Biography

James Field Stanfield (1749-1824)

James Field Stanfield: 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 of 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. This strolling player also wrote the first long-form treatise on Biography in English which was published in Sunderland in 1813. A review of his Essay on the Study and Composition of Biography provides the title of the Biographicon project.

“It is the delight and pride of philosophic history, to trace back the incidents of life to their minute beginnings; the operations of genius to their embryo-commencements; and by a kind of retrograde motion to arrive at causes from effects.”

– James Field Stanfield

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