| Notes |
- He was a tradesman, most likely a clothier as his father appears to have been, who over several decades wrote a large body of devotional material, most of it in journal form but also letters, hymns, and other religious material, all from the perspective of a typical early-eighteenth-century evangelical dissenter. His journals and much of the other material were first held closely by his family, but by 1779 his daughter Phebe Hanbury was the only remaining survivor, and she agreed to allow Benjamin Fawcett to edit and publish Extracts from the Diary, Meditations and Letters, of Mr. Joseph Williams, of Kidderminster.
For the next several decades, up until the mid-19th century, this and various other editions of his religious writings were held in high esteem by followers of the Dissenting tradition. Today he is less well-remembered, rating not even a Wikipedia entry, much less an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but some scholars have begun to re-read and re-assess his work. In the words of Isabel Rivers (citation details below):Why is Williams's journal important? I would like to suggest two main reasons. First, it provides detailed evidence of the responses of a lay Dissenter in the first half of the eighteenth century to contemporary developments in religious thought and organisation, and particularly to the beginnings of the evangelical revival. Williams deplored the movement towards moral and rational religion among some Dissenting ministers, and sought out Church of England clergy of Methodist and evangelical leanings; what he was looking for was a continuation of the Puritan tradition, and he applauded it wherever he found it. He took an active, indeed an aggressive, part in electing the new minister for his church in Kidderminster, and in putting others on the road to conversion--members of his family, strangers he met on the road, even an Anglican clergyman--and at the same time he was very conscious of his own limitations as a layman and his subordinate relationship to ministers and clergy. Secondly, the journal as it was written, edited, and read--a process that lasted from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth--provides an excellent example of the peculiar nature of the literature of the revival, combining the favourite genres of meditation, narrative, hymns, letters, and poetry. He did not labor in solitude. He and his wife were both close to the eminent Nonconformist educator, hymnwriter, and minister Philip Doddridge. He edited the journal of the New England missionary David Brainerd. He was well-connected with many other important figures of the 18th-century evangelical revival, including several adherents of Methodism, for which he professed some admiration.
Little is known of his origins. The date of his birth given here, 16 Nov 1692, comes from a Life published in 1832; it does match up tidily with dates given in his journals, beginning with an entry in which he recalls events that took place in 1699 when he was, in his own words, "aged 7." The death dates, or approximations thereof, for his parents are similarly extracted from his journals and from letters by others in his circle published alongside his journal entries. Allegedly a record exists of a Joseph Williams baptized at Kidderminster on 28 Nov 1692, a son of John and Ann Williams; also allegedly, a John Williams and Anne Crane were married at Kidderminster on 13 Jan 1687. We have been unable to verify these with sources available to us.
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Nielsen Hayden genealogy
1692 - 1755 (63 years)
[2, 3, 4]