MEMOIR

OF

EDWARD JACKSON LOWELL, A. M.

BY A. LAWRENCE LOWELL.

EDWARD JACKSON LOWELL, son of Francis Cabot Lowell and Mary daughter of Samuel P. Gardner, was born in Boston on October 18, 1845. His paternal grandfather, also named Francis Cabot Lowell, graduated from Harvard College in 1793, and was one of the founders of cotton manufactures in this country. In connection with his brother-in-law Patrick T. Jackson, he established the Boston Manufacturing Company at Waltham. The water-power of that place was, however, very small, and after Mr. Lowell's death, in 1817, Mr. Jackson turned his attention to the falls of the Merrimack River at Chelmsford. There he developed manufacturing on a much larger scale, and named the new town after his former associate.

Francis C. Lowell the elder left three sons. John, the oldest of these, called John Lowell, Jr., to distinguish him from an uncle of the same name, was a merchant. While still a young man, he lost in rapid succession his wife and both his children; and his ties with home being broken, he determined to gratify an intense longing for travel by making an extended journey through the East, then comparatively little known. With this object he sailed for Europe, and travelled through the Levant and Egypt, collecting materials for the journal which he intended to publish; but the exposure resulting from a shipwreck in the Red Sea brought on an attack of dysentery, and he reached India only to die at Bombay. Believing, as he stated in his will, that, with its small natural resources, the prosperity of New England must depend on the education of its people, Mr. Lowell left half his property for

the support of public lectures in Boston, a trust which has been administered ever since under the title of the Lowell Institute.

The youngest of the three brothers, Edward Jackson Lowell, from whom our late associate was named, graduated from Harvard College in 1822, and received a degree from the Law School three years later. His career at the Bar was promising, but was cut short by his death in 1830. He developed, early in life, strong literary and historical tastes; and it is said that before he came of age his guardians feeling obliged to remonstrate with him on account of his extravagance, found to their surprise that the money was being spent for books. He accumulated, in fact, before his death a library that was considerable for those days.

Francis C. Lowell, the second of the three brothers, and the father of the subject of this memoir, graduated from Harvard College in 1821. As a young man he was exceedingly delicate, and was hardly expected to live; but a strict regimen, coupled with an extraordinary self-control and an indomitable force of will, enabled him not only to preserve his life until his seventy-second year, but also to accomplish far more than the usual amount of work. He was at one time the Actuary of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, and throughout his life was actively engaged in business, attending his office regularly until within a week of his death. Except for the regular life he was obliged to lead, he never allowed himself to become an invalid, or suffered his health to interfere with his various interests, public and private, or his duties to his friends and to the world.

Edward J. Lowell was the youngest of five children. In August, 1854, when he was less than nine years old, his mother died, and in accordance with her wish that he should receive a part of his education in Europe, his father took him abroad in the following winter. Mr. Francis C. Lowell had been away only a few months when he was called home by the condition of his business affairs; but before his return he placed his son in Sillig's school at Bellerive near Vevey on the Lake of Geneva, then at the height of its reputation. Here our late associate spent three years at the time of life when the mind is most impressionable, and he acquired a sympathy with French ideas, a comprehension of French modes of