Life

George Pryme was born in April 1781 in Cottingham, a village located just outside of Hull in East Yorkshire. He was descended from a Huguenot family who had settled in the north of England after migrating from French Flanders. Pryme was the son of one Christopher Pryme, a merchant of the local area, and Alice Dinsdale.^[1] Financially, the family was comfortable, with Pryme inheriting a considerable amount of property around the Hull area following his father’s death during George’s childhood. He was sent to private schools at Nottingham and at Bunny, before, in 1796, entering Kingston-upon-Hull Grammar School, perhaps best known as the former school of William Wilberforce. At Hull, Pryme came under the influence of headmaster and divine Joseph Milner and was also privately tutored by John Dawson, a mathematician and surgeon. Dawson had strong connections with Cambridge and could lay claim to having tutored at least eight pupils who would go on to become Senior Wranglers. It is not unreasonable to suggest that Dawson probably played an important part in steering the young Pryme towards an undergraduate education at Cambridge, specifically in the Mathematical Tripos. This he embarked on in October 1799, becoming a student at the staunchly liberal, Jacobin stronghold of Trinity College, which for these same reasons was unique but also relatively isolated and reviled within the University. Pryme was a star pupil. Although he was a student of mathematics, securing a scholarship in April 1800, he was perhaps better known for his efforts in composing Latin epigrams and Greek odes, winning him the Browne Medal in 1801 and 1802. There were other prizes to follow, including another prize for a Greek ode in 1804, the Members’ Prize in 1804 for an essay in Latin entitled ‘The Causes of the Decline and Fall of States’, a further Members’ Prize a year later, and, a few years down the line, a Seatonian Prize in 1809. Pryme had, not surprisingly, become ‘Prize Pryme’.^[2]

In between this adulation, Pryme was placed Sixth Wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos of 1803, an achievement which, along with the aforementioned prizes, helped him become a Fellow of Trinity a couple of years later in October 1805. His placing in the Tripos was unexpected, as Pryme himself admitted in his Autobiographic Recollections published in 1870:

As I had divided my time almost equally between my classical and mathematical studies, I had not expected to do more than just obtain a place at the bottom of the Wranglers’ list. When the brackets came out on the morning of the last day of examination, I began to look at the place whereabouts I hoped to be, and not finding my name as I read downwards, felt dismayed, till, casting my eye upwards, I saw my name in the second bracket, as sixth wrangler [there were 13 wranglers in 1803] (Pryme 1870: 55).

The Cambridge examination system has of course changed radically since Pryme’s day. To start with, there were only two degrees available at Cambridge in the early nineteenth century, mathematics and classics. Moreover, the amount and type of knowledge then required to obtain a degree was, as Pryme himself admitted, scarcely believable: ‘Two books of Euclid’s Geometry, Simple and Quadratic Equations, and the early parts of Paley’s Moral Philosophy, were deemed amply sufficient. Yet in the year 1800 three students failed to pass even this test’ (ibid.: 92).

Despite a good performance in the Mathematical Tripos, Pryme decided to take up the study of law, this taking him to Lincoln’s Inn in London in October 1804 where he became one of five pupils of John Atkinson, a well- known special pleader. Pryme’s pupillage seems to have gone well as he was called to the Bar in November 1806. However, his time in London turned out to be rather short as he was forced to leave the city in the summer of 1808 on health grounds, being advised by his doctor that his life might be at risk were he not to seek out the cleaner air of Cambridge. Pryme’s life in the law world had just begun and he was to carry it on through various roles in and around Cambridge, including practising on the Norfolk Circuit and Wisbech Sessions, ending up securing a considerable practice; he was also appointed to several public offices, including Paving Commissioner. Being forced to leave London was nevertheless a ‘severe disappointment’ (ibid.: 83) for Pryme who had set his sights on a legal career. Given his undoubted talents, it is an intriguing question how far he might have risen within the judiciary. However, the legal profession’s loss turned out to be the economics profession’s gain. Marriage to Jane Townley followed in August 1813, with Pryme and his wife living in Barnwell Abbey just outside Cambridge. It was not long after, in March 1816, that he began to lecture on political economy at the University.

