Author: Grinfield, Thomas
Biography:
GRINFIELD, Thomas (1788-1870: ODNB)
He was born at Bath on 27 Sept. 1788, the son of Thomas Grinfield (1748-1824), a Moravian minister in Bristol, and his wife Anna Joanna Barham (1756-1833).In 1823 his father wrote a customary conversion memoir. (His brother Edward William Grinfield [1785-1864] became a noted biblical scholar.) He was educated at St. Paul’s and Trinity College Cambridge (BA 1812, MA 1815) and then entered the established church. He married his cousin Mildred Foster Barham 1791-1866) on 13 Sept. 1813 at Exeter. They had four children. He became curate at St. Sidwells, Exeter, and afterwards rector of Shirland, Derbyshire, from 1827 until his death. He died at 25 Richmond Terrace, Clifton on 8 Apr. 1870, and was buried at Weston super Mare. His estate was valued at around £16,000. His earliest collection, Epistles and Miscellaneous Poems (1815), consists of undistinguished epistles and occasional verse but has minor contributions to topographical poetry and critical theory: "Snowdon," "To a Young Lady, Fond of Wild Scenery," "Essay on the Formation of Genius, as Exemplified in the Poetical Character." His later religious poetry, such as his Century of Original Sacred Songs (1836, 1838) will have few modern readers and his literary criticism in Lecture on Imagination and Poetry (1841) and The Moral Influence of Shakepeare’s Plays (1850) contains nothing original. His sermons and religious essays are no longer read but The History of Preaching (1880) is still worth consulting. (ODNB 27 Jan. 2021; ancestry.co.uk 27 Jan.2021; CCEd; Fulneck Moravian Museum Archives Ms, Ful/3/1; GM May 1824, 475; Bristol Times 18 Apr. 1870) AA