ABSTRACT
The hard part about describing the personality of John Owen is finding it in the first place: he wrote in a curiously impersonal style, giving little of himself away.1 There is in all 24 volumes of his published writings only one reference to any member of his immediate family, his father Henry, a nonconformist minister.2 Owen himself had 11 children, but only one lived into adulthood and even she predeceased him,3 yet there is no mention of this in any of his works. We are told that his grief infiltrated his later writings,4 but if this is the case it is difficult to discern. To compound the problem, Owen was careful to leave behind little in the way of personal papers. peter Toon did a good job of reassembling the detritus of Owen’s letter-writing industry but even then it is a miserly affair. it contains only 98 pieces of correspondence, all of them routinely business-like and detached.5 Certainly there is no autobiography to go on. it is as if Owen sought to hide all
trace of his passing, as far as he could. Toon’s assessment remains true: “Owen as a man, as a human being, still remains an elusive character.”6
