Now! Then! The Rev Henry Venn’s heart and lungs require removal from polluted Huddersfield to a Cambridge village

8 December 1770: The Rev Henry Venn’s heart and lungs require removal from polluted Huddersfield to a Cambridge village

John Venn. 1904. Annals of a Clerical Family. London: Macmillan. Get it:

Excerpt

I plainly perceive, every time I preach, how much I am hurt, and the very last time I preached in Bath chapel I had such a palpitation of heart (a thing I never had before) as soon as I sat down in the chair as made me ready to faint away. This and many other symptoms I feel, but, because I am cheerful and ride about, my Yorkshire friends, through their affection for me, make little of the matter; and as Mrs Jones expressed it, she said if she were one of the Huddersfield congregation she had sooner see me drop down dead than leave the place. I feel very sensibly what a total change in my condition this event will bring about, and if I seem to consult flesh and blood, there are many more comforts in Huddersfield than at Yelling. Do not you believe I enjoy the Word of God, the House of God, the Table of God, and the Ministers of God? And where are they to be enjoyed in that degree they are at Huddersfield? What is a little church with at most a hundred people? What is a small solitary village? What is the Lord’s Table, with perhaps twenty communicants, with what I have for near twenty years been used to? Only renew my strength and make me in any degree capable of the labour of my much-loved post, and I will be bound to strive rather than leave it. [Later:] Nothing would have prevailed on me to leave Huddersfield if my lungs had not received an irreparable injury, of which I am more sensible, by several symptoms, than ever. Looking upon my dissolution as at no great distance, I go to Yelling as a dying man.

Order the book

Subscribe to the free daily email

To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations

Comment

In terms of his illness, what has Yelling got that Huddersfield hasn’t? Clean air? Josiah Bateman wrote a century later that the vicarage

was a very old building, in the worst part of the town, with a garden attached, in which nothing green would grow. Close by, a large, old-fashioned inn was standing, which in times past had been built upon the glebe, and now paid a good rent to the vicar. But all was hemmed in by tall chimneys and wretched buildings; and the house proved on trial an unhealthy residence. Again and again, one and another of my family was attacked with illness; again and again we were invited by kind parishioners to make their handsome houses in the outskirts our home for weeks together. But this could not last; and before a year had elapsed, a decision was required whether we should leave or stay; and that turned upon the retention of the old house, or the erection of a new one. I called a meeting in the vestry, and proposed the question with all simplicity. It was responded to with Yorkshire liberality and kindliness; and in the result a beautiful paddock of two acres and more, just outside the town, was exchanged (the exchange being legally necessary) for an equal quantity of glebe land, covered with gorse, five miles away; and two thousand two hundred pounds were raised to build a handsome Gothic vicarage (Bateman 1880).

But how dirty was the Industrial Revolution in Huddersfield at the time of Venn?

Something to say? Get in touch

Original

It is a happy circumstance for me, since even you and all my dear friends in Yorkshire seem determined to place my removal to a lucrative motive, that the living I am going to will not suffer any such construction, nor will my circumstances be at all materially mended by it. But this does not in the least affect me, because I plainly perceive, every time I preach, how much I am hurt, and the very last time I preached in Bath chapel I had such a palpitation of heart (a thing I never had before) as soon as I sat down in the chair, as made me ready to faint away. This and many other symptoms I feel, but, because I am cheerful and ride about, my Yorkshire friends, through their affection for me, make little of the matter; and as Mrs. Jones expressed it, she said if she were one of the Huddersfield congregation she had sooner see me drop down dead than leave the place. I feel very sensibly what a total change in my condition this event will bring about; and if I seem to consult flesh and blood, there are many more comforts in Huddersfield than at Yelling. Do not you believe I enjoy the Word of God, the House of God, the Table of God, and the Ministers of God? and where are they to be enjoyed in that degree they are at Huddersfield? What is a little church with at most a hundred people? What is a small solitary village? What is the Lord’s Table, with perhaps twenty communicants, with what I have for near twenty years been used to? Only renew my strength and make me in any degree capable of the labour of my much-loved post, and I will be bound to strive rather than leave it.

[A later letter:]

Nothing would have prevailed on me to leave Huddersfield if my lungs had not received an irreparable injury, of which I am more sensible, by several symptoms, than ever. Looking upon my dissolution as at no great distance, I go to Yelling as a dying man.

362 words.