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John Bird Sumner was baptised on the 25th February 1780 at Kenilworth, Warwickshire, England.
He was the son of Robert Sumner and Hannah Bird.
SIBLINGS:
He was an Archbishop of Canterbury.
On 31 March 1803, John Bird Sumner married Marianne Robertson (1779-1829) in the parochial chapel of St Mary Walcot, Bath, Somerset, England, United Kingdom on the 31st March 1803.
She was the daughter of George Robertson of Edinburgh (1742-1791), a captain in the Royal Navy, and Ann (née Lewis) Robertson (1748-1802). His wife's maternal grandparents were Francis Lewis, a New York signatory of the Declaration of Independence, and Elizabeth (née Anessley) Lewis.
CHILDREN:
The Right Reverend and Right Honourable John Bird Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury passed away on the 9 Sept 1862 in Addington, Croydon, Surrey, England, United Kingdom. [1]
Burial
He was buried 12 Sept 1862 in Saint Mary the Blessed Virgin Cemetery, Addington, Surrey, England, United Kingdom. [2]
[3]
Probate
Probate was granted on the will of John Bird Sumner in 1862 [4]
Obituary
His obituary was included in the Cheltenham Chronicle, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, United Kingdom, among many other newspapers that noted his passing. [5]
— the following biography and sources for John Bird Sumner focus primarily on his relationship to William Gifford and John Murray, editor and publisher, respectively, of the influential conservative periodical the Quarterly Review. The biography and sources are by Dr Jonathan Cutmore (FRHistS), author of John Murray's Quarterly Review: Letters 1807-1843 (Liverpool University Press, 2019), from his Writing and Reading the Quarterly Review (manuscript, 2015), used by permission. Jonathan Cutmore (c) 2021
Born at Kenilworth, Warwickshire, Sumner’s parents were the Revd Robert Sumner (1748–1802), vicar of Kenilworth (in the patronage of the king), and Hannah Bird (1756/67–1846), who outlived her husband by forty-four years. After receiving a local education, in 1791 he proceeded, as his father had done before him, to Eton as a scholar; his grandfather had been headmaster there. He followed his father as well to King’s College, Cambridge, where he matriculated in 1798 (BA 1803, MA 1807, DD 1828). At King’s, Sumner was profoundly influenced by the great evangelical preacher Charles Simeon. Between 1801 and his ordination as deacon in the Church of England in 1803, he was a fellow of his college. Sumner was unusual in marrying before he obtained a living, in consequence of which, he lost his fellowship and, as Waterman points out, between 1803 and 1818 ‘he had to endure the ill-paid misery of serving as an Usher (instructor) for almost fifteen years’ (priv. corr.). He was then appointed to the lucrative living of Mapledurham, Oxford and, from 1820, to a succession of increasingly valuable prebendal stalls at Durham. He was elevated to the see of Chester in 1828; in 1848 he became Archbishop of Canterbury.
Except for his publication record, little is known about Sumner’s activities during his long residence at Eton when he thought and wrote much about political economy, about Malthus in particular. It was during his period at Eton that he began to write for the Quarterly Review. Although it is not entirely clear how he came to be a writer for the journal, the probable route was through Thomas Young or Stratford Canning. There is a chance that at Edinburgh in the winter of 1800-1801 Sumner met Young and a fellow usher at Eton, James Pillans. Young and Pillans were then in attendance at Joseph Black’s chemistry classes and, Waterman conjectures, Sumner may have been ‘among those Cambridge men who went to Edinburgh to hear Dugald Stewart’s lectures’ (priv. corr.).
If the three men struck up a friendship in Edinburgh, then just as Young sent Pillans’s first article to the Quarterly’s publisher, John Murray, so he might also have brought Sumner into the Quarterly Review. Another possible if much less likely route is through Stratford Canning. Though Canning was an early projector of the Quarterly and though Sumner was Canning’s tutor at Cambridge, an invitation from Canning to Sumner to become a Quarterly reviewer is unlikely. At the time of the formation of the journal, late 1808, and for a number of years thereafter, Canning was abroad on a diplomatic mission. To judge by his correspondence with his cousin George Canning and by the absence of correspondence with John Murray, Stratford Canning had no involvement in the Quarterly in its early years.
Sumner’s initial experience as a reviewer proved frustrating. He fell victim to the contest then waging between Murray and the Quarterly’s editor, William Gifford, over the management of the journal. The two men often were critical of each other’s preferences, the books they recommended and the men they put forward. Just as Gifford had found fault with Pillans, whom Murray had taken a liking to, so Murray now set his mind against Sumner, whom Gifford thought well of.
In early June 1810, Murray sent Sumner two books Gifford had chosen for him, Thomas Green’s Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature, and a travel book, John Harriott’s Struggles through Life. Having accepted Murray’s commission on 4 June 1810, Sumner punctually wrote and submitted his reviews; they arrived on Gifford’s desk at the end of August. It was only now that Murray read Green’s and Harriott’s books.
Having found them dull, he insisted that Sumner’s perfectly adequate treatment of them be set aside. In any case, he objected to Sumner’s fussing over the religious skepticism Green expressed in his Diary. It was a telling objection because it picked up a theme in Murray’s contest with Gifford, whether the Quarterly should engage in religious controversy. In early September, Murray sent a draft of Sumner’s review of Green to George Ellis, his primary ally against Gifford on the question of whether a defence of Christianity and the established church should be one of the Quarterly’s primary missions. While Ellis thought Sumner had done well over all, predictably he agreed with Murray.
This minor chapter in the Quarterly’s editorial dynamic played itself out in a compromise, with Gifford coming out more or less on top. Gifford sacrificed Sumner’s review of Harriott so that his review of Green might survive with its religious comments intact. It is likely that Sumner knew nothing about these internal struggles. In any case, his association with the Quarterly continued, in a desultory manner, for another fifteen years.
Sumner’s later more significant contribution to the Quarterly was a set of articles on Malthus and political economy, ‘On improving the Condition of the Poor’, which appeared in Number 23, and, in Number 34, a review of the fifth edition of Malthus’s famous essay on population. Underlying both essays is Sumner’s theological construction. Sumner opposed Godwin’s view of the perfectibility of humanity and supported Malthus’s more pessimistic assessment of human nature, that only the hand of God could repair the fallen world, that human suffering is inevitable, and that human schemes for social improvement will ultimately fail. God uses poverty to teach patience to the poor and charity to the rich.
Sumner captures these views in his 1815 ‘Condition of the Poor’ article. In it he clearly states the natural law principles espoused by Malthus to which he subscribed (p.149). The article also is in part a digest of contemporary answers to ‘the pauper question’, the idea that the great increase in population led naturally to an imbalance in prices and wages and, consequently, to an expansion of the pauper class, those who habitually lived on the poor rate. Sumner’s solution was savings banks and education: these would encourage workers to invest in the ‘perpetual stability of universal order and good government’ (p.159).
Sumner’s pro-Malthusian A Treatise on the Records of Creation was reviewed in the Quarterly in Number 31, probably by John Weyland (1774-1854), who, unlike Sumner, was a defender of the existing Poor Laws and therefore, like Robert Southey, critical of Malthus. Weyland was the founding publisher of a high-quality rival to the Quarterly, the British Review (1811-1822), which went further even than Gifford in advancing a defence of Christianity and the Church of England.
For further Research FS on John Bird Sumner (https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/sources/LWJY-F4Q)
See Also
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Categories: Archbishops of Canterbury, Church of England | Notables