Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol II (1901).djvu/363

 London, 1896. To this 'Dictionary' he contributed many articles.  GREENWOOD, JOSEPH GOUGE (1821–1894), principal of the Owens College, Manchester, born in 1821, was the son of the Rev. Joseph Greenwood, a congregationalist minister at Petersfield, Hampshire, and his wife Maria, whose maiden name was Gouge. At the age of fourteen he was sent to University College school, London, of which Thomas Hewitt Key [q. v.] and Henry Maiden [q. v.] had recently been appointed joint head-masters. Thence he proceeded to University College, London. In 1840 he graduated B. A. in the university of London, with honours in both classics and mathematics, gaining the university scholarship in the former subject of examination.

A year before this his father had died, leaving the young student responsible for a family of six younger children. For several years he supported himself and others by private tuition, and after a time as an assistant master in his old school; during an interval he acted as substitute for Henry Maiden in the Greek chair at University College. In his day he had few superiors in London as a private tutor in the classical languages and literature. One of his earliest pupils was Edward A. Leatham, who dedicated to him his striking 'Tale of the great Athenian Revolution Charmione' (1859). Greenwood had no time himself for the luxuries of authorship; but to this period of his life must have belonged his translation of the 'Pneumatics of Hero of Alexandria,' edited by Bennet Woodcroft [q.v.] (1851), and the first plan at least of his 'Elements of Greek Grammar' (1857), an attempt to supplement Hewitt Key's application of the 'crude-form system' to Latin grammar by completing Maiden's fragmentary Greek grammar designed on the same principles.

In 1850 Greenwood accepted the offer of the chair of classics and history in the newly founded Owens College at Manchester. [see ]. He thus became associated at the beginning of its career with this important seminary of higher instruction, whose ultimate success was largely owing to his perseverance and devotion.

At first the college failed to establish a hold upon Manchester and its district, and in July 1857, when its fortunes were almost at their lowest ebb, Greenwood was appointed to the principalship on the resignation of this post by Alexander John Scott [q.v.] Greenwood continued to lecture, but soon after his appointment as professor the subject of history had been detached from his chair and assigned to Richard Copley Christie [q.v. Suppl.]; Latin and classical Greek were later transferred to separate professors; and during the last few years Greenwood retained only the teaching of Greek Testament criticism. His teaching of this subject (afterwards commemorated by the endowment of a Greenwood Greek Testament lectureship in the college) was, in accordance with the system of the college, as well as with his own disposition as a teacher, essentially confined to textual criticism. His private opinions were through life those of an orthodox but liberal churchman.

In the earlier years of the college Greenwood advocated much change in the system of college teaching, in order to recommend it to Manchester business men. In 1853 he had taken an active part in opening classes for the schoolmasters of primary schools; and having in 1858 become honorary secretary of a working-men's college on the same lines as that of the London college, opened a few years earlier under the influence of Frederick Denison Maurice [q. v.], he was instrumental in bringing about its amalgamation, in 1861, with Owens College, of which for a long time to come it formed an important department. Within the next few years a tide in public opinion and sentiment at last set in at Manchester, which justified the foundation, in the midst of a busy industrial community, of a place of learning and research, educationally equal to university requirements. This growth of public interest and confidence in the college was largely due to the scientific teaching of Sir Henry Roscoe and his colleagues; but great credit belongs to Greenwood for consistently maintaining a due balance between the claims of the older and those of the newer branches of academic study. In these endeavours he was entirely at one with Alfred Neild, who during the greater part of his principalship presided over the governing body of the college. In 1867-71 a new era in the history of the college began with the movement for its extension, in which, with Thomas Ashton and others, Greenwood took a prominent part. The results were 'the rebuilding of the college on a new site and scale, the entire recasting of its constitutional and administrative system, an extraordinary development of its facilities for instruction and research, and something like a trebling of its financial resources.' On the opening of the new college buildings in 1873 the principal delivered 