Born at Pembroke in Wales, on 4 December 1795, he was the eldest child of John Walker, a naval officer, who died at Twickenham in 1811 from the effects of wounds received in action.
[1] He won the Craven scholarship in 1817, and the Porson prize for Greek verse in 1818, and he was admitted scholar of Trinity on 3 April of the latter year.
The influence of Charles Simeon helped him for a time; but he deemed himself disqualified by his sceptical views regarding eternal punishment from taking holy orders.
His friend Praed came to his assistance in 1830, and, after paying his debts, settled on him an income for life of £52 a year; Trinity College added £20.
In 1813, when he was seventeen, he published by subscription the first four books of an epic in a volume entitled ‘Gustavus Vasa, and other Poems.’ After leaving school, he made some contributions to the Etonian, which Praed edited.
In 1823 he prepared for publication John Milton's newly discovered treatise De Ecclesia Christiana, of which Charles Richard Sumner, then librarian at Windsor, was the ostensible editor.
John Moultrie published in 1852 a collection of his letters and poems, as ‘The Poetical Remains of William Sidney Walker, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, with a Memoir of the Author.’ Walker left voluminous manuscripts, examined by William Nanson Lettsom, who published in 1854 ‘Shakespeare's Versification, and its Apparent Irregularities explained by Examples from Early and Late English Writers.’ This volume was printed at the expense of George Crawshay, who made Walker's acquaintance just before he left Cambridge; it reached a second edition in 1857, and a third in 1859.