Mary Jones and Her Bible

The story of Mary Jones and her Bible inspired the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society. Mary Jones (16 December 1784 – 28 December 1864) was a Welsh Protestant Christian girl who, at age fifteen, walked twenty-five miles across the countryside to buy a copy of the Welsh Bible from Thomas Charles because she did not have one. Charles then used her story in proposing to the Religious Tract Society that it set up a new organisation to supply Wales with Bibles. The account was first set out in print in 1882 by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the author simply being credited as M.E.R.