Francis Haywood

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Francis Haywood (1796–1858) was an English merchant and translator, best known as the first person to translate Kant's Critique of Pure Reason into English. He was born in Liverpool and lived there for most of his life.

In 1828 he described himself as a layman of the Church of England, though he was active in Liverpool’s Unitarian circles. That year he translated a reply by Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider to Hugh James Rose’s essay on Protestantism in Germany. In 1829, he wrote a Foreign Review article calling for an English translation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote to him about the idea, but was offended when Haywood suggested they collaborate on the translation.

Haywood’s translation of the first Critique appeared anonymously in 1838. He died on 29 May 1858 at Feckenham in Worcestershire and was buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in Feckenham. His daughter, Lucy Franklin, published an anonymous memoir of him in the Cornhill Magazine. Some of his papers are held at Duke University Library.