheshunt, Hertfordshire, on 20 December 1823, he was the son of John Sympson Jessopp (c.1780–1851), barrister-at-law, and his wife Eliza Bridger Goodrich. He was educated at St John's College, Cambridge (B.A. 1848 and M.A. 1851). He took orders in 1848, and in the same year he married Mary Anne Margaret Cotesworth.

Jessopp took on the curacy of Papworth, Cambridgeshire, where he resided till 1854, when he became headmaster of Helston Grammar School. Here he remained until 1859, when he succeeded Dr Vincent at Norwich School, being thus brought into relations with East Anglia, the region he came to write about. His tenure at Norwich (where George Meredith's elder son was among his pupils) was uneventful, and from the fact that he seldom, if ever, alludes to schoolmastering in his subsequent writing, it may not have been to his taste. He began work on his historic studies while at Norwich, and became rector of Scarning in Norfolk in 1879. During this period, he was awarded a Bachelor and Doctor of Divinity (1870), from Worcester College, Oxford.