![John Collinson Nesfield](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/John_Collinson_Nesfield.jpg)
John Collinson Nesfield (14 August 1836 – 28 June 1919) served in various roles as an educator in
British India
The provinces of India, earlier presidencies of British India and still earlier, presidency towns, were the administrative divisions of British governance on the Indian subcontinent. Collectively, they have been called British India. In one ...
and was for some time
curate of St Michael's Church,
Highgate
Highgate ( ) is a suburban area of north London at the northeastern corner of Hampstead Heath, north-northwest of Charing Cross.
Highgate is one of the most expensive London suburbs in which to live. It has two active conservation organisat ...
, London. He wrote numerous books, of which his works on grammar were particularly influential.
Life
John Nesfield was born in 1836 and was the son of a cleric from
Wiltshire
Wiltshire (; abbreviated Wilts) is a historic and ceremonial county in South West England with an area of . It is landlocked and borders the counties of Dorset to the southwest, Somerset to the west, Hampshire to the southeast, Gloucestershire ...
, England. He attended
Highgate Grammar School from 1852-1855 and later taught there from 1859-1864.
He became a postmaster (holder of a senior scholarship) at
Merton College at the
University of Oxford
, mottoeng = The Lord is my light
, established =
, endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019)
, budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20)
, chancellor ...
. There he earned a BA degree in 1860 and was later
promoted to an MA in 1862.
Nesfield became the curate of St Michael's Church,
Highgate
Highgate ( ) is a suburban area of north London at the northeastern corner of Hampstead Heath, north-northwest of Charing Cross.
Highgate is one of the most expensive London suburbs in which to live. It has two active conservation organisat ...
, in
Middlesex
Middlesex (; abbreviation: Middx) is a historic county in southeast England. Its area is almost entirely within the wider urbanised area of London and mostly within the ceremonial county of Greater London, with small sections in neighbour ...
. He began his career in British India in January 1867. There he served initially as a professor at
Presidency College and
Krishnagar Government College, both in the
Bengal Presidency
The Bengal Presidency, officially the Presidency of Fort William and later Bengal Province, was a subdivision of the British Empire in India. At the height of its territorial jurisdiction, it covered large parts of what is now South Asia and ...
, before becoming in May 1872 a Director of Public Instruction (DPI) and schools inspector in
Lower Burma. The
Indian Education Service
The Indian Education Service or Indian Educational Service (IES) formed part of the British Raj between 1896 and 1924, when overseas recruitment ceased. It was an administrative organisation running educational establishments in British India, larg ...
was not founded until 1896 and thus he was an employee of the provincial government. In his role as a DPI he took on responsibility for administration and policy-making, rather than being purely a teacher.
Nesfield transferred from Lower Burma to become DPI in
Oudh State
The Oudh State (, also Kingdom of Awadh, Kingdom of Oudh, or Awadh State) was a princely state in the Awadh region of North India until its annexation by the British in 1856. The name Oudh, now obsolete, was once the anglicized name of ...
in March 1874, then in 1878 became principal of
Benares College when the administration of Oudh was subsumed in the newly created
North-Western Provinces and Oudh
The North-Western Provinces was an Presidencies and provinces of British India, administrative region in British India. The North-Western Provinces were established in 1836, through merging the administrative divisions of the Ceded and Conquere ...
. He joined the inspectorate there in the following year and in 1885 was passed over for promotion to become the province's DPI when, as was not uncommon, the government determined to prefer Edmund White, who was a member of the
Indian Civil Service
The Indian Civil Service (ICS), officially known as the Imperial Civil Service, was the higher civil service of the British Empire in India during British rule in the period between 1858 and 1947.
Its members ruled over more than 300 million p ...
, to an educator. Nesfield objected strenuously to this decision, firing off letters first to the Secretary of State for the province,
R. A. Cross, 1st Viscount Cross
Richard Assheton Cross, 1st Viscount Cross, (30 May 1823 – 8 January 1914), known before his elevation to the peerage as R. A. Cross, was a British statesman and Conservative politician. He notably served as Home Secretary between 1874 and 1 ...
, and then to
Alfred Comyn Lyall
Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall (4 January 1835 – 10 April 1911) was a British civil servant, literary historian and poet.
Early life
He was born at Coulsdon in Surrey, the second son of Alfred Lyall and Mary Drummond Broadwood, daughter of James S ...
, who was the
Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western Provinces and Chief Commissioner of Oudh. When those appeals failed, he wrote also to the
Viceroy of India
The Governor-General of India (1773–1950, from 1858 to 1947 the Viceroy and Governor-General of India, commonly shortened to Viceroy of India) was the representative of the monarch of the United Kingdom and after Indian independence in 19 ...
,
, but was again rebuffed. He eventually did achieve the promotion when White retired in August 1892. He had been made a Fellow of the
University of Allahabad
, mottoeng = "As Many Branches So Many Trees"
, established =
, type = Public
, chancellor = Ashish Chauhan
, vice_chancellor = Sangita Srivastava
, head_label ...
in 1887, the year of its establishment, and retired from India in October 1894.
