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William Enfield (29 March 1741 – 3 November 1797) was a British Unitarianism minister who published a bestselling book on elocution entitled The Speaker (1774).
In Norwich Enfield's congregation assembled prominent families: the Martineau family, two unrelated Taylor families (those descending from John Taylor his predecessor at the Octagon, and that of William Taylor), and several others. His reputation was for bringing those of different views into polite discussion,, and he founded the Speculative Society, including Anglican and nonconformist clergy, and physicians.
Enfield died on 3 November 1797.Webb, R. K. " William Enfield". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press (2004). Retrieved on 21 July 2007.
Throughout his career, Enfield focused more on ethics than on theology in his many published sermons and essays. He was also a contributor to the Monthly Magazine and at his death had just started a biographical dictionary project with John Aikin, a friend from Warrington. Like Aikin and Priestley, Enfield wanted to remain current in many disciplines. Believing that natural philosophy was essential to his students, he studied mathematics one summer and subsequently published a textbook dedicated to Priestley: Institutes of Natural Philosophy, Theoretical and Experimental (1783).
His most successful work, however, was The Speaker (1774), an anthology of literary extracts intended to teach elocution, and produced first for his Warrington pupils.Claudia L. Johnson, The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (2002), p. 131. He published a sequel, Exercises in Elocution in 1780. Enfield's Speaker remained in print until the middle of the nineteenth century and inspired other anthologies, such as Mary Wollstonecraft's The Female Reader (1789).
Enfield industriously translated Brucker’s multi-volume Critical History of Philosophy.
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