Biography

Norman MacColl (1843-1904), editor and Spanish scholar, was born on 31 August 1843 at 28 Ann Street, Corstorphine, Edinburgh. MacColl entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1862, but migrated the following year to Downing College and was awarded a scholarship there in 1865. He graduated BA in 1866 with a first class in the moral sciences tripos, and in 1868 won the Hare prize with an essay, 'Greek sceptics, from Pyrrho to Sextus', which was published in 1869. He was elected to a fellowship at Downing the same year. He became a student of Lincoln's Inn on 21 January 1872 and was called to the bar on 17 November 1875. He was appointed to the editorship of The Athenaeum, a post which he held for almost thirty years, from 1871 to 1900. In 1888 he published an edition for the general reader of select plays of Calderón, of whom he was an ardent but not uncritical admirer, and in 1902 he contributed a two-volume translation of the Exemplary Novels to a collection of the translated works of Cervantes edited by his friend James Fitzmaurice-Kelly. He died suddenly of heart failure at his home, 4 Campden Hill Square, Notting Hill, on 15 December 1904.

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