William Bengo' Collyer

William Bengo' Collyer (1782–1854) was an English Congregational minister and religious writer,

Life

He was the only surviving child of Thomas Collyer, a builder of Deptford, where he was born on 14 April 1782. After education at the Leathersellers' Company's school in Lewisham, he entered Independent College, Homerton as a scholar in 1798.

In 1800 Collyer began his ministry in a small congregation at Peckham, over which he was ordained in December 1801. Under his ministry the congregation increased, and the chapel was several times enlarged. Previous to this, he had in 1813 received an invitation to succeed to the pulpit at Salters' Hall Chapel, which, with the consent of the congregation at Peckham, he accepted, an arrangement being made that he should occupy both pulpits. The Peckham chapel was in 1816 rebuilt and reopened under the name of Hanover Chapel. Collyer and Fry's translations into Hebrew of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, carried out with the help of Judah D'Allemand, were published in 1813 and 1815 respectively.

From 1820 to 1824 Collyer edited, with James Baldwin Brown the elder and Thomas Raffles, The Investigator, a quarterly. It attacked Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley as immoral. The article "Licentious Publications in High Life" of 1822, after Shelley's death, received a reply "Canting Slander: To the Reverend William Bengo Collyer" over a number of issues of The Examiner, attributed to William Hazlitt. In 1823 Collyer rode out a scandal around his examination of young men, in the Addington Square baths, that was brought up in The Lancet. That same year, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Collyer died aged 71 in 1854.

Works

Collyer was the author of: