Author: Salmon, Joseph Whittingham
Biography:
SALMON, Joseph Whittingham (1747-1826: ancestry.co.uk)
He was baptised on 16 Oct. 1747 at Middlewich, Cheshire, the son of Charles Salmon and his wife Ann Wittingham (sic), who had married there on 13 Dec. 1746. With her father’s consent he married Mary Salmon, probably a cousin, on 19 Jan. 1769. They had at least two sons and a daughter. She died in 1785 with her husband delivering a funeral sermon at Barker-street Chapel, Nantwich, entitled The Robes of the Saints Washed in the Blood of the Lamb (Leeds 1785). He then married Frances Pace on 16 June 1786 at St. Mary’s Nantwich, again with issue of at least two sons and a daughter. After her death he married Isabella Sykes on 27 August 1792, at All Saints, Wakefield, with further issue. He early embraced Methodism and became a Wesleyan preacher. He planned to join the Wesleys on their intended mission to Georgia but was prevented from doing so by his parents. In 1785, he was introduced to the works of Emanuel Swedenborg by the Swiss-born Methodist, Rev. John Fletcher (1729-85), Vicar of Madeley, Shropshire. As is clear from his funeral sermon for his wife he was prone to mystical delusions and joined fellow lapsed Methodist, Ralph Mather (later founder of the formal Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church) on preaching tours to various cities. Around 1788 he was instrumental in bringing Rev. Joseph Proud (1745-1826) (q.v.) to the New Church. With Rev. John Clowes (1743-1831), they were largely responsible for the widespread influence of Swedenborg’s doctrine amongst Manchester dissenters. He produced an abridged and altered translation of the French mystic Antoinette Bourignon’s (1616-80) The Light of the World (1786). He also later acted as amaneusis to John Clowes (1743-1831) as he was translating Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia; or, Heavenly Mysteries (1823). He had moved to Manchester in the late 1780s and started a none too successful manufacturing business; he underwent bankruptcy proceedings in 1801 and 1806. He later moved to Weaver’s Bank, near Nantwich, before settling in Nantwich itself where he died on 15 Oct. 1826, aged 79. (ancestry.co.uk 30 Nov. 2022; findmypast.co.uk 30 Nov. 2022; Lewis, 2: 979; Chester Chronicle 3 Nov. 1826; New Jerusalem Magazine Dec. 1826, 374; Intellectual Repository 2 [1827], 430-3; Robert Hindmarsh, Rise and Progress of the New Jerusalem Church, ed.Edward Madeley [1861], 64-7) AA
Other Names:
- J. W. Salmon