Joseph Dornford

Joseph Dornford (1794–1868) was an English churchman and academic, senior tutor of Oriel College, Oxford before becoming rector of Plymtree in Devon.

Born 9 January 1794, he was the son of Sir Josiah Dornford of Deptford, Kent, and the half-brother of the writer Josiah Dornford; his mother Esther Fawcett was a Cambridge lady and good friend of the evangelical leader Charles Simeon, and her son Thomas Truebody Thomason by her first marriage was father of James Thomason. He entered young at Trinity College, Cambridge, which in 1811 he suddenly left to serve as a volunteer in the Peninsular War.

After some military service, Dornford returned and entered Wadham College, Oxford in 1813, where he proceeded B.A. in 1816. In 1817 he was elected to a Michel fellowship at The Queen's College, and in 1819 to a fellowship at Oriel College, where he graduated M.A. 1820. In that year he joined the Russian physician Joseph Hamel on an ascent of Mont Blanc in which three guides were killed.

Dornford was successively elected tutor and dean of Oriel; he was ordained priest in the Church of England in 1822, and was a university proctor in 1830. He succeeded the very different John Keble in the tutorship, in 1823. In that role he played a part in the pre-history of the Oxford Movement, tentatively supporting innovations by John Henry Newman in college teaching. The senior of the four Oriel tutors in 1828 on the election as Provost of Edward Hawkins, Dornford with Newman, Hurrell Froude and Robert Wilberforce, he opposed as they did Robert Peel's 1829 candidacy for Oxford's seat in parliament, preferring Robert Inglis, against the background of Catholic Emancipation. The tutors innovated without consulting Hawkins, with a system that was more pastoral and clerical. Hawkins, who initially had had time for Newman's views, was an Oriel Noetic and was alienated by the Peel issue. College politics became ever more divisive, as Hawkins objected to the changes in teaching.

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