Walter Wilson (biographer)
Walter Wilson (1781?–1847) was an English biographer of nonconformist clergy and their churches.
Life
He was born about 1781. Originally intended for the law, he became a bookseller, with Maxwell of Bell Yard, Temple Bar, London. In 1806 he took the bookshop at the Mewsgate, Charing Cross, vacated by Thomas Payne the younger.
He was living at Camden Town in 1808, from which he moved to Dorset, and again to Burnet, near Bath, Somerset, where he did some farming. Here he had a congenial neighbour in Joseph Hunter; they exchanged copies of collections of dissenting antiquities.
About 1834 he moved from Burnet to Pulteney Street, Bath. During the progress of the Sarah Hewley suit, Wilson's judgment went entirely with the defendants, and his religious views, probably under Hunter's influence, underwent a change in the Unitarian direction.
Wilson died on 21 February 1847. At the time of his death he was one of the eight registered proprietors of The Times.
Works
Reading the Memoirs of Daniel Neal, prefixed by Joshua Toulmin to his edition (1793–7) of Neal's History of the Puritans, led Wilson to collect notices of dissenting divines, and examine manuscript sources of information. He projected a biographical account of the dissenting congregations of London and the vicinity. Soon after beginning the work he came into a considerable income, and entered at the Inner Temple, but apparently never practised at the bar. For his projected work he obtained around three hundred subscribers. He published an instalment of The History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches and Meeting Houses in London, Westminster, and Southwark: including the Lives of their Ministers in 1808, 2 vols. A third volume of his Dissenting Churches appeared in 1810; a fourth in 1814, with a preface (1 May 1814) showing his personal interest in the older types of nonconformity. According to Alexander Gordon in the Dictionary of National Biography, the later volumes of his work exhibit a softer attitude towards the free-thinkers of dissent, and his facts are given fairly. By 1818 he was ready to publish a fifth and completing volume, if five hundred subscribers could be obtained; but it never appeared.
In 1822 he announced a life of Daniel Defoe, of whose publications he had made a much larger collection than had previously been brought together. His Memoirs of the Life and Times of Daniel Defoe 1830, 3 vols., is heavy, but was well reviewed by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1845). He had projected a supplementary work dealing with Defoe's literary antagonists.
Legacy
His library was sold (5–17 July 1847) and broken up. He bequeathed his manuscript collections for the history of dissent to Dr. Williams's Library; a list of these, by the then librarian, Richard Cogan, was printed in the Christian Reformer (1847, p. 758).
Family
He was twice married, and left a son, Henry Walter Wilson of the Inner Temple, and a daughter, married to Norman Garstin, colonial chaplain at Ceylon.
References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Wilson, Walter". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900.
