Author: Lewis, William Garrett
Biography:
LEWIS, William Garrett (1797-1865: Baptist Magazine)
He was born on 19 Mar. 1797 and baptised at St. John the Baptist, Margate, Kent, the eldest of three sons of Rev. Richard Lewis (1759-1805), master of Churchfield Academy, Margate, and his second wife Rebecca Garrett (1762-1835), who had married in London in 1796. In 1822 he registered his birth at Doctor Williams’ Library, London. His father died after a fall from a chaise in 1805. His mother was left with their three sons and seven other children from the previous marriage. According to her grandson’s testimony, she steered the family away from imminent indigence to modest prosperity. He was probably educated at his father’s academy and was then apprenticed to a draper in Margate. He married Susanna Goldsmith (1798-1868) on 20 May 1819 at St. Lawrence, Thanet, Kent, with the consent of her father, Rev. Edward Goldsmith, who was also an independent minister and schoolmaster. They had sixteen children. William Garrett Lewis found commercial life uncongenial and a reading of Philip Doddridge’s Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745), frequently a key text in conversions, led him to prayer and scripture in preparation for the ministry. In 1824 he became minister to the Particular Baptist Congregation at Zion Chapel, Clover Lane, Chatham, at which he served for eighteen years. He became active in Anti-Slavery agitation and was staunch support of the Emancipation Act (1833), lecturing and addressing public meetings throughout Kent. He resigned from Chatham in 1841 and in early 1842 he moved to Salem Chapel, New Park Street, Cheltenham, where he remained for twenty-two years. He published a course of lectures delivered there: The Religion of Rome Examined (1851). In 1864 he resigned and moved to Weston-super-Mare where he regularly preached at the Assembly Rooms. He died at 3 Prince’s Buildings, Weston-super-Mare, on 22 Mar. 1865, leaving an estate of under £800. Five sons were also ministers, three in England and two in Australia. His son, also William Garrett Lewis (1821-85), was editor of the Baptist Magazine for twenty years, and wrote a memoir of his father. (Baptist Magazine, June 1865, 354-58; ancestry.co.uk 7 Sept. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 7 Sept. 2022; Maidstone Journal 5 May 1835; Christian Times 31 Mar. 1865) AA
Other Names:
- W. G. Lewis