Edward Harwood

Edward Harwood (1729–1794) was a prolific English classical scholar and biblical critic.

Harwood was born at Darwen, Lancashire, in 1729. After attending a school at Darwen, he went in 1745 to the Blackburn grammar school under Thomas Hunter, afterwards vicar of Weaverham, Cheshire. Hunter wished him to enter Queen's College, Oxford, with a view to the church. But his parents were Dissenters, and he was trained for the ministry in the academy of David Jennings, at Wellclose Square, London. Leaving the academy in 1750, Harwood engaged in teaching, and was tutor in a boarding-school at Peckham. He preached occasionally for George Benson, and became intimate with Nathaniel Lardner.

In 1754 Harwood moved to Congleton, Cheshire, where he superintended a grammar school, and preached alternately at Wheelock in Cheshire and Leek, Staffordshire. At Congleton he saw much of Joseph Priestley, then at Nantwich, who thought of him as a good classical scholar and entertaining companion. From 1757 he associated also with John Taylor, who in that year became divinity tutor at Warrington Academy; and in 1761 he preached Taylor's funeral sermon at Chowbent, Lancashire. An appendix to the printed sermon takes Taylor's side in disputes about the Academy, against John Seddon, and shows, according to Alexander Gordon writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, that Harwood was by this time at one with Taylor's semi-Arian theology; although he says that he never adopted the tenets of Arius. His letter of 30 December 1784 to William Christie shows, for Gordon, that in later life he inclined to Socinianism.

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