Dean Frederic William Farrar (Bombay, 7 August 1831 – Canterbury, 22 March 1903) was a senior-ranking cleric of the Church of England, philologist, author and schoolteacher. He was a pallbearer at the funeral of Charles Darwin in 1882. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles secret society. He was the Archdeacon of Westminster from 1883 to 1894, and Dean of Canterbury from 1895 until his death in 1903.
Biography
Farrar was born in Bombay, India, and educated at King William's College on the Isle of Man, King's College London and Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he won the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry in 1852. He was for some years a master at Harrow School and, from 1871 to 1876, the headmaster of Marlborough College.
Farrar spent much of his career associated with Westminster Abbey. He was successively a canon there (appointed in 1876), rector of St Margaret's (the church next door), and eventually archdeacon of the Abbey (appointed in 1883). He later served as Dean of Canterbury; and chaplain in ordinary, i.e. attached to the Royal Household. He was an eloquent preacher and a voluminous author, his writings including stories of school life, such as Eric, or, Little by Little and St. Winifred's about life in a boys' boarding school in late Victorian England, and two historical romances.
Farrar was a classics scholar and a comparative philologist, who applied Charles Darwin's ideas of branching descent to the relationships between languages, engaging in a protracted debate with the anti-Darwinian linguist Max Müller. While Farrar was never convinced by the evidence for evolution in biology, he had no theological objections to the idea and urged that it be considered on purely scientific grounds. On Darwin's nomination, Farrar was elected to the Royal Society in 1866 for his philological work. When Darwin died in 1882, the then Canon Farrar helped get the church's permission for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey and preached the sermon at his funeral.
