Journal of Christian Ignatius Latrobe

On folio 1, Journal written in the Year 1788 and Beginning of 1789 by Chr. Ig. La Trobe. The holograph journal, for 4 January 1788 - June 1789, fills folios 2-108; there is a continuation for 1 October - 2 December 1792 (folios 110-125). After folio 45 a page (containing 11 October to part of 16 October 1788) is missing and after folio 69 a page (containing part of 29 November to 4 December 1788) has been torn out; folios 108v-109v are blank.

Christian Ignatius La Trobe (1758-1836), Moravian minister and composer, was born on 12 February 1758 at Fulneck in Yorkshire. Ordained in 1788, he ministered at the Moravian chapel in London. From 1787 to 1834 he was secretary to the Moravian Brethren's Society for the Furtherance of the Gospel to the Heathen. In 1795 he was raised to presbyter and appointed secretary of the international Moravian church in Britain, the Unitas Fratrum. He published his Journal of a Visit to South Africa in 1818 and his six-volume Selection of Sacred Music from the Works of the most Eminent Composers of Germany and Italy in 1806-1826; his Letters to my Children was published posthumously in 1851. In 1834 La Trobe retired to Fairfield, the settlement at Droylsden near Manchester, where he died on 6 May 1836.

Source: John C.S. Mason, 'La Trobe, Christian Ignatius (1758-1836)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. By permission of Oxford University Press - http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/16107.

Purchased by the John Rylands Library from the bookseller H.M. Fletcher in July 1970.