William Adams (author)

William Adams (1814–1848), Church of England clergyman and author of Christian allegories popular in Britain in the 19th century.

Adams was a member of an old Warwickshire family, being the second son of Mr. Serjeant Adams, by his marriage with Miss Eliza Nation, daughter of a well-known Exeter banker. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and between the time of his leaving school and entering the university was the pupil of Dr. John Brasse, author of Brasse's Greek Gradus, by whom his great abilities were first appreciated. He obtained a postmastership at Merton, and in 1836 took a double first-class degree, his elder brother having gained a similar distinction eighteen months previously.

In 1837 he became fellow and tutor of his college, and in 1840 vicar of St. Peter's-in-the-East, a Merton living generally held by a resident fellow (and nowadays deconsecrated and forming part of St Edmund Hall. With his immediate predecessor at St. Peter's, Walter Kerr Hamilton, and his immediate successor, Edmund Hobhouse, Mr. Adams was very intimate. He always took a deep interest in the welfare of the parish, and has left us an interesting memorial of his incumbency in his well-known Warnings of the Holy Week, a set of lectures preached at St. Peter's in Holy Week, 1842. In the spring of this year he went to Eton as one of the examiners for the Newcastle scholarship, and, while bathing there, was all but drowned, and caught a violent cold which, flying to his lungs, ultimately proved fatal. It was hoped that a few months of residence in a warm climate would restore his health, and he accordingly passed the winter of 1842 in Madeira. But the disease had gained too firm a hold to be checked, and he resigned his living, settling at Bonchurch, Isle of Wight. Here he passed the last few years of his life, busily engaged with his pen, and taking part in every effort to improve the spiritual condition of the neighbourhood. He was at Bonchurch acquainted with Elizabeth Missing Sewell. One of his last public acts was to lay the foundation-stone of the new church at Bonchurch; and a few months later his remains were laid in the churchyard of the old church, where, by a happy design, his grave has the ‘shadow of the cross’ ever resting upon it.

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