Sydney Smith was born on 3 June 1771 in Woodford, a subject of the Kingdom of Great Britain. He was educated at Winchester College and later at New College, and he went on to work across several fields at once — as a writer, a journalist, a cleric, and a politician. His citizenship passed, in time, from the Kingdom of Great Britain to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, a transition that reflected the broader constitutional shifts of the period through which he lived.

As an Anglican clergyman, Smith occupied a position within the established church while simultaneously pursuing work in journalism and letters, all of it conducted in English. These roles coexisted throughout his career without apparent contradiction. The most concrete marker of his work in public life was the founding of the Edinburgh Review, a periodical he brought into existence and which bore the imprint of his initiative from its origins.

Smith died in London on 22 February 1845. The arc of his life ran from Woodford through the institutions of Winchester College and New College and outward into the overlapping worlds of the church, political life, and print. His founding of the Edinburgh Review stands as the most specific and durable fact of his career, an act of editorial creation that places him among those who shaped the landscape of periodical publishing in his time.