Richard William Church

The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833-1845 (Dodo Press) Richard William Church

Richard William Church (1815-1890), English divine, was born at Lisbon, his early years being mostly spent at Florence. In later life he was known as Dean Church. After his father's death in 1828 he was sent to a school of a pronounced evangelical type at Redland, Bristol, and went in 1833 to Wadham College, Oxford, then an evangelical college. He took first-class honours in 1836, and in 1838 was elected fellow of Oriel. He was appointed tutor of Oriel in 1839, and was ordained the same year. He was an intimate friend of JH Newman at this period, and closely allied to the Tractarian party. In 1841 No. 90 of Tracts for the Times appeared, and Church resigned his tutorship. The dean's chief published works are a Life of St Anseim (1870), The Lives of Spenser (1879) and Bacon (1884) in Macmillan's "Men of Letters" series, an Essay on Dante (1878), The Oxford Movement (1891), together with many other volumes of essays and sermons. A collection of his journalistic articles was published in 1897 as Occasional Papers.