Walter Richard Cassels

Cassels was born in London, the youngest son of Robert Cassels and Jean Scougall. His father was a British consul at Honfleur.{{cite book |last1=Cassels |first1=Robert |title=Records of the Family of Cassels and connexions |date=1870 |publisher=T.& A Constable for A. Eliot |location=Edinburgh |pages=83–85 |url=https://archive.org/details/recordsoffamily00cass/page/84/mode/2up}} In the 1850s, he published two volumes of poetry, and spent three years in Italy, where he befriended the poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning.{{cite journal |last1=Huxley |first1=Leonard |authorlink=Leonard Huxley (writer)|title=A Visitor to the Brownings |journal=The Yale Review |date=October 1923 |volume=13 |pages=228–246 |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.502026/page/n230/mode/1up}} He later became a partner with two of his brothers, Andrew and John, in the firm of Peel, Cassels & Co. in Bombay, India. In 1862, he published a monograph on the Bombay cotton industry.{{cite journal |title=The Culture of Cotton in India |journal=North American Review |date=October 1862 |volume=95 |issue=197 |pages=554–556 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/25100260|jstor=25100260}} After serving on the Legislative Council of Bombay from 1863 to 1865, Cassels returned to England.{{cite book |title=Who Was Who 1897-1915 (Vol 1) |date=1966 |publisher=Adam & Charles Black |location=London |page=124 |url=https://archive.org/details/whowaswho18971910001vari/page/124/mode/1up}}

In 1874, Cassels published an anonymous two-volume work entitled Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation, in which he challenged the credibility of miracles and the validity of the New Testament.{{cite book |last1=Nash |first1=Henry S. |editor1-last=Jackson |editor1-first=Samuel MacAuley |chapter=Supernatural Religion|title=New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. XI |date=1953 |publisher=Baker Book House |location=Michigan |pages=166–167 |url=https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/encyc11/encyc11/Page_166.html|via=CCEL}} The work at once attracted attention, and resulted in much speculation about the identity of the anonymous author. Theologian Otto Pfleiderer remarked that "Never before had such a systematic attack, based upon solid learning, been made in English upon the external evidences of the Christian religion."{{cite book |last1=Pfleiderer |first1=Otto |last2=Smith |first2=John Frederick |author1-link=Otto Pfleiderer |title=The development of theology in Germany since Kant : and its progress in Great Britain since 1825 |date=1890 |publisher=Swan Sonnenschein |location=London |page=397 |url=https://archive.org/details/a603765000pfleuoft/page/n412/mode/1up}} Many books and articles were written in response to the criticism of Christianity made in Supernatural Religion. The most famous of these rebuttals is a series of essays by Bishop {{nowrap|J. B. Lightfoot}}, which were subsequently collected and published as a book. In 1877, a third volume was added to Supernatural Religion, and a fully revised edition was published in 1879. Cassels published a series of anonymous replies to Bishop Lightfoot and other critics in magazine articles and as footnotes or prefaces to reprints of Supernatural Religion. These replies were also compiled as a book in 1889. Abridged popular editions of Supernatural Religion in a single volume were published in 1902 and 1905.{{cite ODNB |title=Cassels, Walter Richard (1826–1907)|url=https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/32325 |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/32325 |date=23 September 2004}}

News of Cassels' authorship of Supernatural Religion began to leak out in 1895, after he published a series of signed articles on theology.{{cite journal |title=Literary Department |journal=Christian Literature |date=May 1895 |volume=13 |issue=1 |page=51 |url=https://archive.org/details/sim_christian-literature_1895-05_13_1/page/51/mode/1up?q=cassels+%22supernatural+religion%22 |language=English|via=Internet Archive}}

However, Cassels never publicly acknowledged his authorship of Supernatural Religion. Little is known about his private life, or of how he acquired his extensive knowledge of early Christianity. It is known that he collected art and was a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.{{cite book |last1=Wunder |first1=Richard P. |title=Hiram Powers: Vermont Sculptor, 1805–1873 (Vol. 2) |date=1989 |publisher=University of Delaware Press |isbn=978-0-87413-302-8 |pages=28–29 |url=https://archive.org/details/hirampowersvermo0002wund/page/28/mode/2up}}{{cite web |title=Exhibitions of the Royal Photographic Society 1870–1915 |url=http://erps.dmu.ac.uk/exhibitor_details.php?year=1896&efn=Walter+R.+Cassels |publisher=De Montfort University |access-date=7 December 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20211209195353/http://erps.dmu.ac.uk/exhibitor_details.php?year=1896&efn=Walter+R.+Cassels|archive-date=9 December 2021}} He never married and died in London on 10 June 1907.{{cite journal |last1=Columbine |first1=W.B. |title=Walter R. Cassels |journal=The Literary Guide |date=1 July 1907 |pages=105–106 |url=https://reader.exacteditions.com/issues/65381/}} {{subscription required}}

• [https://archive.org/details/eidolonorcourseo00cassrich Eidolon, or the Course of a Soul]; and other poems. William Pickering: London, 1850.
• [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10328 Poems]. Smith, Elder & Co.: London, 1856.
• [https://archive.org/details/cottonanaccount00unkngoog Cotton: An Account of its Culture in the Bombay Presidency]. 1862.

• Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation.
• [https://archive.org/details/supernaturalreli02cassiala Longmans & Co.: London, 1874 (Volumes I and II). Six editions, 1874–1876. Volume III, 1877.]
• Complete Edition (3 vols), 1879.
• [http://www.ftarchives.net/cassels/sr/contents.htm Popular edition (in 1 volume), 1902, Watts & Co. (Reprinted 1905.)]
• A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays. Longmans & Co.: London, 1889.
• [https://archive.org/details/gospelaccordingt00cassrich The Gospel according to Peter: A Study]. Longmans & Co.: London, 1894.

{{Reflist}}

• {{cite DNB12|wstitle=Cassels, Walter Richard|volume=1}}
• [https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/497 Tracks of a Rolling Stone] (1905), Henry J. Coke.
• [https://doi.org/10.2307/450282 "Matthew Arnold and 'The Author of Supernatural Religion': The Background to God and the Bible"], by Jerold J. Savory. SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, Autumn 1976 (Vol 16 no 4), pp. 677–91.
• [https://doi.org/10.1177/1740355307077933 "Male Diagnosis of the Female Pen in Late Victorian Britain: Private Assessments of Supernatural Religion"], by Alan H. Cadwallader. Journal of Anglican Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 69–88 (2007).

• [http://www.ftarchives.net/cassels/sr/contents.htm Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation] (online text of 1902 reprint)
• {{Gutenberg author | id=3468}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Walter Richard Cassels}}
• {{Librivox author |id=12673}}
• {{Find a Grave|142180880}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Cassels, Walter Richard}}

Category:1826 births

Category:1907 deaths

Category:19th-century English theologians

Category:English biblical scholars

Category:Criticism of the Bible

Category:Fellows of the Royal Photographic Society

Category:Members of the Bombay Legislative Council

Category:Poets from London