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Next year marks the centennial of the death of the English Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon. When Spurgeon died, in January 1892, London south of the Thames went into mourning. Sixty thousand people came to pay homage during the three days his body lay in state at the Metropolitan Tabernacle. A funeral parade two miles long followed his hearse from the Tabernacle to the cemetery at Upper Norwood. One hundred thousand people stood along the way, flags flew at half-mast, shops and pubs were closed. It was a remarkable demonstration of affection and respect, even in an era when people were scrupulous in observing the rituals that accompanied death.

Spurgeon died in the same month as Cardinal Manning and Prince Edward. Newspapers and periodicals observed the coincidence with special issues, bordered in black, featuring the portraits of the three men. Manning, a famous convert and a prince of the Roman Catholic Church; Edward, Duke of Clarence, the dull grandson of Queen Victoria; and Spurgeon, the fiercely anti-Catholic evangelical preacher—they constituted a curious mix, even in the pages of the lachrymose penny press. The Duke lacked character or intelligence but was born to great things. Manning, a man of exceptional abilities and powerful connections, had been marked from an early age as one destined to achieve power in church or politics. Charles Spurgeon had none of these advantages of privilege, education, or aristocratic connections. He traveled a more difficult road to his position of eminence, and his is the most remarkable story of the three.

Spurgeon was born in 1834, in Kelvedon, Essex, an area with a long tradition of Protestant resistance dating back to the persecutions of “Bloody Mary” in the sixteenth century. His father, John, and his grandfather, James, were Independent ministers. Like many nineteenth-century Nonconformist ministers, Spurgeon was a “son of the manse.” His earliest childhood memories were of listening to sermons, learning hymns, and looking at the pictures in The Pilgrim’s Progress and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. He would later recommend Foxe’s book as “the perfect Christmas gift for a child,” and it was clearly one of the most significant works he ever read, vividly shaping his attitudes toward established religions, the tyranny of Rome, and the glory of martyrdom. The brave Protestants who were burned at Smithfield, and the valiant Puritans, such as Bunyan, who were jailed for their beliefs, were his childhood heroes. And they remained his heroes and models in the years when he evoked their example to the thousands who came to hear him in the Tabernacle and the tens of thousands who read his sermons each week.

For much of his childhood, Spurgeon lived with his grandparents and Aunt Anne in the small agricultural village of Stambourne. There were about five hundred people in Stambourne, a town so remote that even at the end of the nineteenth century it lacked a railroad station. The revolutions in industry and transportation that transformed Victorian Britain were unknown to Stambourne, where the pace of life revolved around the seasons rather than the machine. Spurgeon’s grandfather preached in an Independent meeting house that dated back to the seventeenth century.

Ten years after leaving Stambourne, Spurgeon began his London ministry, and for the rest of his life the metropolis was his home. Yet he was never truly comfortable in an urban setting. All his life he continued to return to Stambourne, hoping to find in that tranquil setting some respite from the hectic pace of city life. His roots and values remained those of rural, pre-industrial Britain.

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