Hupton, Job

Author

b Staffordshire 1762, d Claxton, nr Norwich, Norfolk 1849. As a youth with only basic education he worked at the local blacksmith’s forge and was converted through the ministry of John Bradford, one of Lady Huntingdon’s preachers or chaplains. For some time afterwards, after training at Trevecca Coll, he too became one of the team she supported. But later he embraced baptist views and for many years from 1794 he ministered to the Baptist congregation at Claxton, Norfolk. His hymns were first published in the Gospel Magazine, to which he also contributed other material, under various initials or noms-de-plume; 22 were reprinted as Hymns and Spiritual Poems posthumously and with a memoir, in 1861. His ‘bold and vigorous imagination and great command of language’ are noted by his fellow-Baptist W R Stevenson in Julian. Hupton’s best-known hymn is a rare Baptist inclusion in some mainstream Anglican hymn-books, although J M Neale (qv) felt the need to revise it for A&M, sometimes helpfully. No.297*.