Introduction to the Wilberforce-Ryland Correspondence

Though biographers of William Wilberforce have had little, if anything, to say about his relations with Baptists, his correspondence, especially with John Ryland, Jr. (1753-1825) demonstrates a consistent and substantial relationship, revealing his sincere admiration for Baptist missions and his willingness as an MP to protect the interests of the missionaries in the face of oppressive governmental regulations in India and Jamaica. Much of the correspondence between Wilberforce and various Baptist ministers and laymen is no longer extant, but some forty letters, written between 1792 and 1827, have survived. None of these letters, however, appeared in The Life of William Wilberforce (1838) or The Correspondence of William Wilberforce (1840) (both edited by his sons, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce), or any biography of Wilberforce thereafter.[1] One letter from Wilberforce to Thomas Langdon, dated 23 February 1792, appeared in Langdon’s Memoir (1837); two other letters, both to John Ryland in 1807, appeared in F. A. Cox’s History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792 to 1842.[2] All the rest remain in manuscript. One letter from Ryland to Wilberforce, dated 26 March 1821, can be found in the Wilberforce Papers at Duke University. In the Wilberforce Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, are eleven letters to Wilberforce, written by such Baptist figures as Robert Hall, Andrew Fuller, Olinthus Gregory, Joshua Marshman, Mrs. Adoniram Judson, and one letter by Wilberforce to John Fawcett. Two more letters can be found at the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford: one from Fuller to Wilberforce, dated 5 December 1801; and the other, dated 15 November 1825, from Wilberforce to W. B. Gurney, a prominent Baptist layman from the congregation at Maze Pond, Southwark. 

More significantly, in a bound volume at Bristol Baptist College (shelfmark MS. G97a) are 22 letters from Wilberforce to John Ryland, Jr. (1753-1825), pastor of the two congregations (Baptist and Independent) at Broadmead in Bristol, president of Bristol Baptist Academy, and a leading member of the BMS Committee from 1793 to 1825. This volume also contains one letter by Ryland to Wilberforce, and one by Wilberforce to Ryland’s son, J. E. Ryland. At some point after the death of Wilberforce, these letters came into the possession of the younger Ryland. In 1850 he presented the volume as a gift to the prominent Baptist railroad magnate and MP, Samuel Morton Peto.  Eventually, the volume found its way to the library at Bristol Baptist College, where it resides today.[3]  The following set of letters consists of those in the bound volume at Bristol, along with the Ryland letter found at Duke and one Wilberforce letter to Ryland included in Cox's History (vol.2, pp. 20-21).  

For a detailed discussion of these letters and their place in the larger context of Ryland's work on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society and Wilberforce's assistance at various times with the work in India and the West Indies, see Timothy Whelan, “An Evangelical Anglican Interaction with Baptist Missionary Society Strategy: William Wilberforce and John Ryland, 1807-1824,” in Interfaces: Baptists and Others, edited by David Bebbington and Martin Sutherland. Studies in Baptist History and Thought, vol. 44 (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2013), 56-85.

[1]Robert and Samuel Wilberforce (eds), The Correspondence of William Wilberforce (2 vols; London: Murray, 1840).

[2]See A Brief Memoir of the Rev. Thomas Langdon, Baptist Minister at Leeds (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1837), p. 151; F. A. Cox, A History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792 to 1842 (2 vols; London: T. Ward, and G. and J. Dyer, 1842), II, pp. 19-21.

[3]Shelfmark MS. G97a, Bristol Baptist College Library. Photocopies of these letters can also be found at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, MSS. Wilberforce, Don. e. 164-165. Baptist historian Daniel Potts refers to two of these letters in British Baptist Missionaries in India, 1793–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 17, 180.