William Spalding (May 22, 1809 - November 16, 1859), British author, was born in Aberdeen.

He was educated at the grammar school there and at Marischal College, and he went in 1830 to Edinburgh, where he was called to the bar in 1833. In that year he published a Letter on Shokespeare's Authorship of the two Noble Kinsmen (reprinted for the New Shakspere Society in 1876), which attracted the notice of Jeffrey, who invited Spalding to contribute to the Edinburgh Review.

He also spent some time in Italy, and in 1841 published Italy and the Italian Islands from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time. He occupied the chair of rhetoric in Edinburgh University from 1840 to 1845, when he was appointed professor of logic in the university of St Andrews, a post which he held till his death.

Besides contributions to the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood's Magazine and the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he was the author of a concise History of English Literature (1853).