Author: Grant, Johnson
Biography:
GRANT, Johnson (1774-1844: ODNB)
He was born on 16 July 1774 and baptised on 4 Aug. at Tolbooth Kirk, Edinburgh, the son of Dr. Gregory Grant, physician, and Mary/Moirah Grant, who had married in 1767. He was educated at Edinburgh (MA 1795) and St. John’s College Oxford (matric. 1795, BA 1799, MA 1805). He was ordained deacon (1799) and priest (1800). He served as curate at Warrington, Cheshire, until his appointment as perpetual curate at nearby St. James, Latchford, in 1803, where he developed the Sunday school using his Manual of Religious Knowledge for the Use of Sunday Schools (1800). He left for London in 1809 and obtained curacies at Hornsey and St. Pancras. He was appointed perpetual curate of St. John the Baptist, Kentish Town, in 1821, where he served until his death. He also held the living of St. Mary, Binbrooke, Lincolnshire, from 1818 and St. Gabriel, Binbrooke, from 1836. He married Margaret Sherriff (1789-1838) on 8 Dec. 1818 at St. Marylebone, Westminster. They had at least six children. His final years were clouded by the loss of three daughters--Emilie (1834), Maria (1835), and Margaret (1839)--and his wife, Margaret, in 1838. He died on 4 Dec. 1844 in Kentish Town. He published a number of now forgotten theological works of which A Summary of the History of the English Church (4 vols. 1811-26) and an array of sermons on a variety of topics, are the most accessible. His Journal of a Three Weeks Tour, in 1797, through Derbyshire to the Lakes, first published anonymously in William Fordyce Mavor’s The British Tourists (1798) 5: 199-281, was reissued in 1809 with his name, J. Grant. A Memoir of Miss Frances Augusta Bell (1827) records the death and literary compositions of a fifteen-year-old parishioner. A further poem, The Joshuad (1837) lies outside the scope of this bibliography and added little to his reputation. (ODNB 10 Mar. 2023; DNB; Ancestry; Scotland’s People; CCEd 10 Mar., 2023; GM Apr. 1845, 444-5; Lewis, 1: 467; LES 25 July, 1834; SJC 13 Mar. 1838, 7 Dec. 1844; OUCH 10 Aug. 1839; Frederick Teague Cansick, A Collection of Curious and Interesting Epitaphs [1869], 183-5 gives family inscriptions) AA
Other Names:
- J. Grant