Henry Alford (7 October 1810 – 12 January 1871) was an English churchman, theologian, textual critic, scholar, poet, hymnodist, and writer.

Alford was born at 25 Alfred Place, Bedford Square, London[1] of a Somersetshire family, which had given five consecutive generations of clergymen to the Anglican church.

[2]He had already taken orders, and in 1835 began his eighteen years' tenure of the vicarage of Wymeswold in Leicestershire, from which seclusion the twice-repeated offer of a colonial bishopric failed to draw him.

He was Hulsean lecturer at Cambridge in 1841–1842, and steadily built up a reputation as scholar and preacher, which would have been enhanced but for his discursive ramblings in the fields of minor poetry and magazine editing.

In March 1857 Lord Palmerston advanced him to the deanery of Canterbury, where, till his death [...], he lived the same strenuous and diversified life that had always characterized him.

Besides editing the works of John Donne, he published several volumes of his own verse, The School of the Heart (1835), The Abbot of Muchelnaye (1841), The Greek Testament.

In this work he first brought before English students a careful collation of the readings of the chief manuscripts and the researches of the ripest continental scholarship of his day.