Edward Clodd was an English banker, writer and anthropologist.
17 Facts About Edward Clodd
2.
Edward Clodd had a great variety of literary and scientific friends, who periodically met at Whitsunday gatherings at his home at Aldeburgh in Suffolk.
3.
Edward Clodd worked for the London Joint Stock Bank from 1872 to 1915, and had residences both in London and Suffolk.
4.
Edward Clodd married his first wife Eliza Garman, a doctor's daughter in 1862.
5.
Edward Clodd had eight children with Eliza, though two died when they were young.
6.
Edward Clodd was an early devotee of the work of Charles Darwin and had personal acquaintance with Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer.
7.
Edward Clodd wrote biographies of all three men, and worked to popularise evolution with books like The Childhood of the World and The Story of Creation: A Plain Account of Evolution.
8.
Edward Clodd was an agnostic and wrote that the Genesis creation narrative of the Bible is similar to other religious myths and should not be read as a literal account.
9.
Edward Clodd wrote a biography of Thomas Henry Huxley and was a lecturer and populariser of anthropology and evolution.
10.
Edward Clodd was a keen folklorist, joining the Folklore Society from 1878, and later becoming its president.
11.
Edward Clodd was a Suffolk Secretary of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia from 1914 to 1916.
12.
Edward Clodd had a talent for friendship, and liked to entertain his friends at literary gatherings in Aldeburgh at his seafront home there, Strafford House, during Whitsuntides.
13.
Edward Clodd's hospitality and friendship was an important part of the development of their social relations.
14.
George Gissing's close friendship with Edward Clodd began when he accepted an invitation to a Whitsuntide gathering in Aldeburgh in 1895.
15.
Edward Clodd was Chairman of the Rationalist Press Association from 1906 to 1913.
16.
Edward Clodd was skeptical about claims of the paranormal and psychical research, which he wrote were the result of superstition and the outcome of ignorance.
17.
Edward Clodd criticised the spiritualist writings of Oliver Lodge as non-scientific.