Author: Moore, William
Biography:
MOORE, William (1782-1848: ancestry.co.uk)
According to his obituary he was born on 7 Feb. 1782 at Bristol, the son of a dissenting minister. However, his father remains unknown and there are no clues as to his parents other than their early deaths. He went briefly to St. Paul’s school, London, but his father then prepared him for entrance to John Horsley’s Northampton dissenting academy to train for the ministry. He went to Keynsham academy for a year and then proceeded to Wymondley, near Hitchin, Herts. , where the Northampton academy had relocated. He spent seven years there. He lost both his parents before the age of sixteen and became deeply religious. As with many young men, Philip Doddridge’s (q.v.) Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul (1745) made a deep impression on him. After Wymondley, he was invited to preach at Leicester for two months but then went first to Penzance and then to Mevagissey (both in Cornwall). After twelve months’ probation he was ordained in 1806 and remained at Mevagissey for eight years. He married Judith Tyeth on 19 July 1808 at St. Mary Magdalene, Launceston, Cornwall. They had at least ten children. In 1814 he accepted an invitation from the Bethesda Chapel, Truro, to become minister of their small congregation and would remain there until his death. He also ran a school for several years. The deaths of four daughters in the 1840s led to depression and in April his health started to decline. He died on 1 Feb. 1848, aged 66, and was buried next to his daughters. Poetic Effusions (1828) contains a number of topographical poems (“Carnbrea,” “Truro Church,” “Rose Hill”) and the unusual “Dying Expressions of a Pious Miner.” His only other published work was a short pamphlet, Strictures on Christian Perfection (1816). (ancestry.co.uk 20 Jan. 2023; Evangelical Magazine Oct. 1848, 505-11; Bibliotheca Cornubiensis, [1874], 1: 369; West Country Poets, 344-45; Patriot 14 Feb. 1848; Johnson, item 633; Dissenting Academies Online, QMC) AA