Fine album of autograph material from missionaries

Jane CRAWSHAW (1828-1856, nee ARTHINGTON) and Simon CRAWSHAW (1830-1918), compilors.

[The Crawshaw Family Album]. A fine album featuring sentiments and signatures from a large number of the reformers, missionaries and churchmen. The Crawshaws and this album seemed to have been based in Yorkshire, but there are entries from people who had come from or been to most parts of the world, including a number of members of the London Missionary Society. [Hunslet Lane, Leeds, Yorkshire, UK, and elsewhere:] 1844 - 1917. Quarto (11 x 9inches; 279 x 228mm). 174 pages, various paper-stock, including some embossed sheets of thicker paper/thin card. There are c. 118 manuscript entries, varying in length from 2 lines to 2 pages, some including quotes in foreign languages and alphabets (see below for a selection of those who contributed). In addition to the manuscript entries, there are also a few original watercolors (charming but of no great artistic merit), and about 15 mounted engraved portraits of past religious leaders (most of these are very carefully cut round and mounted to four or more to a page).

Contemporary very dark blue / black morocco, covers with ruled border in gilt and blind, the central panel on both covers with a stylized image of a gilt vase constructed from small tools, each with an over-flowing arrangement of gilt stylized flowering plants constructed from various small tools, the blooms tooled onto shaped onlays of red, brown, green and tan leather, the flat spine with a related overall gilt design with onlaid flowerheads and a title panel with ‘Album’ lettered in gilt, gilt ruled and toold turn-ins, yellow glazed and lightly embossed endpapers, gilt edges (lightly scuffed, small shallow gouge to upper left section of the spine).

Provenance: Jane Crawshaw (1828-1856, nee Arthington, possibly a gift from her parents); Simon Crawshaw (Jane’s husband, by descent).

An important album with manuscript contributions from a number of the more adventurous missionaries of the 19th century. The album was given in about 1844 to Jane Arthington, sister of Robert Arthington jnr. The Arthington family was wealthy, thanks to a brewery, but had turned to philanthropy and supporting missionary works by the time of the earliest entries in the present album. The entries can be placed into to two different groups: before April 1856 (when Jane died) and after her death, up until 1917 (just before Simon Crawshaw died).

Jane was born into a wealthy Quaker family in the Leeds area. The family soon left the Society of Friends, and Jane initially worshiped with her mother’s congregation (Salem Congregational Chapel, Leeds) before applying to and being accepted by the East Parade Congregational Chapel also in Leeds in 1851. She met her future husband during the summer of 1852; married in 1855 and died in April 1856 of what sounds like general ill-health as well as difficulties following the premature birth of her first child (who died shortly after she did).

Her parents were Maria Arthington (nee Jowitt) and brewer Robert Arthington: they had four children, 1 son (Robert jr.) and three daughters including Jane. Maria was a published author, and contributed a charming poem to the present album “That Album lying on the table…’ dated June 1845, Maria is also known to have produced cut-paper silhouettes, so may well be the source of carefully-cut-out engraved portraits.

Jane Crawshaw (nee Arthington) was the sister of Robert Arthington jnr. (1823-1900). He was “one of the most remarkable figures in the story of Victorian missionary expansion” (Brian Stanley, abstract from article “‘The Miser of Headingly’: Robert Arthington and the Baptist Missionary Society, 1877–1900”). There is at least one entry which features Robert jr. in the present album, and its overall contents in some ways shadow what he went on to do during the latter part of his life: Robert subsequently inherited a fortune from his parents, with which he was able to give substantial financial support to various missionary enterprises.

A selection of the contributors:

Benjamin Goodman, Leeds, 3 July 1844 (b.27 Aug 1763)

John Eustace Giles (1805-1875), Leeds, 13 Nov 1844

Mary S. Whiting. Leeds, 6 May 1892

Cheok Hong Cheong (1853-1928), 1892, Chinese character inscription + 1p letter, Leeds, 6 May 1892, to Mr. Crawshaw. (Chinese-born Cheong lived and worked in Australia, in the UK to lecture about the evils of opium).

Katherine Bushnell (1855-1946), undated, she “was a medical doctor, Christian writer, Bible scholar, social activist, and forerunner of feminist theology. Her lifelong quest was for biblical affirmation of the integrity and equality of women, and she published God's Word to Women as a correction of mistranslation and misinterpretation of the Bible. As a missionary and a doctor, Bushnell worked to reform conditions of human degradation in North America, Europe, and Asia. She was recognized as a forceful and even charismatic speaker.”

