Charles Hennell

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

He was born in Manchester on 30 March 1809, the fifth of a family of eight children, including Sara Hennell. His father, first a foreign agent, and afterwards a partner in a mercantile house, died in 1816. By this time the family had moved to 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.

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.

Hennell was associated with John Thomas Barber Beaumont in the establishment of the New Philosophical Institution, Beaumont Square, Mile End, and was one of the trustees who endeavoured to implements his plans after his death in 1841. In 1847 Hennell withdrew from business, and with his wife and child settled at Woodford, Epping. He had differences with Beaumont's son, John Augustus Beaumont, culminating in a chancery suit, and lost nearly all his savings in railway panics. After a long illness, he died at Woodford, Essex on 2 September 1850.

In 1836 Charles Bray, author of The Philosophy of Necessity, married Hennell's sister Caroline, setting off Hennell's writing career. The Hennells had been brought up in the Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley and Thomas Belsham. In reaction to Charles Bray's freethinking (Bray had sent in particular sent him the Diegesis of Robert Taylor) Hennell undertook an examination of the New Testament narratives. He published Inquiry concerning the Origin of Christianity in 1838. The main conclusion of the work is that Christianity is to be accepted as forming simply a portion of natural human history.John Mackinnon Robertson called it:

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