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Alcott, Amos Bronson Burleigh, Celia C. • Channing, William Henry Cordner, John Dall, Caroline Wells Healey Furness, William Henry Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Hosmer, Frederick Lucian Johnson, Samuel Judd, Sylvester Latimer, Lewis Howard Lowell, James Russell Ripley, George Savage, Minot Judson Sears, Edmund Hamilton Sullivan, William Laurence Taft, William Howard Walker, James Weiss, John Wendte, Charles William Wooley, Celia ParkerWilliam Henry Channing
(1810-1884)
 William Henry Channing |
A nephew of William Ellery Channing, he was a minor Transcendentalist who focused on social change, and spent much of his life in England. Channing was born in Boston on May 25, 1810, the only son of Francis D, and Susan (Higginson) Channing. Channing’s father, who was a lawyer, died before the boy was born, and his uncle became a surrogate father. He was educated at Lancaster (Massachusetts) Academy and the Boston Latin School. He went on to Harvard College, and then the Divinity School there, where he finished in 1833. After graduation he preached around for a year, and then traveled in Europe. He began his ministerial career as a minister-at-large in New York working with the poor, and he also established a free chapel. He always had difficulty settling in one place. Octavius Brooks Frothingham said that he was outspoken, and that settled ministry and its steady routine were boring to him. Frothingham called him “a prophet who went from place to place, with a message of joy and hope.” (Frothingham, Transcendentalism, p. 336). After supplying pulpits for a time, Channing left New York to join a group of ministers who were headed West. He became minister in Cincinnati from 1839-1841. During this ministry he became co-editor of the Western Messenger, a Transcendentalist journal for the Midwest.
Channing became more focused on political reform, and began to advocate for the organic unity of the church, partly because of his disdain for Unitarian individualism, a concern that nearly led him to convert to Catholicism after he completed seminary. Finally he returned to New York, and was minister for a couple of years to a newly formed independent church in Brooklyn (it later met in two other locations, and was named Christian Union), where he showed his rejection of formalism by having the pulpit removed. The church was frequented by Horace Greeley and Henry James, Sr. In 1843 Channing began to edit a social reform journal, the Present. He was also a contributor to the Dial. He became especially involved with the utopian community at Brook Farm, and helped move that community in the direction of its eventual embrace of Fourierism.
In 1847 Channing became a founder of and minister to the Religious Union of Associationists in Boston, after having moved from New York in the fall of 1845, and preaching for a time in West Roxbury. This disparate Religious Union group expressed a common faith in “universal unity,” but did not succeed. Channing preached more of the socialism of Charles Fourier to them.
During his final year in Boston he edited the magazine, The Spirit of the Age. He continued his advocacy for reforming society when he moved on to be minister in Rochester, New York in 1850, where he also became active in abolitionism. His radicalism made it difficult to secure pulpits in America, and this helped influence his decision to go to England in 1854. For three years he served at the Renshaw Street Chapel in Liverpool, and then assumed James Martineau’s old pulpit at Hope Street Chapel, also in Liverpool.
Channing spent most of the remaining years of his life in England, which his wife and children enjoyed as their true home. He returned to America during the Civil War to serve as chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives, and also minister to the Unitarian society in Washington, D.C. He frequently helped with the war effort by visiting the battlefields and the hospitals.
His literary output was primarily as a biographer. He published a three volume, Memoir of William Ellery Channing in 1848, and a biography of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852). He died in London on December 23, 1884.
