Dr. James and Eliza Maine gave birth to their son, Henry James Sumner Maine near Leighton, England on August 15, 1822. Maine grew up in Jersey at Henley-on-Thames with his mother after she separated from his father. He began displaying remarkable abilities in his schooling first at Henley and later at Christ’s Hospital. Maine soon earned a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge in 1840.
His excellence in academics allowed him to take honors in math resulting in the Chancellors Senior Classical Medal. Maine also received medals in Latin Composition, Greek and English Verse. He graduated from Cambridge in 1844, and a few years later he was offered a job in India as part of the Governor-General’s Council. He spent seven years in India as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Calcutta, influencing people as much as he could. Maine’s studies, during his years in India, focused around the ideas that the way of studying the history of civilization was to examine the history of the laws.
After returning to England, Maine became the Corpus Professorship of Jurisprudence at Oxford University. His first lectures Village communities in the East and West were based on his experiences in India and also what he had observed from German researches, they were published in 1871. Maine was known for his ability to relate information from the things he read and learned into informative lectures. In 1871, Maine was also given a seat on the Council of the Secretary of State for India. In 1878, his last lectures were published in Dissertations on Early Law and Custom; soon after he quit his job at Oxford. After his decision to quit at Oxford, he became a Professor at Cambridge University until his death in 1888.
References:
Columbia Encyclopedia Sixth Edition, 2001-2005, http://www.bartleby.com/65/ma/Maine-Si.html
Kunitz,Stanley. British Authors of the Nineteenth Century. New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1936.
Burkland, C.E. Dictionary of Indian Biography. London: Swan Sonnenschein and Company, 1906.
Watson, George. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969
Barnhart, Clarence. The New Century Handbook of English Literature. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1967.
Harvey, Paul. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Kirk, John. Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Company, 1891.
Academic American Encyclopedia. Connecticut: Grolier Incorporated. 1995.
Written by Emily Bernhard
Edited by Marcy L. Voelker, 2007