John Edward Courtenay Bodley (6 June 1853 – 28 May 1925) was an English civil servant, known for his writings on France.
He was the son of the pottery owner Edward Fisher Bodley (1815–1881),[1] and his wife Mary Ridgway Bodley, and brother of the pottery owner Edwin James Drew Bodley.[2] He was educated at Mill Hill School and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, from 1873 to 1876.[3] An active Freemason, he approached Oscar Wilde, then also an undergraduate, and introduced him to a Masonic Lodge in Oxford.[4] Richard Ellmann[5] attributes to Bodley a long, spiteful New York Times article that appeared on Wilde, on 21 January 1882. "Bodelino" was a member of James McNeill Whistler's circle in Paris.[6]
He was secretary to Charles Dilke, from 1880. Initially Dilke thought him frivolous, but he came to play a major part in Dilke's official work and private life.[7] He was a witness in the divorce case that broke Dilke's career.[8] He subsequently believed that Dilke's downfall was caused by Joseph Chamberlain.[9]
A personal friend of Cardinal Manning ("almost certainly his most intimate non-Catholic friend", and Manning's preferred choice as biographer[10]), he was his biographer only in a short work.[11]
Bodley's political writings are in the general tradition of Hippolyte Taine, whom Bodley knew.[12] When Émile Boutmy, a follower of Taine, had his work on England in the same vein translated into English,[13] Bodley wrote an introduction.
Shane Leslie, a friend, described him as "one of the last cultured Europeans".[14] A 1928 work by Charles Maurras about him was entitled L'anglais qui a connu la France;[15] Maurras had already studied Bodley in 1902, in Deux témoins de la France.
He was a descendant of Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library.[17] He married Evelyn Frances Bell but they divorced in 1908. His sons were Ronald Victor Courtenay Bodley and the artist Josselin Reginald Courtenay Bodley (1893-1974), who were also the joint dedicatees of France. His daughter Ava married Ralph Wigram in 1925,[18] and John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley, in 1941.[19]
