User:Spiritualism1234/sandbox

Sir Arthur Underhill (1850 - 1939) was a legal scholar and barrister of the nineteenth century. He was the author of many works on legal torts and is noted for being the father of the famed spiritualist and peace activist, Evelyn Underhill.

Childhood and family background
Underhill was born on 10 October 1850 into a middle-class Wolverhampton family, where his father practiced as a solicitor. Underhill was educated at Woodard school, and later studied law graduating from Trinity College, Dublin where he graduated with an LLD. The Underhill family tree, which Arthur Underhill took pains to discover, goes back to a William Underhill in the fifteenth century, who was qualified to bear arms and took for his motto Vive et Ama, a motto which Arthur Underhill revived and used. In Tudor times there was one Underhill who was known as the hot-gospeller. Later in the eighteenth century a certain John Underhill was a stout Nonconformist divine, but the family seem to have veered back to the Established Church. As a child, he was known as a voracious reader of carrying out books from his father's library to read in his house among the tree-tops. His lifelong interest in sailing can also be dated to childhood. Religion does not seem to have played a large part in his upbringing, although his younger brother Charles attended Cambridge and later became an Anglican priest.

Early career and life
Upon graduating from Trinity, Underhill was called to the Bar, entering Lincoln’s Inn in 1872. He trained in his father's office as a solicitor but decided to leave that side of the legal profession and practise instead as a barrister. It was a risky decision, and his memoirs he discloses the struggles of his first ten years. In 1874 he married Alice Lucy Ironmonger, daughter of a Wolverhampton J.P. Shortly after his daughter Evelyn’s birth in 1875, Underhill left Wolverhampton for London.

Relationship with daughter Evelyn
Evelyn’s biographers have suggested that Underhill had a ‘distant and cool’ relationship with his daughter in her early life. Margaret Cropper suggested that ‘Sir Arthur Underhill really discovered his daughter in her late teens, and became aware then of her good brain and penetrating ability.’ Despite this, Cropper noted that family life was ‘secure and affectionate’ and that ‘Evelyn remained through their whole lives very much at her parents' call and very sure of their value.’

Evelyn shared her father's interest in the law, and above all she went many a cruise on her father’s various boats. Underhill was not religiously observant. While it appears that Underhill exerted little influence on his daughter’s interest in religion, his autobiography reveals he was was a convinced Deist, and argued against the sufficiency of science to produce a satisfying view of life. Underhill provided a number of educational privileges to Evelyn, travelling with his daughter to mainland Europe in 1890. The trip, which Evelyn repeated through her early adulthood, enabled the discovery of forms of religious life unknown to her at home, as well as profoundly moving works of art that provided material for her novels.

Authored legal work
Underhill was considered an expert on torts and private trusts. Some of his more famous works include A Practical and Concise Manual of the Procedure of the Chancery Division of the High Court of Justice both in Actions and Matters (1881); A Concise Guide to Modern Equity Being a Course of Nine Lectures [revised and enlarged] (1885); A Summary of the Law of Torts, or, Wrongs Independent of Contract (1911); The Line of Least Resistance: An Easy but Effective Method of Simplifying the Law of Real Property (1919) all published by Butterworth in London. He also produced an autobiography, Change and Decay: The Recollections and Reflections of an Octogenarian Bencher (London: Butterworth, 1938).

Yachtsmanship
Underhill was an accomplished yachtsman. In 1881 he founded and later became Commodore of the Royal Cruising Club, earning a Master Mariner's Certiticate, Cruising in 1890. He also authored Our Silver Streak, or the Yachtsman's Guide to the English Channel: Simple Navigation for Home Waters; and Courses and Distances round the British Isles.