He was born on 4 January 1850 at 43 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury, London, the son of Frederick Powell, a commissariat merchant, and his wife Mary Powell, daughter of Dr James Powell. He was educated at the Manor House School at Hastings, and Rugby School. He matriculated at the University of Oxford in 1868 as an unattached student, the following year joining Christ Church, where he took a first-class degree in law and modern history in 1872.[5] Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society.
Powell was called to the bar at the Middle Temple in 1874.
Powell took an interest in French poetry, and Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Emile Verhaeren all lectured at Oxford under his auspices. He was also a connoisseur in Japanese art. In politics his sympathies were with the oppressed of all nationalities; he had befriended refugees after the Commune, counting among his friends Jules Vallès the author of Les Réfractaires; and he was also a friend of Stepniak and his circle.
Powell was a member of the Folklore Society and became its president in the year that he died. The society's journal, which had published his papers, printed an obituary by Edward Clodd.
Powell's contributions to history were not extensive, but he was a particularly stimulating teacher. He had been attracted in his school days to the study of Scandinavian history and literature, and he was closely allied with Professor Guðbrandur Vigfússon (d. 1889), whom he assisted in his Icelandic Prose Reader (1897), Corpus Poeticum Boreale (1887), and Origines Islandicae (1905), and in the editing of the Grimm Centenary papers (1886).[8]
^Petch, Alison. "Frederick York Powell". England: The Other Within. Pitt Rivers Museum. Retrieved 11 January 2011.
^Addison, Henry Robert; Oakes, Charles Henry; Lawson, William John; Sladen, Douglas Brooke Wheelton (1900). "POWELL, F. York". Who's Who. Vol. 52. p. 816.
Works by or about Frederick York PowellatWikisource
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Powell, Frederick York". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 22 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 223.
