Author: Styles, Thomas Lewis
Biography:
STYLES, Thomas Lewis (1777-1853: ancestry.co.uk)
Pseudonym Z: S.S.S.
He was baptised on 13 Apr. 1777 at St. Mary’s, Whitechapel, London, the youngest of at least three children of Francis Styles and Mary Lewis, who had married at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, in 1768. Nothing is known of his education but it was probably artisanal--he later worked with white metals and his brother Francis was a tool dealer. He married Ann Collett (1781-1841) on 29 Sept. 1805 at St. Paul’s, Hammersmith. They had at least fourteen children, with several infant deaths. They lived in the Marylebone area of Central London and attended William Huntingdon’s proprietary chapel at Titchfield Street, off the Tottenham Court Road (which later became the New Providence Chapel, Gray’s Inn Lane, Clerkenwell in 1811) where they baptised their early children. They moved around 1821 to Chelsea, where he had a shoe shop at 8 King’s Road, Sloane Square. He later worked in white metals and was listed as a jeweller in 1826. He became a member of the Independent Congregation of the Union Chapel, Chelsea, but quarrelled with the minister, Jesse Hopwood, whom he accused of “Fatal Soul-Deluding Error.” He also criticised William Huntingdon’s followers, publishing his objections in the texts listed here and other prose works. When the formerly independent congregationalist chapel at Squirries Street Chapel, Bethnal Green, turned Baptist in 1827, he returned to the East End and became minister there, appending the Huntingdonesque tag “Z: S.S.S.” to his writings (Zaccheus: Scarlet Sinner Saved). His wife, Ann, died in Shoreditch in 1841, and the census recorded him as a widower and jewelle, living at Goldsmith’s Place in St. Leonard’s parish. He died, aged 76, on 26 Nov. 1853 at 2 Aske Terrace, Hoxton, and was buried at Bunhill Fields dissenting burial ground. His final work, Tekel (1843) was yet another theological quarrel and prefixed a full list of his works. (ancestry.co.uk 5 May 2024; findmypast.co.uk 5 May 2024; Pigot’s Directory (Chelsea) (1826), 406; Tekel (1843); Bunhill Fields burial ground, plots 137 and 143; GRO death cert.) AA