Jarvis

as bishop faithfully and with ability, but was not
sufficiently inclined to activity to be a great
leader.

[G. A., G. M. Jarvis and W. J. Wetmore, The Jarvis
Family (1879) J S. F. Jarvis, "Memoir of Bishop Jar-
vis," Evergreen, Apr., May, and June 1846; Lorenzo
Sabine, Biog. Sketches of Loyalists of the Am. Rev.

addresses ; E. E. Beardsley, The Hist, of the Episc. Ch.
in Conn. (2 vols., 1865, 1868) ; The Diocese of Conn.,
the Jarvis Centenary . . . 1897 (n.d.) ; Conn. Courant,
May n, 1813.] H.E.S.

JARVIS, CHARLES H. (Dec. 20, iSs^-Fcb.
25> *895), pianist and teacher, was born in Phil-
adelphia, where he lived his whole life and died.
His father, Charles Jarvis, an Englishman from
Leicester, was for twenty years prominent in
Philadelphia musical circles as a pianist and
teacher, and served as organist at the Protestant
Episcopal Church of the Epiphany. When Charles
was four years old, his father began teaching
him to play the piano. It was his purpose to
make his son an accomplished sight-reader and
in this he succeeded to a remarkable degree. He
also insisted that any passage that was to be
played with the right hand must be practised
with the left hand as well until equal facility
with the latter was achieved. This discipline
made the boy practically ambidextrous. In De-
cember 1844, at the age of seven, he appeared in
his first concert, at Musical Fund Hall. His
father had arranged for four hands a pot-pourri
of themes from Don Pasquale by H. Rosselen,
and the treble part of this arrangement young
Jarvis played, with Caroline Branson, while
standing up at the piano. His education was
obtained in the public schools of Philadelphia
while he continued his piano study with his fa-
ther and studied theory with Leopold Meignen.
In February 1854 he was graduated from the
Philadelphia high school, where he had excelled
in mathematics. His father died the same year
and, though the son was only seventeen years
old, he began at once a career as a teacher which
continued throughout his life. In 1857 Thalberg
toured the United States, and his quality of tone
and great technique strongly impressed Jarvis,
who made the great pianist his model for both
playing and teaching.

In addition to winning fame as a teacher,
Jarvis was undoubtedly one of the best American
pianists of his time. He had almost unlimited
capacity for work and was an untiring recitalist.
He played often with the Philadelphia Sym-
phony Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic
Society, and the Theodore Thomas Orchestra,
and had a large concert repertoire. In 1862 he
instituted and financed a series of chamber-

Jarvis

music and historical piano recitals, the latter
with Dr. Hugh A. Clarke as lecturer. These and
other series of recitals were continued for over
thirty years, the last one taking place on Feb. 9,
1895, a few weeks before his death. During this
time he performed some eight hundred different
compositions. He was a decided classicist and
though he played Liszt compositions now' and
then, he spoke of them as being too cacophonous.
He disliked Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and other
Romanticists, and attributed their "careless writ-
ing to the bad example of Schumann and Wag-
ner." He seemed to lack the breadth of vision
which an open-minded study of Romanticism
would have given him. He was married in New
Haven, Conn., July 17, 1861, to Lucretia Hall
Yale of Wallingford, Conn. She died in 1875,
and in 1879 ^e married Josephine E. Roebling.
His valuable music library, started by his fa-
ther, was presented by one of his daughters to
the Drexel Institute.

[R. H. Yale, Yale Geneal. (1908); T. C. Whitmer,
"Charles H. Jarvis: Man and Musician," Music, May
1900; Phila. Press and Public Ledger, Feb. 26, 1895.]

F.L.G.C.

JARVIS, EDWARD (Jan. 9, i8o3-0ct. 31,
1884), physician and statistician, was born in
Concord, Mass., the fifth of seven children born
to Francis and Milicent (Hosmer) Jarvis whose
ancestors had resided continuously in New Eng-
land since the middle of the seventeenth century.
Although a baker and farmer by trade, Francis
Jarvis was a man of wide reading and the owner
of a large library. As a boy Edward was inter-
ested in mechanics and inherited his father's ap-
preciation of books. He was educated in the
town schools of Concord, in the academy at
Westford, and entered Harvard College in 1822.
He was graduated with the class of 1826 and
served as its secretary for more than half a cen-
tury. While teaching school in Concord in 1827,
he began to study physiology and anatomy with
Dr. Josiah Bartlett. In the fall of this year he
attended lectures at the Massachusetts Medical
College (now the Harvard Medical School) and
was later a student assistant in anatomy at the
University of Vermont After his graduation in
1830 from the former institution he took up gen-
eral practice in Northfield, Mass., where he was
but moderately successful financially. His inter-
est in vital statistics began while he was prac-
tising In Concord when he came under the in-
fluence of Lemuel Shattuck, one of the able vital
statisticians of the period. On Jan. 9, 1834,
Jarvis married Almira Hunt of Concord. She
afterward became^ his constant assistant in the
treatment of insane patients,
In 1837, at the suggestion of New England

621