Author: Ragg, Thomas
Biography:
RAGG, Thomas (1808-81: ODNB)
The son of George Ragg (1782-1836), a lace maker and prominent radical, and his wife Jane Morrison, he was born in Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, on 11 Jan. 1808. Soon after his birth the family moved to Birmingham, Warwickshire, where George Ragg had a lace and hosiery business which went bankrupt when he became increasingly preoccupied by political activities. Thomas Ragg was educated at dame schools and in an academy run by George Edmonds, chairman of the Birmingham Hampden Society. George Ragg founded the Birmingham Argus, a weekly newspaper which was the organ of the Birmingham Union Society; in 1818 he was sentenced to imprisonment for publishing seditious tracts. Thomas had begun working at the paper with his father at the age of eleven but in 1822 when his mother died he was apprenticed to an uncle, a hosier in Leicester, Leicestershire, and then in Nottingham. Like his father, Thomas was a non-believer but he converted to Christianity; his 1834 The Deity describes his conversion and is dedicated to James Montgomery (q.v.). On 8 June 1832 he married Mary Ann Clark in St. Mary’s, Nottingham; they had two sons. An itinerant dissenting preacher, Ragg also worked with the bookseller William Dearden. He contributed to periodicals and wrote a poetical appeal on behalf of Robert Millhouse (q.v.). Ragg’s poems attracted favourable attention and in 1839 he was invited to edit the Birmingham Advertiser. For a while he attended both the established church and a congregationalist chapel but ultimately he favoured the Church of England. In 1847 he founded the Birmingham chapter of the Protestant Association of the Anglican church and two years later he began editing its newspaper, the Protestant Watchman of the Midland District. Ragg was ordained in 1858 and he became perpetual curate of Lawley, Shropshire, in 1865. After Mary Ann’s death in 1860 he married Jane Sarah Barker (1837-1905) in Nottingham on 10 Jan. 1861; they had eight children. He died at Lawley on 3 Dec. 1881 and was buried in the Lawley churchyard. He left effects of £272. Ragg’s other works include Creation's Testimony to its God, or the Accordance of Science, Philosophy, and Revelation (1855) which went to numerous editions. (ODNB 26 Nov. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 26 Nov. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 26 Nov. 2024; BBTI; L. Brake & M. Demoor, eds. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland [2009]) SR