Author: Rendell, Elias De La Roche
Biography:
RENDELL, Elias De La Roche (1803-76: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 10 Aug. 1803 at Barnstaple, Devon, the son of Elias Rendell (1779-1851) and his wife Ann Davolls De Volls (1781-1840). Nothing is known of his education. He entered the New Jerusalem Church (Swedenborgian) in 1823 and was formally ordained in 1830. He had earlier been invited to minister to the congregation at Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1826 where he served for eighteen years. He married Mary Brown on 15 Feb. 1831, at St. Andrew’s, Newcastle. They had four children and in 1834 are recorded at Villa Place Westgate where he ran an academy, probably to supplement his income. After his wife’s death in 1840, he married Elizabeth Robson at Newcastle in 1842 (his name is mistranscribed in GRO as “Elias de la Riche Rendele”). They went on to have five children. In 1844 they moved to Preston, where he had been appointed minister on a modest salary of £90 per annum. He served there for thirty-one years, was instrumental in establishing the Preston Literary and Scientific Institution and was Secretary of the Exhibition of Arts and Industries held at Preston. He was also sometime President of the General Conference of the New Church, one of the authors of its Liturgy, editor of The Juvenile Magazine for seventeen years, and a frequent contributor to The Intellectual Repository, the New Church’s house journal. No copy of his early work, listed here, appears to have survived but he published widely on theological subjects: An Authentic History of . . . The New Jerusalem Church (1828), A Discourse on the Truly Christian Life (1828),The Deity of Jesus Christ Asserted (1841), The Nature of Visions (1842), The Antediluvian History (1850), The Postdiluvian History (1855), and an array of shorter works, including sermons. He died on 20 May 1876 at Preston, leaving an estate of £1500. (ancestry.co.uk 9 Oct. 2022; Pigot’s Directory 1834 [Newcastle], 601; Weekly Review 27 May 1876; Annual Register for 1876, 142) AA