Henry Morris 1712-1774

Henry MORRIS 1712-1774

Biographical Note

Of Nottinghamshire; BA Queens' College, Cambridge 1732, MA 1735, BD 1744, fellow1732-69. He was ordained a deacon in 1733 and priest in 1735, and after spending time as a curate in Southfleet, Kent, he became rector of St Botolph’s, Cambridge and vicar of Oakington, just north of Cambridge, in 1748. He seems to have held these livings until the 1760s when he returned to his native Nottinghamshire as rector of Hickling, where he died in 1774.

Books

The Queens' Donors’ Register records that Morris bequeathed to the College all his books not already held and that these amounted to two hundred volumes added to the shelves. Most of them will be found today on presses P and R in Queens' Library though less than a quarter had been added to the online catalogue by 2024. They are wide-ranging in subject; they include some theological works and classical authors alongside literary texts (Michael Drayton’s Poems, 1619, Ambrose Philips’s Pastorals, 1710, William Somerville’s The chace: a poem, 1735) and numerous books suggesting an armchair traveller (Daniel Beeckman’s A voyage to and from the island of Borneo, 1718, John Keysler’s Travels through Germany, 1760, Francis Moore’s Travels into the inland parts of Africa, 1738). He was clearly interested in the scientific discoveries of his time, as he owned several tracts by William Watson about his experiments with electricity, and Benjamin Martin’s Essay on electricity, 1748. He also had a copy of Hydrostatical and pneumatical lectures by Roger Cotes (1738), and the Miscellaneous works of the seventeenth-century Oxford Professor of Astronomy, John Greaves (1737). Combined with books on history and current affairs, and remembering that what went to Queens’ is only an unknown fraction of a larger whole (as we do not know what books were rejected as duplicates or unwanted), a picture emerges of an educated and enquiring mind, of a clergyman not single-mindedly focused on issues of salvation and Biblical exegesis. The Library also holds two manuscript notebooks compiled by Morris (MSS 149-50), one containing genealogies of British noble families and the other a list of corrections to the 1773 edition of the Anglo-Saxon version of Orosius.

Characteristic Markings

Morris did not generally inscribe or annotate his books; they were marked with a printed donation label. Someone evidently noticed that Morris’s academic qualifications were left off this; all the examples in the Library have ”S.T.B” (”Sacrae Theologiae Baccalareus”, Bachelor of Sacred Theology) added in a neat eighteenth-century hand after Morris’s name.

Sources

• Hickling Monuments and Memorials.
• Queens' College Donors' Book.
• Venn, J. and J. A., Alumni Cantabrigienses, Cambridge, 1922.