Robert Caesar Childers

Robert Caesar Childers (1838 – 25 July 1876) was a British Orientalist and the compiler of the first Pali–English dictionary to be published. He was the father of the Irish nationalist Erskine Childers and the paternal grandfather of the fourth president of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.

Early years
Childers was born in 1838 in Cantley, South Yorkshire, the son of Reverend Charles Childers, an English chaplain in Nice.

In 1857, at the age of nineteen, he was admitted to Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied Hebrew.

Ceylon
From 1860 to 1864, Childers was employed by the civil service in Ceylon, first as private secretary to the governor, Charles Justin MacCarthy, and then as office assistant to the government agent in Kandy.

During his time in Ceylon, he studied Sinhala and Pali with Ven. Yātrāmulle Śrī Dhammārāma Thera at Bentota Vanavāsa Vihāra, and established a firm friendship with Ven. Waskaḍuwe Śrī Subhūti.

His time there was brought to an end when ill health forced him to return to England.

Pali dictionary
Upon his return to England, Childers continued his study of Pali, influenced by Reinhold Rost and Viggo Fausböll.

In 1870, he published the text of the  Khuddaka Pāṭha with an English translation and notes in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. This was the first Pali text ever printed in England.

The first volume of his Pali dictionary was published in 1872. In the autumn of that year, he was appointed sub-librarian at the India Office under Reinhold Rost, and early in the following year became the first professor of Pali and Buddhist literature at University College, London.

The second and concluding volume was published in 1875. A few months later, the dictionary was awarded the Prix Volney for 1876 by the Institut de France.

Family
Childers was married to Anna Mary Henrietta Barton, who came from an Anglo-Irish family with an estate in Glendalough, County Wicklow. Childers and his wife had five children (two sons and three daughters).

Death
Childers died from tuberculosis on 25 July 1876, at the age of thirty-eight. Thomas William Rhys Davids states in the Dictionary of National Biography that Childers died in Weybridge, but the Encyclopædia Britannica records his place of death as London.