11 Facts About Philip Wicksteed

Philip Henry Wicksteed was an English scholar and Unitarian theologian known for his contributions to classics, medieval studies and economics.

Philip Wicksteed's father was a clergyman within the same tradition of English Dissent.

Philip Wicksteed's mother was born into the Lupton family, a socially progressive, politically active dynasty of businessmen and traders, long established in Leeds, a city both prosperous and squalid with the rapid growth of the Industrial Revolution.

In 1835 Wicksteed had taken up the ministry of the Unitarian place of worship, Mill Hill Chapel, right on the city's central square, and two years later the couple married.

One of their children, a first cousin to Philip Wicksteed, was the maverick MP and mining engineer Arnold Lupton.

Philip Wicksteed was one of nine children, including Janet, who wrote, as Mrs Lewis, a memoir including her parents; Hartley, president of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers; and Charles, an engineer.

One of his nieces was Mary Cicely Philip Wicksteed, who married the prominent Australian surgeon Sir Hibbert Alan Stephen Newton.

Philip Wicksteed was educated at University College London and Manchester New College, the seminary for nonconformist ministers.

In 1894, Philip Wicksteed published his celebrated An Essay on the Co-ordination of the Laws of Distribution, in which he sought to prove mathematically that a distributive system which rewarded factory owners according to marginal productivity would exhaust the total product produced.

Philip Wicksteed married Emily, a daughter of Henry Solly, a Unitarian minister and social reformer.

Philip Wicksteed became an associate of Frances Power Cobbe and supported the anti-vivisection movement.