Henry Alford (theologian)

Henry Alford (7 October 1810 – 12 January 1871) was an English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer.

Life
Alford was born at 25 Alfred Place, Bedford Square, London

"of a Somersetshire family, which had given five consecutive generations of clergymen to the Anglican church. Alford's early years were passed with his widowed father, who was curate of Steeple Ashton in Wiltshire. He was a precocious lad, and before he was ten had written several Latin odes, a history of the Jews and a series of homiletic outlines. After a peripatetic school course he went up to Cambridge in 1827 as a scholar of Trinity in 1827. In 1832 he was 34th wrangler and 8th classic, and in 1834 was made a fellow of Trinity."

Service
"He had already taken orders, and in 1835 began his eighteen years' tenure of the vicarage of Wymeswold in Leicestershire, from which seclusion the twice-repeated offer of a colonial bishopric failed to draw him. He was Hulsean lecturer at Cambridge in 1841–1842, and steadily built up a reputation as scholar and preacher, which would have been enhanced but for his discursive ramblings in the fields of minor poetry and magazine editing."

In 1844, he joined the Cambridge Camden Society (CCS) which published a list of do's and don'ts for church layout which they promoted as a science. He commissioned A.W.N. Pugin to restore St Mary's church. He also was a member of the Metaphysical Society, founded in 1869 by James Knowles.

"In September 1853 Alford moved to Quebec Street Chapel, Marylebone, London, where he had a large and cultured congregation. In March 1857 Lord Palmerston advanced him to the deanery of Canterbury, where, till his death [...], he lived the same strenuous and diversified life that had always characterized him."

Personal life
Henry Alford married his cousin Frances (Fanny) Oke Alford on 10 March 1835 in Curry Rivel, Somerset. They had four children, all born in Wymeswold, of whom both the sons died in childhood. The first was Clement Henry Oke, who died in 1844, aged 11 months; the second was his elder brother Ambrose Oke, who died in Babbacombe, Torquay aged 10, on 31 August 1850.

Henry and Francis' two daughters were:

Henry Alford was the friend of many of his eminent contemporaries, and was much loved for his amiable character. He was buried at St Martin's Church, Canterbury. A description of the funeral and a tribute to Dean Alford were published in The Times. "The inscription on his tomb, chosen by himself, is Diversorium Viatoris Hierosolymam Proficiscentis ('the lodging place of a traveller on his way to Jerusalem')."

Frances Alford died in Middlesex on 18 November 1878.

Published works
"Alford was a talented artist, as his picture-book The Riviera (1870) shows, and he had abundant musical and mechanical talent. Besides editing the works of John Donne, he published several volumes of his own verse, The School of the Heart (1835), The Abbot of Muchelnaye (1841), The Greek Testament. The Four Gospels (1849), and a number of hymns, the best-known of which are 'Forward! be our watchword,' 'Come, ye thankful people, come', and 'Ten thousand times ten thousand.' He translated the Odyssey, wrote a well-known manual of idiom,A Plea for the Queen's English (1863), and was the first editor of the Contemporary Review (1866–1870)."

"His chief fame, however, rests on his monumental edition of the New Testament in Greek (8 vols.), on which he worked from 1841 to 1861. In this work he first brought before English students a careful collation of the readings of the chief manuscripts and the researches of the ripest continental scholarship of his day. Philological rather than theological in character, it marked an epochal change from the old homiletic commentary, and though more recent research, patristic and papyral, has largely changed the method of New Testament exegesis, Alford's work is still a quarry where the student can dig with a good deal of profit."

See Alford's Law for an example. Alford subsequently published the New Testament for English Readers (4 vols., Rivingtons, 1868). "His Life, written by his widow, appeared in 1873 (Rivingtons)."