Walter Richard Cassels

English poet and theological critic

Walter Richard Cassels
Born	(1826-09-04)4 September 1826 London, England
Died	10 June 1907(1907-06-10) (aged 80) London, England
Occupation	Writer, merchant
Nationality	English
Notable works	Supernatural Religion

Walter Richard Cassels (4 September 1826 – 10 June 1907) was an English poet and theological critic best known as the author of Supernatural Religion (1874).

Early life

Cassels was born in London, the youngest son of Robert Cassels and Jean Scougall. His father was a British consul at Honfleur.^[1]^[2] In the 1850s, he published two volumes of poetry, and spent three years in Italy, where he befriended the poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning.^[3] He later became a partner with two of his brothers, Andrew and John, in the firm of Peel, Cassels & Co. in Bombay, India. In 1862, he published a monograph on the Bombay cotton industry.^[4] After serving on the Legislative Council of Bombay from 1863 to 1865, Cassels returned to England.

Supernatural Religion

In 1874, Cassels published an anonymous two-volume work entitled Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation, in which he challenged the credibility of miracles and the validity of the New Testament.^[5] The work at once attracted attention, and resulted in much speculation about the identity of the anonymous author. Theologian Otto Pfleiderer remarked that "Never before had such a systematic attack, based upon solid learning, been made in English upon the external evidences of the Christian religion."^[6] Many books and articles were written in response to the criticism of Christianity made in Supernatural Religion. The most famous of these rebuttals is a series of essays by Bishop J. B. Lightfoot, which were subsequently collected and published as a book. In 1877, a third volume was added to Supernatural Religion, and a fully revised edition was published in 1879. A series of anonymous replies to Bishop Lightfoot and other critics appeared in magazine articles and as footnotes or prefaces to reprints of Supernatural Religion. These replies were also compiled as a book in 1889. Abridged popular editions of Supernatural Religion in a single volume were published in 1902 and 1905.^[1]

Later life

News of Cassels' authorship of Supernatural Religion began to leak out in 1895, after he published a series of signed articles on theology. However, Cassels never publicly acknowledged his authorship of Supernatural Religion. Little is known about his private life, or of how he acquired his extensive knowledge of early Christianity. It is known that he collected art and was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.^[7]^[8] He never married and died in London on 10 June 1907.

Works

Eidolon, or the Course of a Soul; and other poems. William Pickering: London, 1850.
Poems. Smith, Elder & Co.: London, 1856.
Cotton: An Account of its Culture in the Bombay Presidency. 1862.

Published anonymously

Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation.
- Longmans & Co.: London, 1874 (Volumes I and II). Six editions, 1874-1876. Volume III, 1877.
- Complete Edition (3 vols), 1879.
- Popular edition (in 1 volume), 1902, Watts & Co. (Reprinted 1905.)
A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays. Longmans & Co.: London, 1889.
The Gospel according to Peter: A Study. Longmans & Co.: London, 1894.

References

^ ^a ^b "Cassels, Walter Richard (1826-1907)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 23 September 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/32325. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) (subscription required)
^ Cassels, Robert (1870). Records of the Family of Cassels and connexions. Edinburgh: T.& A Constable for A. Eliot. pp. 83–85.
^ Huxley, Leonard (October 1923). "A Visitor to the Brownings". The Yale Review. 13: 228–246.
^ "The Culture of Cotton in India". North American Review. 95 (197): 554–556. October 1862 – via JSTOR.
^ Nash, Henry S. (1953). Jackson, Samuel MacAuley (ed.). New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. XI. Michigan: Baker Book House. pp. 166–167 – via CCEL.
^ Pfleiderer, Otto; Smith, John Frederick (1890). The development of theology in Germany since Kant : and its progress in Great Britain since 1825. London: Swan Sonnenschein. p. 397.
^ Wunder, Richard P. (1989). Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805-1873 (Vol. 2). University of Delaware Press. pp. 28–29. ISBN 978-0-87413-302-8.
^ "Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870-1915". De Montfort University. Archived from the original on 9 December 2021. Retrieved 7 December 2021.

Bibliography

Lee, Sidney, ed. (1912). "Cassels, Walter Richard" . Dictionary of National Biography (2nd supplement). Vol. 1. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
Tracks of a Rolling Stone (1905), Henry J. Coke.
"Matthew Arnold and 'The Author of Supernatural Religion': The Background to God and the Bible", by Jerold J. Savory. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Autumn 1976 (Vol 16 no 4), pp. 677–91.
"Male Diagnosis of the Female Pen in Late Victorian Britain: Private Assessments of Supernatural Religion", by Alan H. Cadwallader. Journal of Anglican Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 69–88 (2007).

External links

Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation (online text of 1902 reprint)
Works by Walter Richard Cassels at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Walter Richard Cassels at Internet Archive
Works by Walter Richard Cassels at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Walter Richard Cassels at Find a Grave