AN ETON GRADUATION GIFT
[SOPHOCLES.]
Tragoediae superstites et deperditarum fragmenta ex recensione G. Dindorfii.
Oxford, University Press, 1832.
8vo, pp. 454; a very good copy, partly untrimmed, in contemporary half black morocco and marbled boards, rubbed; presentation inscription to front endpaper ‘Arthur Hobhouse from C O Goodford, April 1837’, with Hobhouse’s later booklabel; pencil underlining throughout, with scattered neat marginalia, principally in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus.
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Tragoediae superstites et deperditarum fragmenta ex recensione G. Dindorfii.
First Oxford edition of the Sophocles of the precocious Karl Wilhelm Dindorf (1802–1883), first published in Leipzig in 1825. This copy was a graduation present from Charles Old Goodford (1812–1884), assistant master (later Head Master and then provost) at Eton, to Arthur Hobhouse (1818–1904), the future judge and first Baron Hobhouse.
Hobhouse had begun his study of the Classics at the age of four, and later obtained a first in Classics from Balliol College, Oxford; first QC and then Charity Commissioner, in 1881 he was appointed as a liberal-leaning judge to the Judicial Privy Council, on which he served unsalaried for twenty years. In his copy of Sophocles his (or likely his) annotations provide cross-references and variant readings. Goodford would later edit, and have printed, an edition of Terence specifically for presentation to leaving sixth-formers.
