It is sad that he received no recognition in his lifetime for a truly remarkable achievement. He surely deserves an entry in the DNB.

—–

I was just preparing some notes of my own on Wickes when I found this
post (and its partner). Thanks for them both!

A further thought on “what it was that originally inspired him as a
mathematician and cleric to pursue this unlikely and arcane interest.”
Probably the biography in Victor Tunkel’s work also notes that Wickes
had, years earlier (1863), published a rebuttal of the notorious work
of Colenso on the Pentateuch (also on Archive.org).
Twenty or so years later he was writing his “Treatises”. This still
doesn’t explain the “turn” to the cantillation, of course, but it does
suggest a motive for gaining deeper familiarity with the biblical text
in the original. FWIW!

The “note” I refer to is
this.

Best wishes from a fairly grey and damp Edinburgh,
David.

“what it was that originally inspired him as a mathematician and cleric to pursue this unlikely and arcane interest.”

just to add to what S wrote, wickes’s wide interests might seem strange to modern academics, who are expected to become so specialized in one narrow subfield, and among whom breadth of knowledge is completey undervalued (or even considered negatively).

besides wha’t so unusual? jordy penkower also was a budding mathematician (BA and MA) before making his mark as a bible scholar.

“As Simon Winchester writes of a slightly later period in “The Meaning of Everything: the Story of the Oxford English Dictionary,” “[F]or very many they were also cultured and learned times besides. . . . It is perhaps worth recalling just how very well educated people were in those days – or at least to recall how very well educated the educated clases were. . . . [p]eople, or people of a certain kind in the Britain of the day, were quite simply possessed of much time and much learning, and in far greater abundance than many like people possess it today. Items from the newspapers of the time hint at the almost incidental, quite casual cleverness of the cleverest of the reading public. An illustration of the kind of things appears that day in the ‘Telegrams in Brief’ section of The Times, in which it reports, without explanation or adornment, that:

Further hostilities are reported between the Zaranik tribe and the forces of the Zaidi Imam Yahya of Sana’. The Zaranik attacked a Zaidi detachment at Mansuria, near Hodeida, and have been plundering caravans trading with Sana’.

No further details are offered to suggest where all this fighting was (Yemen, one imagines), nor the identities of the parties to the feud. The newspaper’s editor presumes that readers, quite simply, had sufficient education to know.”

http://onthemainline.blogspot.com/2008/04/haggadah-of-times-of-london-1840.html

Thanks for this very informative post. Like most people for whom Wicke’s name is embedded in their brain, I knew nothing about him.