James Field Stanfield (1749-1824)

James Field Stanfield was an actor, freemason and abolitionist on the Eighteenth-Century Northern Stage.

The Dublin-born actor James Field Stanfield spent most of his career performing in theatres in the north of England. To some, his profession made him little more than a vagabond. However, he used his theatrical persona for political ends. Before acting he had been a sailor and was, in fact, the first common mariner to write about the horrors of slavery. He then promoted the abolition of the slave trade at theatrical benefits, making him an early example of the actor as activist. He supported prison reform, was an agitator for workers’ rights and as a freemason promoted civic improvement.

Local archives show how Stanfield built on his theatrical success and forged a reputation as a public reformer with a genuine spirit of Enlightenment; he was an Irishman who brought about real change in political and intellectual circles. Taken collectively, Stanfield’s remarkable contributions to a ‘Northern Enlightenment’ counter the London-centric tendencies found in much theatre and Enlightenment scholarship. 

Stanfield’s highly mobile, public-oriented profession allowed for association with a remarkable number of people, ranging from Yorkshire Radicals to the Edinburgh Professoriat. Encouraged by his associate William Burdon who lived in Morpeth where Stanfield managed the theatre and long-time friends G. W. Meadley and James Tate this strolling player also wrote the first long-form treatise on Biography in English which was published in Sunderland by George Garbutt in 1813. A review of Stanfield’s Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography by William Taylor of Norwich provides the title of the Biographicon project.

In his 1965 publication ‘Lives and Letters’ the American literary scholar Richard Altick described Stanfield as ‘the pioneer systematic theorist of the biographical art’.