Author: Johns, John
Biography:
JOHNS, John (1801-47: ODNB)
He was born on 17 Mar. 1801 at Plymouth, Devon, the eldest of seven children of the landscape painter Ambrose Bowden Johns and his wife Rebekah White, who had married on 8 Apr. 1800 at St. Charles the Martyr, Plymouth. The family worshipped at Norley Street Presbyterian Chapel, Plymouth. He was educated at Plymouth Grammar School and spent some time at Edinburgh University. In 1821 he became Minister to the English Presbyterian congregation at Crediton, Devon, on a salary of only £30 p.a. He married Caroline Reynell on 6 Sept. 1833 at Crediton. They had at least eight children. In 1836 he was appointed Minister to the Domestic Mission Society at Liverpool, which had recently been established to tend to the spiritual and material welfare of the poor. As Liverpool expanded, slums proliferated and poor Irish immigrants, fleeing the Potato Famine of 1845-9, crowded into the city. 1847 (Black ’47) saw an outbreak of typhus there. Johns was one of the few ministers who continued to work among the poor (alongside Catholic priests) but he caught typhus himself and died on 23 June 1847 at 147 Mill Street, Toxteth, Liverpool. He was buried at St. James’s cemetery, Everton. His gravestone describes how he left “the calm beauty of his native Devon and became the Friend and daily Companion of the poor in crowded and woe worn streets.” His wife survived him and emigrated to Tasmania where she died at Hobart in 1861. Johns contributed to the New Monthly Magazine and other periodicals. Many of his poems were reprinted in Dews of Castalie (1828). His second volume, The Valley of the Nymphs (1829), is very rare, as is his sample of a projected Liverpool poem, The Georgics of Life (1846). His hymns were well received, 35 of them appearing in J. K. Beard’s Unitarian Collection of Hymns in 1837. His Annual Reports to the Domestic Mission Society are still consulted for information on the poor in Liverpool. (ODNB [father and son] 30 May 2022; ancestry.co.uk 30 May 2022; findmypast.co.uk 30 May 2022; West Country Poets, 275-6; Curran; A. Holt, A Ministry to the Poor: Being the History of the Liverpool Domestic Mission Society 1836-1936 [1936]; M. B. Simey, Charitable Effort in Liverpool in the Nineteenth Century [1951], 37-40; hymnary.org; Liverpool Mercury 22 and 25 June 1847; GRO death cert; Christian Reformer June 1861, 384) AA
Other Names:
- J. Johns