Havelock Ellis facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Havelock Ellis
Ellis in 1913
Born	Henry Havelock Ellis (1859-02-02)2 February 1859 Croydon, Surrey, England
Died	8 July 1939(1939-07-08) (aged 80) Hintlesham, Suffolk, England
Nationality	English, French
Alma mater	King's College London
Occupation	Physician eugenicist writer
Years active	1879−1931
Spouse(s)	Edith Ellis ​ ​ (m. 1891; died 1916)​

Henry Havelock Ellis (2 February 1859 – 8 July 1939) was an English-French physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer.

Early life and career

Ellis, son of Edward Peppen Ellis and Susannah Mary Wheatley, was born in Croydon, Surrey (now part of Greater London). He had four sisters, none of whom married. His father was a sea captain and an Anglican, while his mother was the daughter of a sea captain who had many other relatives that lived on or near the sea. When he was seven his father took him on one of his voyages, during which they called at Sydney, Australia; Callao, Peru; and Antwerp, Belgium. After his return, Ellis attended the French and German College near Wimbledon, and afterward attended a school in Mitcham.

In April 1875, Ellis sailed on his father's ship for Australia; soon after his arrival in Sydney, he obtained a position as a master at a private school. After the discovery of his lack of training, he was fired and became a tutor for a family living a few miles from Carcoar, New South Wales. He spent a year there and then obtained a position as a master at a grammar school in Grafton, New South Wales. The headmaster had died and Ellis carried on at the school for that year, but was unsuccessful.

At the end of the year, he returned to Sydney and, after three months' training, was given charge of two government part-time elementary schools, one at Sparkes Creek, near Scone, New South Wales, and the other at Junction Creek. He lived at the school house on Sparkes Creek for a year. He wrote in his autobiography, "In Australia, I gained health of body, I attained peace of soul, my life task was revealed to me, I was able to decide on a professional vocation, I became an artist in literature; these five points covered the whole activity of my life in the world. Some of them I should doubtless have reached without the aid of the Australian environment, scarcely all, and most of them I could never have achieved so completely if chance had not cast me into the solitude of the Liverpool Range."

Medicine

Ellis returned to England in April 1879. He studied at St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, now part of King's College London, but never had a regular medical practice. His training was aided by a small legacy and also income earned from editing works in the Mermaid Series of lesser known Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. He joined The Fellowship of the New Life in 1883, meeting other social reformers Eleanor Marx, Edward Carpenter and George Bernard Shaw.

Marriage

Edith Lees and Havelock Ellis

In November 1891, at the age of 32, Ellis married the English writer and proponent of women's rights Edith Lees. At the end of the honeymoon, Ellis went back to his bachelor rooms in Paddington. She lived at a Fellowship House in Bloomsbury.

Later life and death

Commemorative plaque dedicated to Ellis and his wife at Golders Green Crematorium

Ellis spent the last year of his life at Hintlesham, Suffolk, where he died in July 1939. His ashes were scattered at Golders Green Crematorium, North London, following his cremation.

Works

Inmate of Elmira Reformatory showing four views of head The Criminal (1890)

• The Criminal (1890)
• The New Spirit (1890)
• The Nationalisation of Health (1892)

• Affirmations (1898)

• The Nineteenth Century (1900)

• A Study of British Genius (1904)

• The Soul of Spain (1908)

• The Problem of Race-Regeneration (1911)
• The World of Dreams (1911)

(new edition 1926)

• The Task of Social Hygiene (1912)

• The Philosophy of Conflict (1919)

• Little Essays of Love and Virtue (1922)

• Sonnets, with Folk Songs from the Spanish (1925)
• Eonism and Other Supplementary Studies (1928)
• The Art of Life (1929) (selected and arranged by Mrs. S. Herbert)
• More Essays of Love and Virtue (1931)
• ed.: James Hinton: Life in Nature (1931)

• ed.: Imaginary Conversations and Poems: A Selection, by Walter Savage Landor (1933)
• Chapman (1934)
• My Confessional (1934)
• Questions of Our Day (1934)
• From Rousseau to Proust (1935)
• Selected Essays (1936)
• Poems (1937) (selected by John Gawsworth; pseudonym of T. Fytton Armstrong)
• Love and Marriage (1938) (with others)

• From Marlowe to Shaw (1950) (ed. by J. Gawsworth)
• The Genius of Europe (1950)
• The Unpublished Letters of Havelock Ellis to Joseph Ishill (1954)

Translations

• Germinal (by Zola) (1895) (reissued 1933)
• The Psychology of the Emotions by Théodule-Armand Ribot (1897)