Henry Stebbing (editor)

Henry Stebbing FRS (1799–1883) was an English cleric and man of letters, known as a poet, preacher, and historian.

Within a few months he was in charge of three parishes for absentee incumbents, and rode forty miles each Sunday to do the duty.

In 1825 he was appointed evening lecturer at St. Mary's, Bungay, and about 1824 he became perpetual curate of Ilketshall St. Lawrence, Norfolk.

[1] Stebbing became, in January 1826, second master, under Edward Valpy of Norwich grammar school; Henry Reeve was one of his pupils there.

He officiated during the same period at the large cemetery of St. James, Piccadilly, which was situated behind his church, and from 1834 to December 1879 he acted as chaplain to University College hospital.

For a few months, from 21 November 1835 to the following spring, he held, on the presentation of John Norris, the vicarage of Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire.

[1] A moderate churchman, inclining to evangelicalism, in 1847 Stebbing published A Letter to Lord John Russell on the Established Church, in which he argued for a reform of the system of patronage.

[1] Stebbing's major works were:[1] He wrote a continuation to the Death of William IV, of David Hume and Tobias Smollett's History of England.

He was editor of the Diamond Bible (1834, 1840, and 1857), Diamond New Testament (1835), Charles Knight's Pictorial Edition of the Book of Common Prayer (1838–1840), Tate and Brady's Psalms (1840), Psalms and Hymns, with some original Hymns (1841), and many modern theological works.

The eldest son, John (died 1885), translated Wilhelm Humboldt's Letters to a Lady and Adolphe Thiers's History of France under Napoleon.