From Bath to Cambridge: The Early Life and Education of Robert Leslie Ellis

AbstractRobert Leslie Ellis was born in Bath on 25 August 1817. His father, Francis Ellis (1772–1842), had held a position in the Admiralty, but resigned when he became the principal heir of his uncle Henry Ellis, formerly Governor of Nova Scotia, who on his death in 1806 left him £10,000 and extensive landholdings in Ireland and elsewhere. Francis and his wife Mary, née Kilbee (1777–1847), had six children, of whom Robert, born in 1817, was the youngest. The family lived in a succession of large houses in Bath, where Francis Ellis, a well-known local figure, was one of the founders of the Bath Literary and Scientific Institution, founded in 1823. The Institution had a well-stocked library which took in both British and continental books and periodicals, and the teenaged Ellis frequented it regularly, reading avidly and conversing with the adult members, who included scholars and scientists of some distinction. His father involved himself in Ellis’s education and was himself a well-educated and inquiring man; his uncle had described him as ‘really a very deserving young man of uncommon abilities and possessed of more scientific and other knowledge than [one] could expect at his years.’ In an account of the Bath literati published in 1854, Francis Ellis was included in a list of ‘men with intelligent and well-informed minds’, and a later supplement stated that ‘Francis Ellis had an enlarged mind, was a good classic, a superior mathematician, and a generally well-informed man’. Ellis’s library contained several hundred books in 1841, when an inventory was taken.