John Kenrick

John Kenrick (1788-1877), historian and tutor from Exeter, was the son of Timothy Kenrick, Unitarian minister. He studied at Exeter and later at Birmingham under John Kentish, and then at Glasgow, taking an MA in 1810. He then began a tenure as classics tutor at Manchester College, York, with Charles Wellbeloved. He would become the greatest Unitarian scholar of his day, and of considerable significance for his translations of Latin grammars. He also published a number of historical texts, mostly from the classical period, and on Roman York. Through his pupils, most notably John James Tayler (1797–1869), James Martineau (1805–1900), and George Vance Smith (1816–1902), and his writings he was responsible for helping to introduce to Britain the main nineteenth-century advances in German historical criticism and philology.