Author: Hartley, John
Biography:
HARTLEY, John (1796-1843: ancestry.co.uk)
He was born on 2 Feb. 1796 and baptised at the Moravian Chapel, Bedford on 10 Feb., the son of the Rev. John Hartley, sometime schoolmaster in Germany, Superintendant Minister at the Moravian settlement in Fulneck, near Leeds, Yorkshire, and Missionary in Dublin, and his wife Hannah. His father died in Ireland in 1811. Thereafter the family must have conformed as he proceeded to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, (matric. 1820, B.A. 1823, M.A. 1831). In 1823 he became assistant curate at St. Nicholas, Gloucester. He married Caroline Wylie at Old St. Pancras Church, London, on 15 May 1832. He then took up the post of Chaplain at the Anglican Chapel in Geneva, from where he signed the preface to Poems of a Traveller (1835). Several of the poems on missionary life are of historical interest as they combine the travel book of Childe Harold with evangelical zeal, a feature also found in the Quaker poets Sarah Evance and Eleanor Dickinson (qq.v.), and Laura Sophia Temple (q.v.). Although a minister in the Established Church, he retained strong Moravian missionary zeal and his Researches in Greece and the Levant (1831) was unsympathetic to Ottoman culture. Later, in Continental Sermons (1840) he would warn against the dangers of cultural relativism inherent in foreign travel. He later became a Missionary to the Mediterranean and BritishChaplain at Nice. He died on 10 June 1843 at Chambéry, Savoie, France. He left strict instructions for his son Arthur’s education in Northern Protestant culture. (ancestry.co.uk 25 Jun. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 25 Jun. 2021; CCEd 25 Jun. 2021; Morning Post 16 May 1832; Evening Mail 21 Jun. 1843; GM Sept. 1843, 326; Reinhold Schiffler, Oriental Panorama [1999]) AA