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Author: Isaac, Benjamin

Biography:

ISAAC, Benjamin (1784-1850: ancestry.co.uk)

He was born probably at Ely, Cambridgeshire, and baptised on 7 May 1784 at Honiton, Devon, the son of Thomas Isaac and his wife--who was possibly the Catherine Clash whom he married in Honiton in 1767 but it is by no means certain. Benjamin Isaac married Ann Bevill (1790-1823) on 27 Sept. 1814 at March, Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire. They had five children. She died in Feb. 1823 and was buried in Cambridge. He then married Mary Elizabeth Frances Lee (1800-66) on 1 Jan. 1824 at All Saints, Edmonton. They had at least eleven children, with most surviving into adulthood. From about 1825 until his death he was minister at Gloucester Chapel, Cambridge Street, Hackney Fields. He also ran a classical, mathematical, and commercial academy from 3 Minerva Terrace, Hackney Road. He was always listed as an independent dissenting minister but may have had Baptist sympathies, as his obituary appeared in The Earthen Vessel. However, he remarked to Rev. Henry Erskine Head, rector of Feniton, Devon, that the only obstacle to his joining the established church was the unfair rigour of the tests for subscription (Head, 6). He died at his house, 6 York Terrace, Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, on 30 Apr. 1850, aged 66, from typhus and influenza, and was buried at Gloucester Chapel. In addition to his work listed here, he wrote a couple of sermons and some dialogues on death and edited A Selection of Hymns for Public Worship (1826, with a second revised edition appearing in 1834 that appends some of his original hymns). (ancestry.co.uk 26 Dec. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 26 Dec. 2022; Cambridge Chronicle 14 Feb. 1823, 9 Jan. 1824, 4 July 1840; Patriot 2 May 1850; The Earthen Vessel 6 [1850], 139-40; H. E. Head, A Letter to the Most Reverend Archbishops [1840]) AA

 

Books written (2):

London: printed by E. Justins and Son, 1828
2nd edn. London: Printed for the Author, 1834