TRAVEL WITH FRANCES RIDLEY HAVERGAL
The English hymn writer and poet
By Carol Purves. Day One. 128 pages. £10.00
ISBN 978-1-84625-206-8
Frances Ridley Havergal was one of the most significant of Victorian women, but, unlike Florence Nightingale or Josephine Butler, her influence stemmed not from a public personality but from her writings and, supremely, from her poems and hymns.
She was born in 1836 into a Worcestershire rectory with a large, loving and musical family. An attractive and articulate child, she was reading by the age of three and writing simple hymns when she was six. She suffered the loss of her mother when she was 12, and when her father remarried, her stepmother, through jealousy, imposed petty restrictions on her, even when she was an adult. Frances learned Hebrew and Greek from her father, became fluent in French and German, and taught herself Welsh by means of her Welsh Bible and Prayer Book. In her mid-teens, she memorised the Gospels, Epistles, Revelation and Psalms.
