Author: WILLIAMS, Thomas
Biography:
WILLIAMS, Thomas (1755-1843: ancestry.co.uk)
Thomas Williams was likely the son of William and Sarah Williams and born on 1 Feb. 1755 and baptised on 7 Apr. at St. Dunstan’s, Stepney, London. He married Hannah Osborne at Saint Pancras, London, on 14 June 1781; they are known to have had at least one child, Priscilla, who was baptised at Bull Lane Independent chapel on 7 Nov. 1782. She married Edward Tindale, a widower and non-conformist minister on 23 Apr. 1804 at a ceremony in St. Dunstan’s that was witnessed by her father. Thomas Williams served as the minister of the Rose Lane meeting house in Ratcliff, London, for fifty years; he had probably taken on that position in about 1790 although no record has been located. Leporati records that he was present at some of the initial meetings of the London Missionary Society in Jan. and Feb. of 1795. In the same year he published as by “A Layman” The Age of Infidelity: In Answer to Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason; The Missionary, listed in this bibliography; and The Age of Credulity A Letter to Nathaniel Brassey Halhed, about Halhed’s support for Richard Brothers (qq.v.). The Age of Infidelity went to numerous printings (particularly in America), and a second part was issued in 1796. Many of Williams’s writings seem to have been issued as pamphlets which may not have survived but he is known to have written A Vindication of the Calvinistic Doctrines of Human Depravity, the Atonement…. (1799), and The Song of Songs… A New Translation (1801). Although his 1795 works were issued pseudonymously or anonymously, later works were published as by T. Williams and include notices for his other writings. Williams was predeceased by his wife who died in her ninety-sixth year on 26 Mar. 1839. He died in 1843 and was buried with Hannah in the non-Conformist cemetery at Bunhill Fields, London, on 7 July. The burial notice gives his address at the time of death as Gloucester Terrace, Cannon Street Road, London. (The Missionary is erroneously attributed to Thomas Beck by ESTC, but see the first paragraph of Beck's preface to The Mission [1796].) (ancestry.co.uk 24 Feb. 2025; Matthew Leporati, Romantic Epics and the Mission of Empire [2023]; The Christian Witness and Church Members Magazine 15 [1858], 388) SR