Sydney Smith (1771-1845) was a distinguished clergyman (popular among parishioners and admired for his preaching, though impatient of theological controversies) and a prolific writer on politics and social morals. An early champion of modern ideas of liberty, Smith stood for religious toleration, Parliamentary reform and a low-tax, free-trade economy; he also made outspoken attacks on the slave trade, and on Westminster’s oppressive policy in Ireland. His early career found him tutoring in Edinburgh, where he fell in with Walter Scott and the circle of friends who later maintained The Edinburgh Review. After some years as a farmer and clergyman in Yorkshire, Smith moved to Somerset and finally to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1831. He married Catharine Amelia Pybus in 1800, and they had two children.
The defiant Mrs Partington took on the full might of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1831, the House of Lords rejected a Bill on the reform of Parliament, sent over from the House of Commons. Sydney Smith was strongly in favour of this Bill, but told a political meeting in Taunton that he was not too worried, as the Lords had set themselves a task even harder than Mrs Partington set herself in 1824. Mrs Partington? Let the Revd Mr Smith explain...
Many problems in life and society would be eased if we were better at reading characters — especially our own.
In 1804-06, the Revd Sydney Smith gave a series of lectures to the Royal Institution, later published as Sketches on Moral Philosophy. The lectures were aimed at a wide audience (much like Michael Faraday’s Christmas lectures there), and encouraged Smith’s naturally easy style. It was in one of these lectures that Smith gave us what is now an indispensable analogy for a misfit employee.
Sydney Smith warned ordinary Americans that encouraging the hawks in Washington would cost them more than blood.
In 1820, Sydney Smith interrupted his review of a recent book on the US economy to reflect on the price of military adventure. America had clashed with Britain in the War of 1812, and some in Washington were eager to renew hostilities against their old colonial master. Smith urged ‘brother Jonathan’ (the ordinary American, counterpart to John Bull) to think hard about what it would mean.