Aside from teaching, practising as a barrister, and composing poetry, the other main calling of Pryme’s life was his service as an MP for Cambridge. Given that he had been a student at Trinity, it was perhaps no great surprise that Pryme was able to successfully stand for election. As Reid (2013: 630631) notes, ‘Between 1790 and 1820 [albeit slightly before Pryme became an MP] 151 men who had passed through its [Trinity’s] gates were elected to the House of Commons. No Cambridge college could rival its record of producing statesmen’. Elected as a reforming Whig, Pryme first entered parliament in 1832, being re-elected in 1835 and 1837, before being forced to stand down as an MP in 1841, again due to health reasons. Pryme was active as a politician and was a supporter of, amongst other things, shorter parliaments and the repeal of the Corn Laws, making a speech on the latter in the House on 2 April 1840, where he employed Ricardo’s theory of rent to support his position (although Ricardo himself was eventually forced to make his case for free trade by using the theory of comparative advantage (see Kubo 2015: 7)).^[3] Pryme took part in parliamentary proceedings on a number of other issues, including the Tithe Commutation Act and university reform at Oxford and Cambridge,^[4] and also introduced a bill to the Commons in November 1837 which proposed the abolition of the grand jury system in Britain, although this was resoundingly defeated by 25 votes for to 196 against (see Elliff 1938: 8-9).^[5] Pryme was intimate with a number of political luminaries during this period, including future Prime Ministers Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Althorp, as well as various noted people outside parliament, such as the poet William Wordsworth, the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, and the scientist Sir Humphry Davy.^[6]

Following his retirement from parliament, Pryme spent his time teaching at Cambridge and conducting his legal practice, followed by a move with his family to Wistow in Huntingdonshire in 1847, where they lived on a 500-acre estate. One of Pryme’s hobbies during this period was the cultivation of his land through the basics of chemistry that he had picked up. Continuing to lecture on political economy until late 1863, he resigned from Cambridge, with the University shortly thereafter agreeing to put the Professorship of Political Economy on a permanent basis. Pryme died in December 1868.^[7]

[1] Through his mother, Pryme was distantly related to the Anglican minister, theologian, and co-founderof Methodism, John Wesley.
[2] Pryme continued to compose poetry well into later life. His Jephthah, and Other Poems, which appearedin 1838, was critiqued in The Monthly Review, where it was noted that ‘from a lecturer on the principlesand sources of the wealth of nations, one does not readily expect to hear the chieftain’s triumphs or themaiden’s tragedy chaunted in loftily constructed rhyme’ (Anonymous 1838: 308). Poetic works by Prymealso get their own listing in The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature: 1800—1900, published asrecently as 1999 (Shattock 1999).
[3] Fetter (1975) examines the influence that economists elected as MPs had on British legislation duringthe period from 1819, Ricardo’s election to parliament, to 1868, when John Stuart Mill left parliament.Fetter argues that ‘in the halls of Westminster.. .back-benchers had an impact on legislation, by voting,by speeches, by sponsoring of legislation, and by activities on committees, that is unmatched at any othertime or in any other country’ (ibid.: 1,060). Fetter’s text mentions Pryme twice, albeit only in passing onboth occasions.
[4] A motion introduced by Pryme to the Commons in 1837 for reform of the universities was withdrawnafter he was assured that an overhaul would follow soon thereafter (see Rashid 1980: 288). However,reform did not take place for at least another 15 years.
[5] The grand jury system eventually ceased to be used, at least in England, in 1933.
[6] Pryme was also a very good friend of anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Perronet Thompson; the two hadbeen at school and Cambridge together. It does not seem unreasonable to argue that Thompson was aninfluence on the development of Pryme’s liberalism. (Copies of the letters exchanged between Pryme andThompson are housed at the Hull University Archive. See http://www.hull.ac.uk/arc/downloads/DTHcatalogue’pdf.)
[7] One of Pryme’s legacies was his collection of books on economics. As Fetter notes, ‘In 1840 it was probably the greatest collection of English economic literature in the world’ (Fetter 1939: 416). It has nevertheless had a somewhat nomadic existence. The collection was given to Cambridge in 1872 but remaineduncatalogued until the mid-1930s. The books then arrived at the Marshall Library, where they wererestored and catalogued under Sraffa’s direction. The Pryme Collection is currently housed in the RareBooks Section of Cambridge University Library. It is made up of around 1,850 volumes, of which over1,500 are British (see ibid.).