The Selected Writings

by Sydney Smith, W.H. Auden (Editor)

‘I wish you would tell Mr Sydney Smith that of all the men I ever heard of and never saw, I have the greatest curiosity to see … and to know him.’ Charles Dickens

How one agrees with Dickens. Without doubt, Sydney Smith was the most famous wit of his generation. But there was more to him than that, he was an outstanding representative of the English liberal tradition.

Starting as an impoverished village curate he went to Edinburgh as a tutor, and co-founded the Edinburgh Review, the first major nineteenth-century periodical. Happily married, he moved in 1803 to London, where he was introduced into the Holland House circle – of which he quickly became an admired and popular member – but at the age of thirty-eight a Tory government banished him to a village parsonage. There he became ‘one of the best country vicars of whom there is a record’, and after his two chief causes – the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the Reform Bill of 1832 – triumphed, he was rewarded by a canonry of St. Paul’s.

This generous selection of his writings gives the full flavour of his mind and intellectual personality. In a characteristically stimulating introduction in which he discusses Sydney Smith both as an individual and as a shining exemplar of the liberal mind, W. H. Auden places him with Jonathan Swift and Bernard Shaw among the few polemic authors ‘who must be ranked very high by any literary standard.’

Genres: Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Sydney Smith was an English Anglican clergyman, essayist, and public intellectual celebrated for his brilliant wit, humane outlook, and lively prose. Born in Essex to a mercurial merchant father and a mother of Huguenot descent, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he distinguished himself for both scholarship and personality. Ordained in 1796, he combined energetic parish work with wide intellectual interests, soon gaining attention as a preacher of unusual humor and clarity. After moving to Edinburgh in 1798 as a tutor, he helped found the influential Edinburgh Review in 1802 and remained one of its most admired contributors for decades, shaping liberal opinion with essays that blended moral seriousness and comic flair. Settling later in London, he lectured at the Royal Institution, advocated progressive causes such as Catholic emancipation, parliamentary reform, the abolition of slavery, and the education of women, and became a central figure in Whig society. Though his outspoken views limited ecclesiastical advancement, he served faithfully in rural parishes, winning deep affection from parishioners while continuing to write and speak on public issues. Smith’s reputation as one of the great conversationalists of his age endured through his sermons, essays, pamphlets, and countless anecdotes attributed to him. Remembered as much for his humane common sense as for his humor, he left a lasting mark on nineteenth-century British intellectual life and remains one of the most quoted clerical writers in English literature.