Issues of promotion were not the only thing about which Nesfield complained during his time in India. Education was particularly poorly developed in the North-Western Provinces and in 1882 he asked the province's Education Commission "what hope is there of reaching the heart or brain of a man who is educated at a cost of four rupees a year?" He was also involved in a dispute that persisted for a while after he retired. There had been investigations regarding whether many of the English and vernacular textbooks prescribed for use in schools of the North-Western Provinces had been contrived so as to provide him with a monopoly on publication. It was eventually agreed that he had acted under the instructions of White, had done so at his own risk, and was providing a much-needed service. He gave the copyrights to a publisher in London after retiring.
He had married a missionary, Ellen Blumhardt, and the couple had many children, including Vincent Blumhardt Nesfield who pioneered the use of chlorine in water purification. Nesfield died in 1919.
Influence
Education
Nesfield's ''English Grammar: Past and Present'' was originally written for the market in colonial India. It was later expanded to appeal to students in Britain as well, from young men preparing for various professional examinations to students in "Ladies' Colleges". Other books on the English language by Nesfield include ''A Junior Course In English Composition, A Senior Course In English Composition'', but it was his ''A Manual Of English Grammar and Composition'' that proved really successful both in Britain and
her colonies — so much so that it formed the basis for many other grammar and composition primers including but not limited to ''
Warriner's English Grammar and Composition'', and ''High School English Grammar and Composition'', fondly called
Wren & Martin
''Wren & Martin'' refers to a single book ''High School English Grammar and Composition'' or collectively, a series of English grammar textbooks written jointly by P. C. Wren and H. Martin. Written primarily for the children of British officers ...
by
P. C. Wren
Percival Christopher Wren (1 November 187522 November 1941) was an English writer, mostly of adventure fiction. He is remembered best for ''Beau Geste'', a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa. This was ...
and H. Martin. Bibliographer Manfred Görlach is critical, saying of the frequently reprinted ''English Grammar: Past and Present'' that "it is not quite easy to see how its wordiness, lack of clear structure, mixture of synchronic description and diachronic explanation and often unclear definitions gave the book the immense impact it had".
Anthropology
Like
Denzil Ibbetson
Sir Denzil Charles Jelf Ibbetson (30 August 1847 – 21 February 1908)Talbot (2012). was an administrator in British India and an author. He served as Chief-Commissioner of the Central Provinces and Berar from 1898 to 1899 and Lie ...
, an administrator of the
British Raj
The British Raj (; from Hindi ''rāj'': kingdom, realm, state, or empire) was the rule of the British Crown on the Indian subcontinent;
*
* it is also called Crown rule in India,
*
*
*
*
or Direct rule in India,
* Quote: "Mill, who was him ...
, Nesfield believed that the society of the North-Western Provinces in British India did not permit the rigid imposition of an administratively-defined
caste construct as
Herbert Hope Risley advocated. According to Nesfield, society there was less governed by ideas of caste based on
varna
Varna may refer to:
Places Europe
*Varna, Bulgaria, a city in Bulgaria
**Varna Province
**Varna Municipality
** Gulf of Varna
**Lake Varna
**Varna Necropolis
*Vahrn, or Varna, a municipality in Italy
*Varniai, a city in Lithuania
* Varna (Šaba ...
and instead was more open and fluid. Tribes, which he considered to be kin-based groups that dominated small areas, were the dominant feature of rural life. Caste designators, such as
Jat
The Jat people ((), ()) are a traditionally agricultural community in Northern India and Pakistan. Originally pastoralists in the lower Indus river-valley of Sindh, Jats migrated north into the Punjab region in late medieval times, and su ...
and
Rajput
Rajput (from Sanskrit ''raja-putra'' 'son of a king') is a large multi-component cluster of castes, kin bodies, and local groups, sharing social status and ideology of genealogical descent originating from the Indian subcontinent. The term Ra ...
, were status-based titles to which any tribe that rose to social prominence could lay a claim, and which could be dismissed by their peers if they declined.
The debate about caste reflected the contemporary debate around topics such as
scientific racism
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscience, pseudoscientific belief that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racism (racial discrimination), racial inferiority, or racial superiority.. "Few tragedies ...
and the
Aryan invasion theory
The Indo-Aryan migrations were the migrations into the Indian subcontinent of Indo-Aryan peoples, an ethnolinguistic group that spoke Indo-Aryan languages, the predominant languages of today's North India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lank ...
. Anthropologist Ellen Bal notes that
Works
Nesfield's publications include:
*''An Essay on the Kanjar Tribe'' (1882)
*''On the Results of Primary Education in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh'' (1883)
*''Brief View of the Caste System of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh'' (1885)
*''The Function of Modern Brahmins in Upper India'' (1887)
*''Two Essays on the Mushera Tribe'' (1888)
*''English Grammar: Past and Present'' (1898)
*''A Junior Course In English Composition, A Senior Course In English Composition''
*''A Manual of English Grammar and Composition'' (1898)
*English Grammar Series
References
Notes
Citations
Bibliography
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Nesfield, John
1836 births
1919 deaths
Alumni of Merton College, Oxford
Academic staff of the University of Allahabad
History of education in India
Administrators in British India
Administrators in British Burma
Grammarians from England
English anthropologists
People educated at Highgate School
19th-century English clergy
19th-century English writers
20th-century English clergy
20th-century English writers
19th-century anthropologists
20th-century anthropologists