Author: Shepherd, William
Biography:
SHEPHERD, William (1768-1847: ODNB)
He was born in Thomas Street, Liverpool, on 11 Oct. 1768 and baptised on 15 Nov. at Benn’s Gardens Presbyterian Chapel, the son of William Shepherd, master shoemaker and burgess, and Elizabeth Mather, daughter of the dissenting minister Benjamin Mather, who had married on 23 Jan. 1768 at St. Nicholas, Liverpool. He was educated by some leading dissenters at Holden’s Academy near Rainford (1776-82), in Bolton (1782-85), at the famed Daventry Academy (1785-88) run by Dr. Thomas Belsham, and at New College Hackney (1788-80). In Liverpool he became acquainted with William Roscoe (q.v.) who was to become a lifelong friend. In 1791 he became unitarian minister at Gateacre, near Liverpool. He married Frances Nicholson, daughter of a Liverpool merchant, on 8 June 1792 at St. James, Toxteth. There was no issue. In the era of the treason trials he visited Jeremiah Joyce in the Tower in 1794 and Gilbert Wakefield (q.v.) in Dorchester gaol in 1799. He was in Paris in 1802 and 1814 and published an account of his visits. He opened a school and with fellow-Unitarians Lant Carpenter (q.v.) and Jeremiah Joyce published a compilation on Systematic Education (1815). Possibly under Roscoe’s influence, he developed an interest in Italian literature and produced a well-regarded Life of Poggio Bracciolini (1803). His Sermon on the Fatal Effects of Intolerance (1816) and his editing with a memoir of the abolitionist Edward Rushton’s (q.v.) Poems and Other Writings (1824) are still of value. The University of Edinburgh awarded him an LLD in 1834. His wife Frances died on 17 Nov. 1829 and Hannah Joyce, the daughter of his lifelong friend and radical dissenting minister Jeremiah Joyce, whom he had adopted, became his housekeeper. She would later prefix a memoir to a selection of his letters. In 1837 Thomas De Quincey made some disparaging and somewhat ill-judged remarks about his Jacobinism and the literati loosely grouped around Roscoe and Currie, which he refuted. He died 21 July 1847 at the Nook, Gateacre, with a marble tablet and inscription erected in 1850. (ODNB 17 Mar. 2023; DNB; Hannah Ridyard, A Selection from the Early Letters of the Late Rev. William Shepherd, LL.D. [1855]; “Brief Memoir,” Imperial Magazine Apr. 1821, 378-80; Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine Feb. 1837, 70-73 and May 1837, 337-40; Liverpool Mercury 20 Nov. 1829, 23 July 1847) AA
Other Names:
- W. Shepherd