Edward Hayes Plumptre

Edward Hayes Plumptre (1821-1891) was an English Anglican clergyman, biblical scholar, and hymn writer. He spent more than two decades at King's College London as chaplain and as professor of pastoral theology and of exegesis, and from 1881 until his death he was Dean of Wells. A prolific contributor to biblical commentaries, he was also admired as a translator of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Dante. His book The Spirits in Prison (1884) surveys Christian teaching on the state of the dead and reflects his cautious sympathy with the "larger hope" of salvation beyond the grave.

Studies on the life after death by the Dean of Wells, taking their title from the passage in 1 Peter about Christ's preaching to 'the spirits in prison.' Plumptre argues for an intermediate state in which growth, repentance, and the reach of Christ's redemption continue — the scholarly Anglican middle path of the wider hope, between Farrar's rhetoric and Allin's full universalism.

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