Henry Nettleship (May 5, 1839 - July 10, 1893) was an English classical scholar.

A drawing of Henry Nettleship

He was born at Kettering, and was educated at Lancing College, Durham and Charterhouse schools, and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1861 he was elected to a fellowship at Lincoln, which he vacated on his marriage in 1870. In 1868 he became an assistant master at Harrow, but in 1873 he returned to Oxford, and was elected to a fellowship at Corpus. In 1878 he was appointed to succeed Edwin Palmer in the professorship of Latin, and held the post till his death.

Nettleship had always been interested in Virgil, and a good deal of his time was devoted to his favourite poet. After John Conington's death in 1869, he saw his edition of Virgil through the press, and revised and corrected subsequent editions of the work. In 1875 he had undertaken to compile a new Latin lexicon for the Clarendon Press, but the work proved more than he could accomplish, and in 1887 he published some of the results of twelve years' labour in a volume entitled Confributions to Latin Lexicography, a genuine piece of original work.

In conjunction with John Edwin Sandys, Nettleship revised and edited Seyffert's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities , and he contributed to a volume entitled Essays on the Endowment of Research an article on "The Present Relations between Classical Research and Classical Education in England," in which he pointed out the great value of the professorial lecture in Germany.

In his views on the research question be was a follower of Mark Pattison, whose essays he edited in 1889 for the Clarendon Press. In Lectures and Essays on Subjects connected with Latin Literature and Scholarship, Nettleship revised and republished some of his previous publications. A second series of these, published in 1895, and edited by F Haverfield , contained a memoir by Mrs M Nettleship.

Obituary notices appeared in The Times (July 11, 1893); Classical Review (October, 1893); Oxford Magazine (October 18, 1893).

Works online

• Electronic edition of Oskar Seyffert's Dictionary of Classical Antiquities (1894), edited by Nettleship and John Edwin Sandys. (See the preface for their respective contributions.)