Item 122 - Letter from John Wilberforce Doran to Thomas Robinson

1 folded sheet

This letter and MSPB 123 are in an envelope pasted to the back of a blank flyleaf in a copy of Thomas Robinson’s Last Days of Bishop Heber (D.8.157). The envelope is marked in ink by C. E. R. Robinson ‘Correspondence between my Father & Mr Doran. 1865’, and in pencil ‘p. 17’, a reference to a page of the Appendix containing a reference to John William Doran. On the other side of the flyleaf bearing the envelope is a cutting of the review mentioned in the letter, and on an earlier flyleaf is a memorandum by C. E. R. Robinson headed ‘Notes of a lecture by my father on Bishop Heber & the Church in India in the Literary Institution Gravesend on Tuesday Jan 7. 1862.’ See also MSPB 124–5.

Transcript

West Malling | Maidstone
March 21. 1865

Revd Sir,

In the number of the “Church Times”, {1} which I take the liberty to send you, you will find a notice of a work on “the Christians of St Thomas” by the Rev. G. B. Howard. As the review contains a very offensive allusion to my late dear & revered father, I am of course anxious to do anything I can to vindicate his memory from so grievous a slur as is there thrown upon it. You will doubtless remember the circumstances referred to, & if you can kindly give me authority to say that your opinion of my father’s conduct is not that of the reviewer, I shall be indeed obliged to you.

I am, Revd Sir, | Yours faithfully
J. W. Doran, | clerk, M.A.

The Venerable | Archdeacon Robinson | DD. | Master of the Temple.

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{1} 18 March 1865.

{2} The Christians of St Thomas and their Liturgies (Oxford and London: John Henry and James Parker, 1864).

{3} One passage in the review records that the last days of Bishop Heber were employed in an attempt to heal a dispute between two candidates for primacy among the St Thomas Christians, ‘a design defeated by the carelessness and sloth of his chaplain Doran, whom he had selected to convey his letters of counsel to the rival prelates’.

In an envelope pasted to a flyleaf in D.8.157.