Early Life
Collison was born in Beverley, Yorkshire, on 6 January 1772, and became articled to a solicitor in Bridlington. Taking a keen interest in the local Independent Chapel, he became an early Sunday school teacher, and in 1792 decided to give up law and train full-time as a minister at Hoxton College near London. In 1797 he settled close to London in the village of Walthamstow in Essex to carry out pastoral duties, becoming the minister of Marsh Street Independent (Congregational) chapel, in whose grounds he was eventually buried. He undertook this ministerial role whilst also tutoring at Hoxton - until ill health led him to give up the latter in 1801. Detached from Hoxton, he was sought after by other educationalists, and was attracted to an offer to become the founding President and first tutor of a new theological institution, the Hackney Academy. This was to be based on the non-denominational principles George Collison was already familiar with, in his early associations with the London Missionary Society.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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