William Enfield

William Enfield (29 March 1741 – 3 November 1797) was a British Unitarian minister who published a bestselling book on elocution entitled "The Speaker" (1774).

Enfield was born in Sudbury, Suffolk to William and Ann Enfield. In 1758, he entered Daventry Academy at the behest of his teacher and minister, William Hextal. In 1763 he became the minister at Benn's Garden Chapel in Liverpool, a wealthy and well-connected congregation. In 1767 Enfield married Mary Holland, the daughter of a local draper, and together they had five children. In 1770 he moved to Warrington to be the minister of the Cairo Street Chapel and a tutor of rhetoric and modern languages at Warrington Academy. He remained there until 1785, when he was called to be the minister of the distinguished Octagon Chapel in Norwich.

Despite being a Unitarian, Enfield still respected the Established Church and supported the government intertwined with it. When fellow Unitarian Joseph Priestley attacked these institutions, Enfield published "Remarks on Several Late Publications in a Letter to Dr. Priestley" (1770). Enfield believed that Dissenters would eventually win recognition from the government and decried Priestley's abrasive strategy. Priestley replied in a dismissive pamphlet, but the two still remained friends. Eventually, Enfield changed his position, agreeing with Priestley that Dissenting civil rights were too slow in coming.

Throughout his career, Enfield focused more on ethics than on theology in his many published sermons and essays. He was also a contributor to the "Monthly Magazine" and at his death had just started a biographical dictionary project with John Aikin, a friend from Warrington. Like Aikin and Priestley, Enfield wanted to remain current in many disciplines. Believing that natural philosophy was essential to his students, he studied mathematics one summer and subsequently published a textbook dedicated to Priestley: "Institutes of Natural Philosophy, Theoretical and Experimental" (1783). His most successful work, however, was "The Speaker" (1774), an anthology of literary extracts intended to teach elocution. He published a sequel, "Exercises in Elocution" in 1780. Enfield's "Speaker" remained in print until the middle of the nineteenth century and inspired other anthologies, such as Mary Wollstonecraft's "The Female Speaker".

Enfield died on 3 November 1797. [Webb, R. K. " [http://bert.lib.indiana.edu:2378/view/article/8804 William Enfield] ". "Oxford Dictionary of National Biography". Oxford University Press (2004). Retrieved on 21 July 2007.]

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