Alfred Chilton Pearson

Alfred Chilton Pearson FBA (8 October 18612 January 1935) was an English classical scholar, noted for his work on Greek tragedy. Born and schooled in London, Pearson graduated with distinction from Christ's College, Cambridge, before pursuing a career in law, business and teaching. In 1919, having published several books on ancient Greek philosophy and tragedy, he was elected as the Gladstone Professor of Greek at the University of Liverpool, and he subsequently became Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge in 1921.

Porson was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1924, the year in which he released his Oxford Classical Text of the works of the fifth-century tragedian Sophocles, but was forced to resign his academic post in 1928 by increasing ill-health. Following the death of his wife, Edith, in 1930, he moved successively to Hunstanton in Norfolk and to Kensington in London, where he died in 1935.

Life Alfred Chilton Pearson was born at 23 Campden Hill Square, London, on 8 October 1861. He was the only child of the merchant Robert Henry Pearson and his wife Georgina. Georgina Pearson died during Alfred's childhood.

After education at King's College School and Highgate School, Pearson went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1879, and married Edith Maud Green, the daughter of a solicitor, he published his edition of the works of Sophocles in the Oxford Classical Texts series,

From 1926, Pearson began to suffer from what his obituarist George Chatterton Richards called a "nervous condition", following the death of Postgate in a bicycle accident. In the same year, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters degree by the University of Manchester. He resigned his professorship in 1928 on the grounds of ill health. His wife, Edith, died in 1930: Pearson's biographer and successor as Regius Professor, Donald Struan Robertson, states that he remained in "total incapacity" from that year until his death. In 1932, Pearson moved in with his son, Robert, at Hunstanton in Norfolk, in 1934, he moved again to 61 Queen's Gate, Kensington, where he died on 2 January 1935.

Pearson and his wife had a son and two daughters, one of whom died during Pearson's lifetime. He was a member of the National Liberal Club from the early 1900s, but had resigned his membership by 1923, saying that he expected to become "a crusted Tory" in his old age. He subsequently joined the Athenaeum. In 1914, he wrote to Robert that the First World War was "a terrible crime against humanity", but that Britain's involvement in it was required by "the cause of freedom and relief from military despotism". An inscription in his honour in the chapel of Trinity College commemorates him as "an exemplar of the Porsonian method".

Publications The Fragments of Zeno and Cleanthes: With Introduction and Explanatory Notes, A. C. Pearson, ed., London: C. J. Clay and Sons and Cambridge University Press: 1891 (The Pitt Press Series). The Helena of Euripides, edited by A. C. Pearson, Cambridge University Press: 1903 (The Pitt Press Series) Euripides: The Heraclidae, edited by A. C. Pearson, Cambridge University Press: 1903 (The Pitt Press Series) Euripides: The Phoenissae, edited by A. C. Pearson, Cambridge University Press: 1909 (The Pitt Press Series) The Ajax of Sophocles, edited by A. C. Pearson based on the edition of R. C. Jebb, Cambridge University Press, 1912 Fragments of Sophocles – Edited With Additional Notes From the Papers of Sir R. C. Jebb and W. G. Headlam, 3 volumes, Cambridge University Press, 1917 Sophoclis Fabulae recognovit brevique adnotatione critica instruxit A.C. Pearson – Oxford Classical Text, Clarendon Press, 1924