John Riland

John Riland (1736?-1822) was an Anglican evangelical minister at St. Mary’s, Birmingham, and author of Extracts from Various Devotional Writings of Joseph Hall (Birmingham, 1784). Some letters that passed between Riland and the Rev. Francis Blick were attached to A Sermon on John VII: 17: Delivered in the Parish Church of Sutton Coldfield, January 30, 1791 (Birmingham, 1791). An interesting letter to Riland appeared in the Protestant Magazine (February 1782), in which the writer questions statements made by Riland in a recent publication in which he argued that England’s laws were “inadequate” to protecting women and preventing lewdness, especially prostitution. Riland was a major factor in the formation of the Birmingham Sunday School Society in the mid-1780s. On 4 July 1791, at a meeting of the Birmingham chapter of the Committee to Promote the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Riland appears among the individuals receiving public thanks from the Committee (a printed copy of the resolutions passed that day can be found in the William Smith Papers, VI, Duke University). Whether this  “Riland” was a relation of John Ryland, Jr., is unknown. See Thomas Walter Laquer, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture, 1780-1850 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 27.