Farrar was born in
Bombay, India, and educated at
King William's College on the
Isle of Man,
King's College London and
Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he won the
Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry in 1852. He was for some years a master at
Harrow School and, from 1871 to 1876, the headmaster of
Marlborough College. Farrar spent much of his career associated with
Westminster Abbey. He was successively a
canon there (appointed in 1876), rector of
St Margaret's (the church next door), and eventually
archdeacon of the Abbey (appointed in 1883). He later served as
Dean of Canterbury; and
chaplain in ordinary, i.e. attached to the
Royal Household. He was an eloquent preacher and a voluminous author, his writings including
stories of school life, such as
Eric, or, Little by Little and ''St. Winifred's'' about life in a boys' boarding school in late Victorian England, and two historical romances. Farrar was a classics scholar and a
comparative philologist, who applied
Charles Darwin's ideas of branching descent to the relationships between languages, engaging in a protracted debate with the anti-Darwinian linguist
Max Müller. While Farrar was never convinced by the evidence for evolution in biology, he had no theological objections to the idea and urged that it be considered on purely scientific grounds. On Darwin's nomination, Farrar was elected to the
Royal Society in 1866 for his philological work. When Darwin died in 1882, the then
Canon Farrar helped get the church's permission for him to be buried in Westminster Abbey and preached the sermon at his funeral. He originated the term "
abominable fancy" for the longstanding Christian idea that the eternal punishment of the damned would entertain the saved. Farrar published
Eternal Hope in 1878 and
Mercy and Judgment in 1881, both of which defend his position on hell at length. In April 1882, the then Canon Farrar was one of ten pallbearers at the funeral of
Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey; the others were: The Duke of Devonshire, The Duke of Argyll, The Earl of Derby, Mr. J. Russell Lowell, Mr. W. Spottiswoode, Sir Joseph Hooker, Mr.
A. R. Wallace,
Thomas Huxley, and Sir John Lubbock (
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury) ==Family==