Author: Smith, William Henry
Biography:
SMITH, William Henry (1806-72: ODNB)
He was born at North End, Hammersmith, London, on 5 Jan. 1806 and baptised at St. Anne’s Soho on 2 Feb., the tenth of eleven children of Richard Smith (1760-1823), a retired barrister, and Ann Hanckes (1765-1842). He was educated locally and at Radley Academy and in 1821 proceeded to Glasgow College, possibly with a view to becoming a Presbyterian minister like his brother, Theyre Townsend Smith. His education was cut short by the death of his father in 1823 and he was articled to Sharon Turner, q.v. attorney and well-regarded Anglo-Saxon scholar. He practised law without enthusiasm or much success and in the 1830s went into semi-retirement, writing the two volumes listed here and a novel, Ernesto: A Philosophical Romance (1835). He entered the Middle Temple on 6 Nov. 1835 and was called to the Bar on 23 Nov. 1838. In the late 1820s he had contributed eight pieces to the Athenaeum weekly newspaper under the Wordsworthian pseudonym “Woolgatherer.” From 1836 he contributed to the Westminster Review, notably a ground-breaking essay, “The Poets of Our Age, Considered as to their Philosophical Tendencies” (Apr. 1836, 33-9), which treated Wordsworth, Shelley, and Coleridge as modern “metaphysical” poets. From 1837 he contributed over 125 articles to Blackwood’s, including “A Prosing Upon Poetry’” (Aug. 1839, 193-202). A play, Athelwold (1842), failed. Philosophical works included A Discourse on Ethics of the School of Paley (1839), a crisis-of-faith novel, Thorndale (1856), Gravenhurst (1862), and Knowing and Feeling (1874). He abandoned law in 1849 and retired to Brighton and Bowness in the Lake District, where John Wilson asked him to stand in for him as Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh but he declined. He met Lucy Caroline Cumming (1818-81) in Borrowdale and they married at St. John’s, Notting Hill, London, on 5 Mar. 1861. He suffered a heart attack in 1869 and died from consumption at 1 Norfolk Square, Brighton, on 28 Mar. 1872, leaving an estate of £5000 to his wife, Caroline, who died in 1881. Neglected, he merits a re-assessment. (ODNB 1 Oct. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 1 Oct. 2024; “Memoir” by Lucy Caroline Smith, in Gravenhurst [1875], 5-121; G. S. Merriam, The Story of William and Lucy Smith [1890]; West Sussex Journal 2 Apr. 1872; Dundee Courier 16 Dec. 1881) AA
Other Names:
- W. H. Smith