Introduction

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was born in Edgeworthstown in County Longford, Ireland. His large family background is fascinating, and has been richly described by Barbe (2010). His grandfather was the energetic and colourful Richard Lovell Edgeworth, whose life was documented in a two-volume memoir by his eldest daughter, the famous novelist Maria Edgeworth (1820); see also Butler and Butler (1927).

J. Creedy (*)

SACL, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand e-mail: john.creedy@vuw.ac.nz

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R. A. Cord (ed.), The Palgrave Companion to Oxford Economics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58471-9_11

Richard Lovell's sixth son, and seventeenth surviving child, was Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, who in 1831 met his wife, Rosa Florentina Eroles, from Catalonia and then aged sixteen, while on the way to Germany to study phi­losophy: they married three weeks later. Francis Ysidro was their fifth son. With his family background and considerable linguistic skills, Edgeworth had wide international sympathies.

Edgeworth was educated by tutors until 1862, when he entered Trinity College Dublin to study languages.

His career after graduation was varied. He was called to the Bar in 1877, the year in which his first book, New and Old Methods of Ethics, was pub­lished. Edgeworth applied unsuccessfully for a Professorship of Greek at Bedford College, London, in 1875, but later lectured there on English lan­guage and literature for a brief period from late 1877 to mid-1878. He had earlier lectured on logic, mental and moral sciences and metaphysics to pro­spective Indian civil servants, at a private institution run by a Mr Walter Wren. In 1880, he applied for a chair of philosophy, also unsuccessfully, but began lecturing on logic to evening classes at King's College London. Soon after the publication of his second book, Mathematical Psychics, in 1881, he applied for a professorship of logic, mental and moral philosophy and politi­cal economy at Liverpool. Edgeworth had to wait until 1890 to obtain a professorial appointment. This was at King's College London, where he suc­ceeded Thorold Rogers in the Tooke Chair of Economic Science and Statistics. In the next year, he again succeeded Rogers, this time to become Drummond Professor, a position he held until his retirement in 1922, and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

In addition to his work in economics, Edgeworth began a series of statisti­cal papers in 1883, and was secretary to the British Association Report on Index Numbers (1887-1889). He was President of Section F of the British Association in 1889, a position he held again in 1922. Edgeworth's work on mathematical statistics took an increasingly important role. Indeed, of about 170 papers which he published, approximately three-quarters were concerned with statistical theory: many are collected in McCann (1996). He became a Guy Medalist (Gold) of the Royal Statistical Society in 1907 and was President of the Society from 1912 to 1914. His third and final book was Metretike: or, The Method of Measuring Probability and Utility (Edgeworth 1887); on his statistics contributions, see Bowley (1928) and Stigler (1978). Near the end of his life, some of the vast stream of his economics papers were collected in three volumes of Papers Relating to Political Economy (Edgeworth 1925).

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