Charles Christian Hennell

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Charles Christian Hennell (30 March 1809 โ€“ 2 September 1850) was an English merchant, known as a Unitarian apologist for his work An Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity.

Life

Hennell was born in

Hackney on the edge of London, where Charles attended a day school; from this he went to a school at Derby, kept by an uncle, Edward Higginson (the elder), a Unitarian minister. There he learned some Latin and French, and a little Greek.[1]

Aged 15, Hennell obtained a junior clerkship with a firm of foreign merchants in London. In 1836, after twelve years in the post, he began business on his own account in Threadneedle Street as a silk and drug merchant, and in 1843, on the recommendation of his former employers, he was appointed manager of an iron company.[1]

Hennell was associated with

Woodford, Essex on 2 September 1850.[1][2]

Works

In 1836

John Mackinnon Robertson
called it:

... the first systematic analysis, in English, without animus, of the gospels as historical documents.[4]

And in his Short History Robertson classified Hennell as a representative of "revived English

rational dissenter circles going back to Priestley, with some German theologians, but largely limited (as Strauss wrote) to works in Latin; and that his writing was not in those terms so innovative as to justify the weight sometimes given it as an influence on George Eliot.[6]

Hennell published in 1839 Christian Theism, an essay on religious sentiment after the end of a belief in miraculous revelation. A second edition of the Inquiry appeared in 1841; it was republished with Christian Theism in one volume, 1870.[1]

Robertson commented on how

Mary Ann Evans (the future writer George Eliot) was for the time close to the Brays, and in 1852 she wrote an account of the Inquiry for the Analytical Catalogue of John Chapman's publications.[1]

Family

Hennell's acquaintance with Dr. Brabant was followed (1843) by marriage to his daughter, Elizabeth Rebecca ("Rufa");[12] Mary Ann Evans took over the English translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu that Rufa had started. After Hennell's death she married in 1857 a disillusioned Anglican priest, the author Wathen Mark Wilks Call.[12][13]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Scott 1891.
  2. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12939. Retrieved 9 April 2016. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  3. ^ Robert Taylor, Herbert Cutner (editor), The Diegesis (1997), p. 37; Google Books.
  4. John Mackinnon Robertson, History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, Part 1 (2003 reprint), p. 140; Google Books
    .
  5. John Mackinnon Robertson, A Short History of Freethought, Ancient and Modern (1899), p. 384;archive.org
    .
  6. ^ Elinor Shaffer, Kubla Khan and the Fall of Jerusalem, pp. 230โ€“2.
  7. John Mackinnon Robertson, History of Freethought in the Nineteenth Century, Part 2 (2003 reprint), p. 506; Google Books
    .
  8. ^ William Hodge Mill, Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Gospel vol. 1 (1840), p. 54 note 10; archive.org.
  9. ^ Laurel Brake, Marysa Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (2009), p. 623; Google Books.
  10. The Christian Remembrancer, vol. 11 (January to June 1846), pp. 347โ€“401; archive.org
    .
  11. ^ Rosemary Ashton, 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London (2006), p. 91.
  12. ^
    doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/12939. (Subscription or UK public library membership
    required.)
  13. ^ "Call, Wathen Mark Wilks (CL835WM)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
Attribution

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Scott, James Moffat (1891). "Hennell, Charles Christian". In Stephen, Leslie; Lee, Sidney (eds.). Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 25. London: Smith, Elder & Co.

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