Thomas Byrth
| Thomas Byrth | |
|---|---|
| Born |
11 September 1793 Devonport, Plymouth, Devon, England |
| Died | 28 October 1849 (aged 56) Wallasey, Cheshire, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation | Divine |
| Known for | Unitarian controversy |
Thomas Byrth (11 September 1793 – 28 October 1849) was an English teacher, cleric and scholar. He was of Quaker background, and became an evangelical low church Anglican. He was opposed to high Calvinism. He was a leading defender of the conventional view of the Trinity during the unitarian controversies of the 1830s and 1840s.
Thomas Byrth was born in Plymouth Dock (now Devonport, Plymouth), on 11 September 1793. His father, John Byrth (1757–1813), was born and raised a Quaker in Kilkenny, County Westmeath, Ireland. In 1786 John Byrth married Mary Hobling, a Wesleyan Methodist from an old Cornish family, in Plymouth Dock. Their first child was baptised in a Wesleyan chapel. John Byrth was listed as being a grocer in Plymouth Dock in 1791. He retained his Quaker beliefs, and was in an 1809 list of Devon Quakers.
Thomas Byrth briefly attended the Callington, Cornwall, parish school, then spent eight years in a private school run by two Unitarian ministers. They were well-meaning but incompetent teachers. His then spent a year at a school in Launceston, Cornwall, run by Richard Cope (1776–1850), a congregational minister. Due to lack of money to pay for further education, Thomas Byrth took an apprenticeship at a chemist and druggist company in Plymouth founded by William Cookworthy (1705–80), a Quaker and pioneer porcelain manufacturer. Byrth was an apprentice with Cookworthys from 1809 to 1814.
Byrth became a close friend of Samuel Rowe (1793–1853), a bookseller and antiquarian. In 1814 they launched the Plymouth Literary Magazine and undertook an antiquarian tour of Cornwall. They published only six issues of the magazine, the last appearing on 19 November 1814. Also in 1814 they established a boarding school in Plympton, which was also short-lived. Byrth was still connected to the Quakers, but began to gradually adopt evangelical doctrines. He was a moderate evangelical, and was opposed to the high Calvinist teachings of Robert Hawker (1753–1827) that were in vogue in Plymouth at the time. Byrth was active in the Plymouth Athenaeum, described as "the centre of all literary, scientific and artistic life in South Devon."
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