Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Crowther, Jonathan (1760-1824)

by Alexander Gordon

CROWTHER, JONATHAN (1760–1824), methodist preacher, was appointed to the itinerant ministry by John Wesley in 1784. In 1787 Wesley sent him to Scotland, where his year's pay amounted to 50s.; he reported that ‘no man is fit for Inverness circuit, unless his flesh be brass, his bones iron, and his heart harder than a stoic's.’ In 1789 Wesley empowered him to reduce to Wesleyan discipline the Glasgow methodists, who had set up a ‘session’ of ‘ordained elders’ on the presbyterian model. Crowther was president of conference in 1819, and president of the Irish conference in 1820. For two years before his death he was disabled by a paralytic affection. He died at Warrington on 8 June 1824, leaving a wife and children. He was buried in the chapel yard at Halifax. He published:

1. ‘The Methodist Manual,’ Halifax, 1810, 8vo.
2. ‘A Portraiture of Methodism,’ 1811, 8vo.
3. A life of Thomas Coke, D.C.L. [q. v.]

Tyerman has made some use of his manuscript autobiography.

[Wesleyan-Methodist Mag. 1824, pp. 500, 648; Ministers of Conference, 1825, p. 472; Tyerman's Life and Times of John Wesley, 1871, iii. 507, 581.]

A. G.