Wakefield is supposed by some to occupy the site of a Roman station. In Domesday the name occurs as Wackefield. Originally it consisted of three hamlets—Northgate, Kirkgate, and Westgate. The manor of Wakefield soon after the Conquest was granted to William, third earl of Warren. It formed an extensive baronial liberty extending westwards to the borders of Lancashire and Cheshire. On the death without male issue (30th June 1347) of John, eighth earl of Warren, it reverted to the crown, aud by Edward III. it was given to his fifth son, Edward de Langley, whom he created earl of Cambridge, and who in the reign of Richard II. was created duke of York. After the battle of Wakefield in 1460 it remained in the possession of the crown till the reign of Charles I., who granted it to Henry, earl of Holland. It became the marriage portion of the earl’s daughter when she married Sir Gervaise Clifton of Clifton in the county of Nottingham. About 1663 Sir Gervaise Clifton sold it to Sir Christopher Clapham, whose heirs in the year 1760 sold it to the duke of Leeds, and it still remains in the possession of that family. Near Wakefield Queen Margaret inflicted a memorable defeat on Richard, duke of York (31st December 1460). The town has possessed a corn-market since the time of the Saxons. It obtained a charter for a cattle-market 1st March 1765. It was incorporated by Charles I. in 1626, and was governed by a constable, until it obtained a new charter under the Municipal Act, 11th March 1848. Since 1832 it has returned a member of parliament. Under an Improvement Act obtained in 1877, the corporation were empowered to purchase the waterworks belonging to a company which had been formed in 1835. In 1880 an Act was granted for obtaining a supply from Rishworth Moors, near Halifax, and the works were completed in 1888 at a cost of about £500,000.

