Revd. Dr. Harris
General information▶Date of birth: 8 March 1802 Place of birth: Ugborough, Devon ▶Father: William Harris Mother: Elizabeth ▶Spouse(s): Mary Anne Wrangham Date(s) of marriage: 6 July 1838 Place(s) of marriage: Independent Chapel, Epsom, Surrey ▶Occupation: Clergyman (Congregationalist); College head, Professor, Author ▶Lifestory: [Identification likely.] The Revd. Dr John Harris was the eldest son of tailor and draper William Harris, of Ugborough, Devon, and his wife Elizabeth. As he entered his teens his family moved to Bristol, where he worked in his father’s shop while passing his leisure time in study. With the Church in mind he was offered speaking engagements by the Bristol Itinerant Society as a “boy preacher”, and in 1823 he took up a place to study theology at the dissenting (Congregational) Hoxton Academy near London. It was not long before he was invited to become a Pastor, in 1825 at Epsom in Surrey. He started to edge into public life with his first and perhaps his most influential publication The great teacher (1835) and soon afterwards won 100 guineas in a competition for his essay on covetousness, published in 1836 as Mammon, or, Covetousness the sin of the Christian Church. His writing style was popular, and he won further prizes in 1835 (for his essay on Christian missionary work, published as The great commission in 1842) and in 1837 (for his essay published that year as Britannia, or The moral claims of seamen). Then in 1838 he was appointed to be Theological Tutor (Professor of Theology) at the dissenting college at Cheshunt in Hertfordshire (then largely associated with Congregationalists), of which he was also President. In the same year he married Mary Anne, daughter of William Wrangham of Epsom, Surrey, and niece of Archdeacon Francis Wrangham: they had one daughter. Also in 1838 he was awarded the degree of DD by Brown University, Rhode Island; his accessible but analytical work was particularly popular in the United States. In 1839 the Revd. Dr Harris, his wife, and daughter lived at 2 Pittville Terrace North (Clarence Lodge, Clarence Square); they bought a one-month subscription allowing them to take the waters at Pittville Pump Room and were presumably staying on a short lease or as visitors. He continued to write and to publish, both in periodicals such as the Congregational Magazine and the Evangelical Magazine, and in book form up to the time of his death. His wife inherited the leasehold of a house in Conduit Street in London during her lifetime on the death of her father in Epsom in March 1845. In 1852 he was elected Chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. Harris died of pyaemia (blood-poisoning) in 1856, at the age of fifty-four, at New College, St John’s Wood, in London; he was buried in Abney Park cemetery. [It is possible that “Rev. Dr. Harris and family” refers to the Revd. Dr. Joseph Hemington Harris, who resigned from his post as Principal of King’s College, Toronto, in 1838 and returned to England with his second wife and son by his first wife: for his biography see the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.] ▶Moved to Pittville from: Cheshunt, Hertfordshire Moved from Pittville to: Bath ▶Date of death: 21 December 1856 Place of death: New College, St John’s Wood, London ▶Date of burial: Place of burial: ▶Notes: ODNB, Wikipedia ID: 19352 Contributor(s): John Simpson
Found no family members on the Pittville History Works Database (based on “relation to head” in the 1841-1911 census records and 1939 register records) |