Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A carte-de-visite portrait of the Reverend Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892).

The descendent of two generations of Independent preachers, Spurgeon was born at Kelvedon in Essex in 1834 and became a Baptist in 1850. He preached his first sermon that same year and in 1852 he was appointed pastor of the Baptist congregation at Waterbeach in Cambridgeshire. In 1854 he went to Southwark in south London, where his sermons drew such crowds (audiences frequently numbered more than 10,000) that a new church, the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Newington Causeway, had to be built for him. He owed his fame as a preacher to his great oratorical gifts, his humour and his shrewd common sense, which showed itself especially in his treatment of contemporary problems. He wrote more than 3,500 sermons, numerous volumes of which were published and translated into many languages. Apart from his preaching activities, he founded a pastors’ college and an orphanage.

He died on 31 January 1892 at Menton (13 miles northeast of Nice) in the south of France, where he would often vacation.

Photographed by Richard Smith of London.