WAKEFIELD, Edward Gibbon (1796-1862), colonial statesman, was born in London, March 20, 1796, of an originally Quaker family. His father, Edward Wakefield, author of Ireland, Statistical and Political, was a surveyor and land agent in extensive practice; his grandmother, Priscilla Wakefield, was a popular author for the young, and one of the first introducers of savings banks. Wakefield was for a short time at Westminster School, and was brought up to his father’s profession, which he relinquished on occasion of his elopement at the age of 20 with Miss Pattle, the orphan daughter of an Indian civil servant. The young lady’s relatives ultimately became reconciled to the match, and procured him an appointment as attaché to the British legation at Turin. He resigned this post in 1820, upon the death of his wife, to whom he was fondly attached, and, though making some efforts to connect himself with journalism, spent the years immediately succeeding in idleness, residing for the most part in Paris. In 1826 he appeared before the public as the hero of a most extraordinary adventure, the abduction of Miss Ellen Turner, daughter of William Turner, of Shrigley Park, Cheshire. Miss Turner was decoyed from school by means of a forged letter, and made to believe that she could only save her father from ruin by marrying Wakefield, whom she accordingly accompanied to Gretna Green. This time the family refused to condone his proceedings; he was tried with his confederates at Lancaster assizes, March 1827, convicted, and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment in Newgate. The marriage, which had not been consummated, was dissolved by a special Act of Parliament. A disgrace which would have blasted the career of most men made Wakefield a practical statesman and a benefactor to his country. Meditating, it is probable, emigration upon his release, he turned his attention while in prison to colonial subjects, and acutely detected the main causes of the slow progress of the Australian colonies in the enormous size of the landed estates, the reckless manner in which land was given away, the absence of all systematic effort at colonization, and the consequent discouragement of immigration and dearth of labour. He proposed to remedy this state of things by the sale of land in small quantities at a sufficient price, and the employment of the proceeds as a fund for promoting immigration. These views were expressed with extraordinary vigour and incisiveness in his Letter from Sydney (1829), published while he was still in prison, but composed with such graphic power that it has been continually quoted as if written on the spot. After his release Wakefield seemed disposed for a while to turn his attention to social questions at home, and produced a tract on the Punishment of Death, with a terribly graphic picture of the condemned sermon in Newgate, and another on incendiarism in the rural districts, with an equally powerful exhibition of the degraded condition of the agricultural labourer. He soon, however, became entirely engrossed with colonial affairs, and, having impressed Stuart Mill, Colonel Torrens, and other leading economists with the value of his ideas, became a leading though not a conspicuous manager of the South Australian Company, by which the colony of South Australia was ultimately founded. In 1833 he published anonymously England and America, a work primarily intended to develop his own colonial theory, which is done in the appendix entitled “The Art of Colonization.” The body of the work, however, is fruitful in seminal ideas, though some statements may be rash, and some conclusions extravagant. It contains the distinct proposal that the transport of letters should be wholly gratuitous—the precursor of subsequent reform—and the prophecy that, under given circumstances, “the Americans would raise cheaper corn than has ever been raised.” In 1836 Wakefield published the first volume of an edition of Adam Smith, which he did not complete. In 1837 the New Zealand Association was established, and he became its managing director. Scarcely, however, was this great undertaking fairly commenced when he accepted the post of private secretary to Lord Durham on the latter’s appointment as special commissioner to Canada. The Durham Report, the charter of constitutional government in the colonies, though drawn up by Charles Buller, embodied the ideas of Wakefield, and the latter was the means of its being given prematurely to the public through the Times, to prevent its being tampered with by the Government. He acted in the same spirit a few months later, when (about July, 1839), understanding that the authorities intended to prevent the despatch of emigrants to New Zealand, he hurried them off on his own responsibility, thus compelling the Government to annex the country just in time to anticipate a similar step on the part of France. For several years Wakefield continued to direct the New Zealand Company, fighting its battles with the colonial office and the missionary interest, and secretly inspiring and guiding many parliamentary committees on colonial subjects, especially on the abolition of transportation. The company was by no means a financial success, and many of its proceedings were wholly unscrupulous and indefensible; its great object, however, was attained, and New Zealand became the Britain of the south. In 1846 Wakefield, exhausted with labour, was struck down by apoplexy, and spent more than a year in complete retirement, writing during his gradual recovery his Art of Colonization. The management of the company had meanwhile passed into the hands of others, whose sole object was to settle accounts with the Government, and wind up the undertaking. Wakefield seceded, and joined Lord Lyttelton and Mr Godley in establishing the Canterbury settlement as a Church of England colony. A portion of his correspondence on this subject has been published by his son, and is perhaps the most adequate memorial extant of the vigour and sagacity of his intellect. As usual with him, however, he failed to retain the confidence of his coadjutors to the end. In 1853, after the grant of a constitution to New Zealand, he took up his residence in the colony, and immediately began to act a leading part in colonial politics. In 1854 he appeared in the first New Zealand parliament as extra-official adviser of the acting governor, a position which excited great jealousy, and as the mover of a resolution demanding the appointment of a responsible ministry. It was carried unanimously, but difficulties, which will be found detailed in Swainson’s New Zealand and its Colonization (ch. 12), prevented its being made effective until after the mover’s retirement from political life. In December 1854, after a fatiguing address to a public meeting, followed by prolonged exposure to a south-east gale, his constitution entirely broke down. He spent the rest of his life in retirement, dying at Wellington on 16th May 1862.

Wakefield was a man of large views and lofty aims, and in private life displayed the warmth of heart which commonly accompanies these qualities. His main defect was unscrupulousness: he hesitated at nothing necessary to accomplish an object, and the conviction of his untrustworthiness gradually alienated his associates, and left him politically powerless. Excluded from parliament by the fatal error of his youth, he was compelled to resort to indirect means of working out his plans by influencing public men. But for a tendency to paradox, his intellectual powers were of the highest order, and as a master of nervous idiomatic English he is second to Cobbett alone. After every deduction it remains true that no contemporary showed equal genius as a colonial statesman, or in this department rendered equal service to his country.

For an impartial examination of the Wakefield system, see Leroy-Beaulieu, De la Colonisation chez les Peuples Modernes (3d ed., pp. 562-575 and 696-700).

