Thomas Raffles

Thomas Raffles (1788-1863) was raised a Wesleyan Methodist. He studied at Homerton Academy, 1805-1809, after which he began his long career as a Congregational minister, first at Hammersmith for three years, then at Great George Street in Liverpool, 1812-1863. One of the leading Congregational ministers of his day, he was a noted preacher, pastor, educator, and antiquarian. He was involved with the formation of Blackburn Academy (later Lancashire Independent College) in 1816, where Joseph Fletcher and William Hope served as tutors. Raffles was also chairman of the Congregational Union in 1839, and authored several books, including Memoirs of the Life and Ministry of the Late Rev. Thomas Spencer, of Liverpool (Liverpool, 1813), Lectures on Practical Religion (1820) and Internal Evidence of the Inspiration of Scripture (1849), as well as a posthumous volume of hymns and an early volume of poetry entitled Poems by Three Friends (1813), a collaboration between Raffles, his brother-in-law James Baldwin Brown (1785–1843), and their Quaker friend Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen (1792–1836). Raffles was cousin to Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781–1826), Governor of Sumatra (1813–16, 1818–24) and a strong supporter of the early missionary stations in that country.  His son writes that it was during his time at Hammersmith that Raffles began collecting autographs and books, a habit that ‘was maintained throughout his life. He delighted in poring over an old book-stall, and was familiar with every place in London, where there was a chance that anything curious might be met with, and occasionally his perseverance was rewarded’ (Thomas Stamford Raffles, Memoirs of the Life and Ministry of the Rev. Thomas Raffles, D.D., LL.D. [London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1864], 52). James Baldwin Brown, in his brief Thomas Raffles, D.D., LL.D.: A Sketch (London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1863), declared that ‘for fifty years he [Raffles] has been a foremost man in our denomination, perhaps more widely known, more heartily loved, more largely listened to, than any Nonconformist of his time.’ Second only to his fame as a preacher, Brown adds, was his ‘reputation as a man of cultivated taste’, demonstrated by his impressive collection of autograph letters (12, 39).

Thomas Raffles’s massive collection of autograph letters and portraits is now held by the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, from which the majority of the letters transcribed in this book were taken. Within the volumes of the Thomas Raffles Collection are original letters of some 231 poets, 392 artists, over 900 members of the English nobility and other notable figures, 133 English Nonconformist divines (with letters composed between 1658 and 1821), 135 missionaries and 2,260 authors (chiefly English, including autographs of nearly every important writer in English literary history after 1700), as well as eight boxes of letters and papers written or signed by various notables, English and foreign (English MSS 343-87). Among the papers of Thomas Raffles is another collection of 64 fascicles of letters and portraits of ministers, missionaries and evangelists primarily of the nineteenth century, partially collected by Raffles’s son, Thomas Stamford Raffles (see Lizzie Boxall, ‘Portraits and Autographs Collected by the Rev. Thomas Raffles, John Rylands Library, Manchester’, 1991). In the early part of the twentieth century Lancashire Independent College deposited in the Rylands Library a significant collection of letters and manuscripts pertaining to Raffles, comprising five volumes of autograph letters from more than 400 ministers (mostly Nonconformist), twenty-eight unbound volumes of sermons by Raffles, and a three-volume manuscript, ‘Collections for a History of the Nonconformist Churches of Lancashire’, composed by Raffles between 1819 and 1821. See Raffles, Memoirs of the Life and Ministry of the Rev. Thomas Raffles; DEB; W. Wright Roberts, ‘English Autograph Letters in the John Rylands Library’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 25 [Special Volume] (1941), 129.