Author: AVELING, Thomas William Baxter
Biography:
AVELING, Thomas William Baxter (1815-88: ODNB)
He was born on 11 May 1815 at Castletown, Isle of Man, the son of William Aveling (1773-1818), soldier, from Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and Bridget Meehan (1790-1843), who was Irish. They had married at Wisbech on 16 Jan. 1812 before moving to the Isle of Man where William Aveling was stationed in the last years of the Napoleonic Wars. After the death of his father at Wisbech in 1818, his mother married William Wilson on 24 May 1819 at St. Peter’s, Wisbech. Aveling was educated locally and dedicated the work listed here to his schoolmaster, James Smith. The volume contained sonnets, addresses to a nightingale and the ocean, a few hymns, and “To the Memory of W. Wilberforce, Esq.” He attended Highbury College, London (1834-8) to prepare for the Congregational ministry, and was ordained at Kingsland Congregational church, Hackney, London, on 11 Oct. 1838. There he would serve as minister until his death. He married Mary Ann Goodall (1816-77) on 3 Oct. 1839 at Wisbech Independent Chapel. After her death he married Agnes Sarah Joscelyne (1842-1915) on 13 Aug. 1878 at Cambridge Heath Congregational Chapel, Hackney. There were eight children from the first marriage: the fifth child was Edward Bibbens Aveling (1849-98), Darwinian socialist and secularist, and for fourteen years in a “moral union” with Eleanor Marx (1855-98), daughter of Karl Marx. There was no issue from the second marriage. Active in religious philanthropy, he edited the Jewish Herald and the Missionary Souvenir and was Secretary of the Asylum for Fatherless Children, and Honorary Secretary of the Irish Evangelical Society. He published an array of sermons and a volume of religious lectures: Namaan; or, Life’s Shadows and Sunshine (1853). He wrote up his travels in the Mediterranean and the Levant as Voices of Many Waters (1855). Other works included The Service of the Sanctuary (1859) and Memorials of the Clayton Family (1867). He died at Reedham, near Caterham, Surrey, on 3 July 1884, and was buried at Abney Park, Stoke Newington, where there is still a monumental tomb. He left an estate of just over £8000. (ODNB 10 Oct. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 10 Oct. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 10 Oct. 2024; Josiah Miller, Our Hymns [1866], 389-90; Johnson item 36; Cambridge Chronicle 5 Oct. 1839; LES 16 Aug. 1878; Hackney and Kingsland Gazette, 8 Aug. and 3 Sept. 1877, 4 and 9 July 1884) AA
Other Names:
- T. W. B. Aveling