Arthur Helps

Sir Arthur Helps (10 July 1813 – 7 March 1875) was an English writer and dean of the Privy Council. He was a Cambridge Apostle and an early advocate of animal rights.

Biography

The youngest son of London merchant Thomas Helps, Arthur Helps was born in Streatham in south London.

He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, coming out thirty-first wrangler in the mathematical tripos in 1835. He was recognized by the ablest of his contemporaries there as a man of superior gifts, and likely to make his mark in later life. As a member of the "Conversazione Society", better known as the Cambridge Apostles, a society established in 1820 for the purposes of discussion on social and literary questions by a few young men attracted to each other by a common taste for literature and speculation, he was associated with Charles Buller, Frederick Maurice, Richard Chenevix Trench, Monckton Milnes, Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson.

Soon after leaving the university, Arthur Helps became private secretary to Thomas Spring Rice (afterwards Lord Monteagle), then Chancellor of the Exchequer. This appointment he filled until 1839, when he went to Ireland as private secretary to Lord Morpeth (afterwards Earl of Carlisle), Chief Secretary for Ireland. In the meanwhile (28 October 1836) Helps had married Bessy Fuller, daughter of Captain Edward Fuller and Elizabeth Blennerhassett. Bessy's maternal grandfather, Rev. John Blennerhassett of Tralee, County Kerry, was the cousin of Harman Blennerhassett.