Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Dornford, Josiah
DORNFORD, JOSIAH (1764–1797), miscellaneous writer, born in 1764, was son of Josiah Dornford of Deptford, Kent, a member of the court of common council of the city of London, and the author of several pamphlets on the affairs of that corporation and the reform of debtors' prisons. He studied at Trinity College, Oxford—B.A. 1785, M.A. 1792—and at Göttingen, where he took the degree of LL.D. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn. In 1790 he published in three volumes an English version of John Stephen Pütter's ‘Historical Development of the Present Political Constitution of the Germanic Empire;’ the translation was probably executed at Göttingen, where Pütter was professor of laws. He also published in Latin a small volume of academic exercises by another Göttingen professor, the philologist Heyne, who, in a preface to this publication, speaks of Dornford as a ‘learned youth’ who had ‘gained the highest honours in jurisprudence in our academy.’ His only other known work is ‘The Motives and Consequences of the Present War impartially considered’ (1793), a pamphlet written in defence of the Pitt administration. In 1795 he was named inspector-general of the army accounts in the Leeward Islands, and the record of this appointment shows that he had served as one of the commissaries to Lord Moira's army. He died at Martinique 1 July 1797.
[Gent. Mag. 1795, p. 973; 1797, p. 800. In Brit. Mus. Cat. and in Watt's Bibl. Brit. Dornford is confused with his father.]