Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse.

  • Edmund Gosse
Date:
1905
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Thomas Browne / by Edmund Gosse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    orphans, he was defrauded by one of his guardians,” his fortune at his father’s death having been two-thirds of £9000. His widowed mother soon married Sir Thomas Dutton, of Gloucester and Isleworth, who “ enjoyed an honourable post in the Government of Ireland.” The statement of Johnson that Browne was “left to the rapa- city of his guardian, deprived now of both his parents, and therefore helpless and unprotected,” has always been accepted, although it is only supported by a much milder statement of Whitefoot’s. If Lady Dutton took her widow’s third, there were left £6000, not for Thomas alone, but for her four children. Thomas was well educated and able to travel freely ; if his mother abandoned him, and his guardian defrauded him of the greater part of his £1500, it is difficult to know what were his sources of income. Moreover, there is evidence that he remained on intimately friendly terms with his step-father until the death of the latter in 1634. Ifthe Paul Garraway who died in 1620 was Thomas Browne’s grandfather, it is possible that the boy, who was then at Winchester, profited by the distribution of his wealth. All must be left to conjecture, but there is certainly no evidence of poverty. Of the youth of Thomas Browne, unhappily, no particulars have been preserved beyond the bare fact that he was admitted to a scholarship at Winchester, on the 20th of August 1616, and that he proceeded six years later to Oxford, where, early in 1623, he matriculated as a fellow-commoner of Broadgates Hall, the name by which what became Pembroke College during Browne’s stay at Oxford was originally known. It appears, also, that Thomas Lushington, afterwards a distinguished divine, but then a young graduate
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