Arthur John Butler

Arthur John Butler (21 June 1844 – 26 February 1910), was an English scholar, editor, and mountaineer, professor of Italian language and literature at University College London.

Apart from his work on Dante and other Italian poets, Butler translated books from German and French, including the memoirs of Bismarck, Thiébault, and Marbot, and work by Sainte-Beuve. He also contributed to the Cambridge Modern History and the Dictionary of National Biography and in the 1890s was editor of the Alpine Journal.

Early life Butler was born at Putney, the son of the Rev. William John Butler (1818–1894), later Dean of Lincoln, by his marriage to Emma Barnett (1813–1894), a daughter of George Henry Barnett, a banker, of Glympton Park, Woodstock. Butler was the eldest of at least five children. His sisters were Grace Harriet (born 1847), Edith Emma (1851–1936), and Mary Avice (1855–1938), while his brother was William George (1849–1938). Their grandfather John La Forey Butler (1786–1848), was a banker in the firm of H. & I. Johnstone, and their uncle Henry Barnett was also a banker, as well as being a Conservative member of parliament. Both Butler parents were supporters of the High Church Tractarian movement. In 1848, William John Butler founded the Community of St Mary the Virgin.

Brought up at Wantage, where his father was Vicar, in 1853 Butler won a scholarship to St Andrew's College, Bradfield, but in 1857 he migrated to Eton, after which he gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1867 he graduated eighth in the Classical Tripos and was also a junior optime in the mathematical tripos. Select Essays of Sainte-Beuve (1895), the Memoirs of Baron Thiébault (1896), Friedrich Ratzel's The History of Mankind (1896), and Bismarck: the Man and the Statesman (1898), from Bismarck's Gedanken und Erinnerungen. He worked at the Public Record Office from 1899 until his death, editing calendars of foreign papers from the year 1577. Four such volumes appeared between 1901 and 1909.

Butler's final work, completed just before his death, was The Forerunners of Dante (1910), a selection from early Italian poets.

Family life On 6 April 1875 Butler married Mary Caroline, a daughter of William Gilson Humphry, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields. They had one son and six daughters.