Edward
Clodd (1 July 1840 – 16
March 1930) was an English banker, writer and anthropologist. He had a great variety of literary and
scientific friends, who periodically met at Whitsunday (a springtime holiday) gatherings at his home
at Aldeburgh in Suffolk. Although born in Margate, where his father was captain of a trading brig, the
family moved soon afterward to Aldeburgh, his father's ancestors deriving
from Parham and Framlingham in Suffolk. Born to a Baptist family, his parents wished him to become a
minister, but he instead began a career in accountancy and banking, relocating
to London in 1855. He was the only surviving child of seven. Edward first worked unpaid for six months at an
accountant's office in Cornhill in London when he was 14 years of age. He worked for the London Joint Stock Bank from
1872 to 1915, and had residences both in London and Suffolk. He married his
first wife Eliza Garman, a doctor's daughter in 1862. He had eight children with Eliza, though two
died when they were young. In his old age, he married his secretary,
Phyllis Maud Rope (born 1887), who survived him by 27 years. Clodd was an early
devotee of the work of Charles Darwin and had personal acquaintance with Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. He 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. 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. He wrote many popular books on evolutionary science.[3] He wrote a biography of Thomas Henry Huxley and
was a lecturer and populariser of anthropology and evolution. He was also a
keen folklorist, joining the Folklore Society from 1878, and later becoming its
president. He was a Suffolk Secretary of the Prehistoric Society of
East Anglia from 1914 to 1916. He was a prominent member and officer of the
Omar Khayyam Club or 'O.K. Club', and organised the planting of the rose
from Omar Khayyam's tomb on to
the grave of Edward Fitzgerald at Boulge, Suffolk, at the Centenary gathering. 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. Prominent among his literary friends and correspondents
were Grant Allen, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, George Gissing, Edward Fitzgerald, Andrew Lang, Cotter Morison, Samuel Butler, Mary Kingsley and Mrs Lynn Linton; he also knew Sir Henry Thompson,
Sir William Huggins, Sir Laurence Gomme, Sir John Rhys, Paul Du Chaillu, Edward Whymper, Alfred Comyn Lyall, York Powell, William Holman Hunt,
Sir E. Ray Lankester, H.G. Wells and many others as acquaintances. His
hospitality and friendship was an important part of the development of their
social relations. George Gissing's close friendship with Clodd began when he
accepted an invitation to a Whitsuntide gathering in Aldeburgh in 1895.