Sydney Smith - Doughty Street, London, UK
N 51° 31.421 W 000° 07.007
30U E 700009 N 5712004
This brown plaque is on the wall of a property in Doughty Street.
Waymark Code: WMDPNK
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 02/11/2012
Views: 2
The plaque reads:
"LCC / Sydney Smith / 1771 - 1845 / Author and wit / lived here".
"Smith was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he took orders and became a fellow. After two years in Wiltshire as a curate, he became tutor in 1797 to Michael Hicks Beach and then to his younger brother William. The continent being closed by the war, they settled in Edinburgh. During his stay there, he launched in 1802 the Edinburgh Review with his friends Brougham and Francis Jeffrey and contributed to it for 25 years. From 1806 Smith was rector of Foston near York, which he held until 1829, when he moved to the living of Combe Florey in Somerset. In 1807 his Peter Plymley letters, urging religious liberty, had a great success. Smith was an ardent advocate of catholic emancipation, had a distaste for the excesses of methodists, and his speech at Taunton in 1831 on parliamentary reform (‘Mrs Partington and the Atlantic Ocean’) became an instant classic. When his Whig friends came to power in 1830, Grey gave him a canonry at St Paul's, but he was passed over for a bishopric, which hurt him."
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