Sidney Smith
(1771–1845)

Clergyman and essayist, Englishman Sidney Smith was known as the wittiest man of his time. He is widely quoted even today. While discussing the hot weather with a lady acquaintance he said, "Heat, madam! It was so dreadful that I found there was nothing for it but to take off my flesh and sit in my bones." Of marriage, he said, "Marriage resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing anyone who comes between them."

Born in Woodford, Essex, the son of a gentleman of independent means, Smith was educated at Winchester and Oxford. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1794. In 1798, he took a job as a tutor for a gentleman's son in Edinburgh, where he met writers and Whig reformers. In 1802, Smith, Francis Jeffrey, and Henry Brougham founded the Edinburgh Review, a "liberal" Whig publication, to which Smith continued to contribute articles for 25 years. Smith lobbied in the Review and elsewhere against the Game Laws, transportation, prisons, slavery, and for Catholic emancipation and Church reform.

Smith moved to London in 1803, where he lectured on moral philosophy and became well known in literary society. In 1809, he moved to Yorkshire to work as a clergyman. There he also acted as magistrate and village doctor. He went to a parish in Somerset in 1829; in 1831 he was given a residentiary canonry at St. Paul's.

The Smith of Smiths (1934) is a biography of Sidney Smith written by Hesketh Pearson.

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