Author: Langley, John Henry
Biography:
LANGLEY, John Henry (1754-1792: ancestry.com)
A nonconformist minister, Langley was born at Shrewsbury, Shropshire, on 12 Sep. 1754, one of the four children of Francis Langley (1730-1781) of Abbey Foregate, Shrewsbury, and his wife, Susannah Betteridge (d 1791). His sisters were Susannah (b 1752), Ann Henrietta (1759-1827), and Frances Betteridge (1762-1830). His parents wanted him to be a medical doctor but, having experienced an evangelical conversion at age sixteen in 1775, he was ordained in Herefordshire by a Calvinist Methodist follower of George Whitfield, the Rev. Joseph Cartwright of Lant Street Chapel, Southwark. He and Cartwright were later allied with Lady Huntingdon’s Connexion, to whom he dedicated his collection of hymns. Langley fell in love and initially decided to marry, but after much prayer he rejected the (unnamed) object of his affection because of her “too strong an attachment to dress.” From 1783, he was minister at the Jamaica Row Chapel, Rotherhithe, Southwark. He began composing hymns at age seventeen “with no other Motive than to fill up and enliven [his] leisure Hours.” Other hymns he wrote “at the Desire of Friends.” Following a lingering, undefined illness he died in Bermondsey, Southwark, on 1 June 1792. Despite his nonconformism, he was buried in St Mary Magdalen, Mortlake, in the Church of England. (ancestry.com 3 June 2023; findmypast.com 17 June 2023; PROB 11/1220; Gospel Magazine [1776], 480-82; J. Cartwright, The Necessity of Dying [1791], 25-39; W. Wilson, History and Antiquities of Dissenting Churches [1808], 2: 366-67; R. A. Leaver, “Olney Hymns,” Churchman [1983], 244-45) JC
Other Names:
- J. H. L.