William Boyd Carpenter
26 March 1841 -
26 October 1918

Family

William Boyd Carpenter was the second son of Rev. Henry Carpenter of Liverpool and his wife, Hester, sister of Archibald Boyd, Dean of Exeter. William Carpenter married twice: first, in 1864, to Harriet Charlotte Peers; second, in 1883, to Annie Maude Gardner. He had five sons and six daughters.

Education

From the Royal Institution, Liverpool, Carpenter won an open scholarship at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, and graduated B.A. in 1864. He delivered the Hulsean Lectures at Cambridge in 1878 and the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 1887. In 1895, he delivered a series of lectures on preaching at Cambridge. In 1904 and again, in 1913, he delivered the Noble Lectures at Harvard, and in the latter year also presented the Liverpool Lecture.

Church Appointments and Service

Carpenter was ordained in 1864 to a curacy at All Saints, Maidstone. Two years later he became curate of St. Paul's, Clapham, and from 1867 until 1870 he served as curate for Holy Trinity, Lee. In 1870 he was appointed vicar of St. James's, Halloway, from which he was transferred, in 1877, to "the fashionable parish of Christ Church, Lancaster Gate." Two years later, he was appointed to a royal chaplaincy, and in 1882 was made a canon of Windsor. In 1884, he was preferred, by Gladstone, for the See of Ripon, which he administered for twenty-five years. Upon his resignation, in 1911, Carpenter became canon and, later, sub-dean of Westminster.

Noteworthy Publications

Carpenter was a prolific writer, an author of commentaries, reviews, religious poetry, books of devotion, and popular expositions of poetry, particularly of Dante. His popular religious teaching is best exemplified by his Introduction to the Study of the Scriptures (1902). Under the nom de plume Delaval Boyd, Carpenter published a tragedy, Brian (1905).

Footnote

Carpenter's reputation "rests mainly on his oratory. He spoke without manuscript or notes, with extreme rapidity, and in a beautifully modulated voice; this caused him to be known as 'the silver-tongued bishop of Ripon.'"

"He showed himself a persuasive exponent of Victorian religious liberalism." -- DNB 1912-21: 94