Andrew Kippis (28 March 1725 – 8 October 1795) was an English nonconformist clergyman and biographer.
The son of Robert Kippis, a silk-hosier, he was born at Nottingham. Having gone to school at Sleaford in Lincolnshire he passed at the age of sixteen to the Dissenting academy at Northampton, of which Dr Philip Doddridge was then president. In 1746 Kippis became minister of a church at Boston; in 1750 he moved to Dorking, Surrey; and in 1753 he became pastor of a Presbyterian congregation at Westminster, where he remained till his death.
Kippis took a prominent part in the affairs of his church. From 1763 till 1784 he was classical and philological tutor in the Coward Trust's academy[1] at Hoxton, and subsequently in the New College at Hackney. In 1778 he was elected a fellow of the Antiquarian Society, and a fellow of the Royal Society in 1779.
Kippis was a very voluminous writer. He contributed largely to The Gentleman's Magazine, The Monthly Review and The Library; and he had a good deal to do with the establishment and conduct of The New Annual Register. He published also a number of sermons and occasional pamphlets; and he prefixed a life of the author to a collected edition of Dr Nathaniel Lardner's Works (1788). He wrote a life of Dr Doddridge, which is prefixed to Doddridge's Exposition of the New Testament (1792). His chief work is his edition of the Biographia Britannica, of which, however, he only lived to publish five volumes (folio, 1778–1793). In this work he had the assistance of Dr Joseph Towers,[2] minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church.
One of the works by Kippis is Cook's Voyages. This was first published in London in 1788 [3] and includes a letter by Kippis to King George III of the United Kingdom dated June 13, 1788. The book has accounts of the three voyages — 1768-1771, 1772–1775, and 1776-1779 — as well as an account of the character of Captain Cook, the effects of his voyages, and a commentary of his services.