William Sewell (author)

William Sewell (23 January 1804 – 14 November 1874), English divine and author, was born at Newport, Isle of Wight, the son of a solicitor.

He was educated at Winchester and Merton College, Oxford, was elected a fellow of Exeter College in 1827, and from 1831-1853 was a tutor there. From 1836-1841 he was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy. Sewell, who took holy orders in 1830, was a friend of Pusey, Newman and Keble in the earlier days of the Tractarian movement, but subsequently considered that the Tractarians leaned too much towards Rome, and dissociated himself from them, his novel Hawkstone being opposed to Newman's position at the time. When, however, in 1849, JA Froude published his Nemesis of Faith, Sewell denounced the wickedness of the book to his class, and, when one of his pupils confessed to the possession of a copy, seized it, tore it to pieces, and threw it in the fire.

In 1843 he, with some friends, founded at Rathfarnham, near Dublin, St Columba's College, designed to be a sort of Irish Eton, and in 1847 helped to found Radley College. Sewell's intention was that each of these schools should be conducted on strict High Church principles. He was originally himself one of the managers of St Columba, and later the third Warden of Radley, but his business management was not successful in either case, and his personal responsibility for the debts contracted by Radley caused the sequestration of his Oxford fellowship. In 1862 his financial difficulties compelled him to leave England for Germany, and he did not return till 1870.

Publications

• Translations of the Agamemnon (1846), Georgics (1846 and 1854) and Odes and Epodes of Horace (1850)
• An Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato (1841)
• Christian Politics (1844)
• Hawkstone: a tale of and for England (fiction) (1845)
• The Nation, the Church and the University of Oxford (1849)
• Christian Vestiges of Creation (1861)

Siblings

• His elder brother, Richard Clarke Sewell (1803-1864), practised successfully as a barrister in England, and then went to Australia, where he obtained a large criminal practice. In 1857 he was appointed reader in law to the University of Melbourne. He was the author of a large number of legal works.
• A younger brother, Henry Sewell became the first premier of New Zealand.
• Another brother James Edwards Sewell was warden of New College, Oxford.
• A sister, Elizabeth Missing Sewell (1815-1906), was the author of Amy Herbert and many other High Church novels, and of several devotional books. An edition of her works was published in eleven volumes (1886).

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: