John Nelson Darby

DARBY, John Nelson. b. Westminster, London, 18 November 1800; d. Bournemouth, Hampshire, 29 April 1882. He was educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Dublin (BA 1819). He was a lawyer, who was called to the Irish and English Bar, but who then gave up law to become a clergyman in the Church in Ireland. He worked as a curate in Calary, near Enniskerrry, a poor area of County Wicklow, from 1825 to 1827, when he had a riding accident that gave him time to consider his position in the Church. According to the ODNB, he wrote Considerations on the Nature and Unity of the Church (1828) criticising the clergy, the first of many polemical publications of subsequent years in which Darby...