Description

Meet John Aikin (1713–1780), the son of a linen-draper from Kirkcudbright, Scotland, who would teach Classics at the influential Warrington Academy. Destined, he thought, for a career as a dissenting minister, Aikin completed his education at King’s College, Aberdeen, and left a Doctor of Divinity. Poor health forced him to give up his first congregation, which he had secured at Market Harborough. He subsequently turned his attention to education and soon settled as a tutor in a school in Kibworth, where he would teach Thomas Belsham and the radical Dissenting classicist, Gilbert Wakefield.  Wakefield remembered that Aikin “had an intimacy with the best authors of Greece and Rome, superior to what I have ever known in any Dissenting minister from my own experience. His taste for composition was correct and elegant: and his repetition of beautiful passages … highly animated, and expressive of sensibility.”

n.b. around 1750