Richard Heber Newton (31 October 1840 – 19 December 1914) was a prominent American Episcopalian priest and writer.

Rev. John Abbs (1810–1888) was an English missionary sent out to Southern India by the London Missionary Society. He spent 22 years in Travancore, a period rarely exceeded by European missionaries in India at that time. He was the husband of Louisa Sewell Abbs and the author of Twenty-Two Years' Missionary Experience in Travancore. Christianity remains strong in the area where he worked.

Rev. John Leifchild (1780–1862) was an English Congregational minister and writer.

Rev. John Parker + Lillie Sheldon Parker (nee Ashburner) Mongolia, L.M.S. 1899

Robert Moffat (21 December 1795 – 9 August 1883) was a Scottish Congregationalist missionary to Africa, father of Mary Moffat Livingstone and father-in-law of David Livingstone, and first translator of the Bible into Setswana.

Elihu Burritt (December 8, 1810 – March 6, 1879) was an American diplomat, philanthropist and social activist. He was also a prolific lecturer, journalist and writer who traveled widely in the United States and Europe.

Dr. Ralph Wardlaw Thompson (foreign sec. of the London Missionary Society, etc).

Alfred James Gould (printer in Kuruman, b. 1859)

John Tom Brown, missionary in Kuruman.

Man Guph or Suph Lal and Phulbai Lal, India ?

Rev. Henry Robert Reynolds (1825-1890)

Alessandro Gavazzi (21 March 1809 – 9 January 1889) was an Italian preacher and patriot. He at first became a monk (1825), and attached himself to the Barnabites at Naples, where he afterwards (1829) acted as professor of rhetoric. He left the church, and became best known as a provocative speaker against Catholicism, touring Europe and the United States. Protests against him broke out in Canada in 1853, causing numerous deaths in the Gavazzi Riots.

Sir Edward Baines (28 May 1800 – 2 March 1890), also known as Edward Baines Jr, was a nonconformist English newspaper editor and Member of Parliament (MP).

John Bartholemew Gough + Mary Elizabeth Gough his wife – temperance advocate.

Christopher Newman Hall (22 May 1816 – 18 February 1902), born at Maidstone and known in later life as a 'Dissenter's Bishop', was one of the most celebrated nineteenth century English Nonconformist divines. He was active in social causes; supporting Abraham Lincoln and abolition of slavery during the American Civil War, the Chartist cause, and arranging for influential Nonconformists to meet Gladstone. His tract Come to Jesus, first published in 1848 also contributed to his becoming a household name throughout Britain, the US and further afield, supposedly selling four million copies worldwide over his lifetime.

Sir Thomas Palmer Whittaker PC (7 January 1850 – 9 November 1919) was a British businessman and Liberal Party politician.

Garabed Thoumaion, exiled Armenian

M Nachim 1908

Harriet Ross Taylor, 1900, Bengal

Rev. William Allen Elliott , author of book ‘Gold from Quartz’ re. Africa

??? Robertson, London Missionary Society. Tanganyika

Arthur T. Polhill-Turner (7 February 1862 – 21 November 1935) was an English missionary. He was one of the Cambridge Seven, seven young men from England that travelled to China in order to continue Hudson Taylor's missionary work there.

Edward Pearse, China

Elizabeth Thomson ?wife of John Boden Thomson ?

Thomas Raffles (1788–1863) was an English Congregational minister, known as a dominant nonconformist figure at the Great George Street Congregational Church in Liverpool, and as an abolitionist and historian.

George Turner (1818 – 19 May 1891) was an English missionary, active in Samoa and elsewhere in the South Pacific. He was the author of Nineteen Years in Polynesia: Missionary Life, Travels, and Researches in the Islands of the Pacific, 1861; and of Samoa A Hundred Years Ago and Long Before, 1884.

William Knibb, OM (7 September 1803 – 15 November 1845) was an English Baptist minister and missionary to Jamaica. He is chiefly known today for his work to free slaves.

On the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, Knibb was posthumously awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. He was the first white male to receive the country's highest civil honour.

Sir Henry Walford Davies KCVO OBE (6 September 1869 – 11 March 1941) was an English composer, organist, conductor and educator who held the title Master of the King's Music from 1934 until 1941. Although a performing musician and composer, he served with the Royal Air Force during the First World War when he composed the well known Royal Air Force March Past. Davies was musical adviser to the nascent British Broadcasting Corporation, and became known to a wide public for his explanatory talks on music between 1924 and 1941, which brought him great popularity with British radio audiences.

S A Edge ‘London Missionary society, eleven years in China’