Author: Sewell, William
Biography:
SEWELL, William (1804-1874: ODNB)
He was born 23 Jan. 1804 on the Isle of Wight a son of solicitor Thomas Sewell (1774-1842) and his wife and cousin, Jane Sewell (d 1848). He was baptized three years later, on 13 Jan., at Newport. Notable among his hoard of siblings, Henry (1807-1879) became the first premier of New Zealand; James Edwards became warden of New College, Oxford; and his sister Elisabeth Missing became a novelist. An accomplished scholar, he was educated at Winchester College from 1819 through 1822 and Merton College, Oxford, from 1822 (BA 1827, DD 1847). He was elected Petrean fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, won university prizes, from 1831 to 1853 was a tutor, and, from 1833 to the end of his life librarian at Exeter College. From 1836 to 1841 he served as Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy. In his very popular lectures, he played a significant part in moving the University from its long-held loyalty to Aristotle toward an interest in the philosophy of Plato. An anti-Catholic High Churchman, he was ordained deacon in 1831, priest in 1832. He held curacies, non-concurrently, at Whippingham, Isle of Wight, and at St Nicholas in Carisbrooke Castle. He contributed sympathetic articles on the Oxford Movement to the British Critic and the QR. In the 1830s, he witnessed Roman Catholic practice in Ireland. Subsequently, he lost sympathy with the Movement. He especially objected to Anglo-Catholic ritualism in the Church. His concern that the University was becoming obsessed with theology in the 1830s may have been partly responsible for the turn toward lexicology by Henry Liddell (q.v.) and Robert Scott in 1836, whose 1843 lexicon he is credited with having first suggested (Stray et al). He died on 14 Nov. 1874 at Litchford Hall, Blackley, near Manchester. At probate, his estate was estimated under £600. He never married. Besides poetry, he published books on philosophy and theology, numerous addresses and sermons, and a novel, Hawkstone: A Tale of and for England in 18— (1845). His sister Elizabeth edited two of his works of fiction, Uncle Peter’s Fairy Tale for the Nineteenth Century (1869) and The Giant (1871). (ODNB 4 Nov. 2024; CCEd 9 Nov. 2024; ancestry.com 4 Nov. 2024; C. Stray, M. Clarke, and J. T. Katz eds, Liddell and Scott: The History, Methodology, and Languages of the World’s Leading Lexicon of Ancient Greek [2016], 5) JC, CS
Other Names:
- W. Sewell