Selwyn, William

Person

Selwyn, William

1806 - 1875

William Selwyn was born on 19th February 1806. He was a Church of England clergyman, canon of Ely Cathedral, Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University, and an amateur astronomer.
Selwyn was the eldest surviving son of William Selwyn and his wife Laetitia Kynaston.
He was educated at Eton College from 1823 and St John's College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1824. In 1826 he won all the Browne medals and he was also Craven scholar. He graduated in 1828 as sixth wrangler, and also senior classic and first chancellor's medallist. His subsequent degrees were MA in 1831, BD in 1850, and DD in 1864.
In March 1829 Selwyn was made a fellow of St John's, and in the same year gained the Norrisian prize. He was ordained deacon by the bishop of Ely in 1829 and priest by the bishop of Rochester in 1831. In 1831 he became the rector of Branstone, Leicestershire. He married Juliana Elizabeth Cooke in 1832.
In 1846 he became vicar of Melbourne, Cambridgeshire, in the chapter of Ely and he remained in that post until 1853. In 1833 he was made a canon residentiary of Ely, an office which he retained until his death. He was also elected to the Lady Margaret’s professorship of divinity at the University of Cambridge in 1855.
He insisted on setting apart out of his own income the yearly sum of £700 for the endowment of the Norrisian professorship and after that for furthering the study of theology in Cambridge.
In 1857 he was appointed Ramsden preacher and in 1859 was chaplain-in-ordinary to the queen. He served on the committee to revise the Authorized Version of the Old Testament. He was honorary joint curator of Lambeth Library from 1872, and president of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1867. Selwyn published letters, speeches, sermons, and works on Old Testament criticism.
One of Selwyn’s major concerns was the position of the cathedral in the church. He questioned the centralizing tendency of the ecclesiastical commission, and its emphasis upon the parish, publishing a pamphlet in 1840 entitled 'An Attempt to investigate the True Principles of Cathedral Reform'. He believed in the capability of the church to reform itself through its councils. In 1852 he was named a member of the cathedrals commission, and the report of 1854 was understood to be largely his work. He was also the moving cause of the rebuilding of his own college chapel at St. John’s, for which purpose funds had been accumulating under the bequest of a late master.
Selwyn was also a keen astronomer and whilst at Ely he established an observatory in an area of the cathedral precincts. In collaboration with John Persehouse Titterton, a local photographer, he prepared a series of photographs of the solar disc over an entire sunspot cycle from 1863 to 1874 using a six-inch achromatic lens. The prints were donated to the Royal Greenwich Observatory and Selwyn was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1866. He was also an elected Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In Michaelmas term 1866, when riding along the Trumpington Road, he was thrown from his horse. He never wholly recovered from the effects of the fall and died at Vine Cottage, Cambridge, on 24 April 1875. He was buried at Ely cathedral and has a monument there.

J. H. Lupton, revised by Ellie Clewlow, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004: https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-25069;jsessionid=73BC17D10087F70B097293D74D5CE4FA