Baptist Letters in the Raffles Collection and Methodist Archives: Introduction

Within the collections at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester are more than 330 letters to and from Baptist ministers and laypersons composed between 1741 and 1907 and now scattered throughout the volumes of the Thomas Raffles Collection (156 letters), the Raffles Handlist (9 letters), ENG. MS. 861 (69 letters, also collected by Thomas Raffles (1788-1863) and his son, Thomas Stamford Raffles), and the Methodist Archives (103 letters), a massive collection of materials that moved to the Rylands Library from London in the 1970s. These letters, of which 234 were collected by Raffles, provide important insights into English Baptist history, establishing the John Rylands Library as a valuable resource for Baptist historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

After Raffles’s death, his collection of letters, portraits, and literary and historical manuscripts was deposited at Lancashire Independent College. In 1896 the collection was purchased by Enriqueta Augustina Tennant Rylands (1843-1908), wealthy widow (and third wife) of the Manchester industrialist and Christian philanthropist, John Rylands (1801-88). The Raffles Collection was one of the first manuscript collections to find a home in the John Rylands Library, a magnificent structure commissioned by Mrs. Rylands in honor of her husband. The Raffles Collection (Eng. MS. 343-87) includes original letters of some 230 poets, 390 artists, over 540 members of the English nobility, 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. Another part of the Raffles Collection consists of 64 small volumes of letters and portraits of ministers, missionaries, and evangelists primarily of the of the nineteenth century, partially collected by Raffles’s son, Thomas Stamford Raffles. In the early part of the twentieth century, Lancashire College deposited in the Rylands Library a second collection of letters and manuscripts, comprising five volumes of autograph letters from more than 400 ministers, mostly nonconformist, collected by Raffles’s son, Thomas Stamford Raffles. Now known as the Raffles Handlist, this collection also includes twenty-eight unbound volumes of sermons by Raffles as well as his three-volume manuscript, ‘Collections for a History of the Nonconformist Churches of Lancashire’, composed between 1819 and 1821. 

For annotated transcriptions of 267 of these letters, as well as an extensive biographical index, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1845 (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009); for an accounting of all the Baptist letters in the Rylands Library, see Timothy Whelan,  “A Calendar of Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741-1907,” Baptist Quarterly 42 (2008), 577-612; further enlarged in Timothy Whelan,  “Baptist Autographs at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 89.2 (2013), 203-25. For connections between Raffles and Joseph Angus (1816-1902), Baptist minister, teacher, and antiquarian, see Timothy Whelan,  “Joseph Angus and the Use of Autograph Letters in the Library at Holford House, Regent’s Park College, London,” Baptist Quarterly 40 (2004): 455-76.

For the complete Calendar of the Baptist letters in the Rylands Library, click here. Other non-Baptist letters from the Rylands Library and the Raffles Collection can also be found on this site.