Author: Whitfield, Henry
Biography:
WHITFIELD, Henry (1776-1816: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 16 Dec. 1776 at Thornton Dale, Yorkshire, with only his father’s name given. The Cambridge admission registers state that his father was Robert Whitfield of 10 George Street, Minories, London, and ACAD adds his mother’s first name, Sarah. (There are no obvious matches in Yorkshire or London for their marriage.) He was educated at Eton (King’s Scholar 1787) and King’s College, Cambridge (matric. 1796, BA 1801, MA 1804, Fellow, 1799-1816). On 17 Apr. 1799 his father placed him in a Mr. Faux’s private madhouse at Bethnal Green. He was “in a very disordered state of mind” but had sufficiently recovered by the end of June to be allowed to complete the probationary period of his Fellowship. He died at Cambridge in late Jan. 1816 but may have been buried at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, on 30 Jan. 1816. There is no Cambridge burial record. The work listed here is a revised and expanded version of a six-page work published the previous year. Other works of his were also printed by S. Highley of Fleet Street: Two Letters from Satan to Buonaparte (8 pages, 1804) and the novel A Picture from Life: or, The History of Emma Tankerville and Sir Henry Moreton (1804, 1808). Various other novels have been attributed to him, including the string Villeroy (1790-1), Sigismar (1799), and Geraldwood (1801), but the attributions are doubtful given his age and the circumstances of anonymity. The string Leopold (1803) and But which? (1807) is also doubtful. Leopold was printed by Highley and advertised anonymously alongside two works with Whitfield’s name at the end of A Picture from Life. The Monthly Review may have attributed it him on this basis (MR Aug. 1804). Watkins is probably correct in listing only A Picture from Life as his work. Watkins, however, confused him with another Rev. Henry Whitfield (1769-1791), the son of Rev. Henry Whitfield (1741-1813); both were educated at Pembroke, Cambridge, and were rectors of Lothbury, London. Henry Whitfield (senior) wrote to the Monthly Review stating that he was not the author of Leopold (MR, Sept. 1804, 112). (ancestry.co.uk 17 May 2024; findmypast.co.uk 17 May 2024; Watkins, 383; R. A. Austen-Leigh, The Eton College Register 1753-1790, 561-2; Monthly Magazine Mar. 1804, 160; Cambridge Chronicle 9 Feb. 1816; GM Apr. 1816, 377; EN1, EN2; Patricia McGuire, archivist, King’s College Cambridge) AA