The Papers of Howell Harris
Harris kept a detailed diary, in addition to a careful filing of letters he sent and received during his ministry. His papers afford access to a first eye witness of the Welsh Methodist revival. After his death, they were left to gather dust for over a century until O. M. Edwards, in the 1880s, noted their importance and suggested they ought to be cared for. By this time, the once-home of Harris at Trefeca had been turned into a college. The deputy head of the College, Edwin Williams, took on the task of putting the papers in order. They were kept at Trefeca until 1910 when the Presbyterian church of Wales (which ‘owned’ the papers) decided to set up a committee whose responsibility it would be to take care of the papers and to study them.
By 1913 the scale of the work needing to be done on the papers became apparent. As many of the papers were in Latin, it was estimated that it would take much of a decade and a vast sum of money to ready the papers for publication. In 1913, it was decided that a better use of resources would be to set up a Historical Society of the Presbyterian church of Wales that would be responsible for publishing a regular journal to include, amongst other articles, some of Howell Harris’s papers.
It is believed that around 1932, the papers were moved from Trefeca to the denomination's theological College in Aberystwyth. Those papers, along with others from Coleg y Bala (an old college of the denomination in Bala, North Wales), were taken in 1934 to be stored safely at the National Library of Wales. The papers are in the vaults to this day. Recently Dr. Geraint Tudur (son of R. Tudur Jones), Chair of Church History at University of Wales, Bangor, published a biography of Harris: Howell Harris: From conversion to separation, 1735-1750, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000.
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“You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The deadly monotony of Christian country life where there are no beggars to feed, no drunkards to credit, which are among the moral duties of Christians in cities, leads as naturally to the outvent of what Methodists call “revivals” as did the backslidings of the people in those days.”
—Corra May Harris (1869–1935)