Enslavement, Evangelicalism and Bibles

British (English) School; Thomas Penny White (1777-1845), Fellow (1802)

Thomas Penny White (1777-1845)

Born in London in 1778, Thomas Penny White was admitted at Queens’ in 1797 as a sizar – a student who carried out menial tasks within his college and who could receive financial support. His father, Thomas White, was the owner and headteacher of The Colchester Academy in Essex from 1785 until his death in 1804. A brilliant student, Penny White graduated in 1802 as Senior Wrangler, the highest scoring undergraduate in mathematics. As further testament to his ability, he won the Smith's Prize, an accolade awarded annually to two students in mathematics and theoretical physics. The same year, he became a Fellow of the College before obtaining his M.A. in 1805. He remained a fellow until 1812, the year he married an heiress to substantial wealth derived from enslavement, Charlotte Eliza Channing (1791-1861).
Charlotte was the daughter of John Channing and his second wife Charlotte Eliza Perkins (1761-1796). John Channing was born in Soberton, a village near Droxford where Thomas Penny White would later become the curate in 1813 following his marriage to Charlotte. By the 1770s, John Channing had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and was an established owner of plantations in Georgia and South Carolina where enslaved people were working his rice fields. In 1755, John Channing married Joanna Izard, the widow of John Izard who came from an old and wealthy family of plantation owners. By 1769, John and Joanna lived between London and South Carolina. The management of the plantations was left to the care of Edward Telfair. Following the death of Joanna in 1788, John married Charlotte Eliza Perkins. Their eldest daughter, Charlotte Eliza (future wife of Thomas Penny White), was born in 1791. The year after the birth of Charlotte, John died, leaving his substantial estate to his wife. His will records that his two plantations in South Carolina were sold for £23,880 and that he held £10,000 in government bonds. In 1796, at the age of five, Charlotte became the heiress of a wealthy estate.
In 1842, three years before his death, Penny White founded an annual prize of £30 (equivalent of £2,584 in 2022). He had also previously been a benefactor to the library: according to Queens’ Donors’ Book, he donated a 5-volume set of Lavater’s Physiognomy in 1815. Three years later, he made another donation to the library, recorded in the Donors’ book as ‘a valuable Collection of Bibles in modern languages, printed for, or by the assistance of, the British & Foreign Bible Society’– now part of the Samuel Lee Collection. Published British & Foreign Bible Society reports indicate Thomas Penny White to have been an active member of the Society: he was the secretary of the Hampshire auxiliary society, created in 1814 which coincides with his time as curate in Soberton, Hampshire (1813-26).

Artist unknown, 19th century
Queens' College Art Collection

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