WAKEFIELD, Gilbert (1756-1801), classical scholar, theologian, and politician, was born at Nottingham, February 22, 1756, and was the son of the Rev. George Wakefield, rector of St Nicholas. After being educated at various private schools, he proceeded at the age of sixteen to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he cultivated his classical studies diligently, but imbibed a thorough distaste for logic and mathematics. He became, however, fellow of his college in 1776, and in 1778 was ordained by the bishop of Peterborough, in a frame of mind which led him afterwards to declare that he regarded his subscription to the Articles as the most disingenuous action of his life. He held, however, curacies for a short time at Stockport and Liverpool, but in 1779, the year of his marriage, quitted the church, and accepted the post of classical tutor at the Nonconformist academy at Warrington. The institution was already on the decline, and Wakefield’s pugnacious temper was not likely to contribute to restore it. “It survived my arrival,” he says, “four years.” During this short period he published translations of Matthew and the first epistle to the Thessalonians, and treatises on inspiration and baptism, the latter of which was entirely written in nine days. He apologizes for this precipitancy as the result of “a constitutional ardour which will not suffer me to dwell long on the same subject.” However inevitable, this was the source of most of his failures and mistakes. After the dissolution of the academy, he resided successively at Bramcote in Nottinghamshire, at Richmond, and at Nottingham, taking pupils and persevering in his theological and classical studies, which were considerably retarded by ill health. His most important production at this time was the Silva Critica, “illustrating the Scriptures by light borrowed from the philology of Greece and Rome.” Three parts of this work were printed at the Cambridge university press, but, the authorities declining to proceed further with it, the author was obliged to complete it himself. In 1790 he was appointed professor of classics at the newly-founded Unitarian college at Hackney. Here he speedily became uncomfortable; his proposals for reform in the course of instruction were unacceptable to his colleagues, and his dislike to the religious services, which he carried to the length of objecting to all social worship, occasioned his resignation in June 1791. The publication of his views on public worship deprived him of all his private pupils, and his time was henceforth devoted to authorship and the education of his children. His next important work was a new translation of the New Testament, retaining as much of the language of the Authorized Version as he deemed consistent with accuracy. This soon reached a second edition. He commenced an edition of Pope, which he was prevented from completing by the competition of Warton, but the notes were published separately. His edition of Lucretius, a work of high pretensions and little solid performance, appeared in 1796. It gained for the editor a very exaggerated reputation, but Wakefield suffered himself to be allured from the paths of literature into those of political and religious controversy. After assailing with equal acerbity writers so diverse in their principles as Wilberforce and Thomas Paine, he in January 1798 “employed a few hours” in drawing up a reply to Bishop Watson’s Address to the People of Great Britain. These few hours procured him two years’ imprisonment in Dorchester jail. He was convicted in February 1799 of having published a seditious libel, an offence which he had assuredly no intention of committing, and his eloquent defence was naturally thrown away upon the same jurymen who had already convicted the printer. The sympathy excited for him, however, led to a subscription, amounting to no less than £5000, and forming a sufficient provision for his family upon his death, which occurred September 9, 1801, shortly after his liberation, from an attack of typhus fever. He had occupied himself while in prison with the preparation of classical lectures and an English-Greek lexicon, and had corresponded on classical subjects with Charles James Fox. The letters were subsequently published.

Wakefield was one of the most honest of men, but also one of the most precipitate, narrow-minded, and presumptuous. His extreme ardour and his consciousness of integrity produced an uncharitableness verging on offensiveness, little in harmony with the many magnanimous and amiable features of his character. Rashness, opinionativeness, and contentiousness grievously marred in him the character of patriot and scholar, though they could not destroy his claim to be numbered among both.

The principal authority for his life is the second edition of his Memoirs, in two volumes (London, 1804). The first volume is autobiographical; the second, compiled by the editors, Rutt and Wainwright, includes several estimates of his character and performances from various sources, the most remarkable being one by Dr Parr.