Fanny Crosby

1820–1915AmericanMethodist hymn-writer

Blind from infancy, she wrote more than eight thousand hymn texts and gave most of the money away in the Bowery.

Summary

Fanny Crosby lived 1820–1915, and was American. This wing places Fanny Crosby in The Missionary Century, 1790–1910.

Lived 1820–1915, American.
Stood in The Missionary Century (1790–1910).
Hangs on The Hymn Writers.
Tradition: Methodist hymn-writer.

The life

Fanny Crosby lost her sight as a baby to a doctor's botched treatment, and refused for the rest of her life to be pitied for it, she said the first face she ever saw would be her Savior's. She was educated at the New York Institution for the Blind, taught there for eleven years, addressed Congress, and married a blind musician named Alexander van Alstyne.

Publishers came to her with tunes and she supplied the words, often composing a whole text in her head before dictating a line; the count runs past eight thousand, and because no hymnal wanted a dozen entries by one author she scattered them under something like two hundred pen names. 'Blessed Assurance' was written to a tune a friend played for her twice. Royalties made her comfortable and she stayed poor anyway, living near and working in the Bowery rescue missions for decades because that was where she wanted to be.

What was happening while he lived9 moments · 1790–1910

1825George Müller is convertedA German student with a record of lying and petty theft went along to a small Saturday prayer meeting in a private house in Halle, mostly out of curiosity. He walked out changed, and spent the next seventy years proving in public that God answers prayer.
1840Livingstone sails, and the Burmese Bible is doneDavid Livingstone, a Scottish mill worker who studied medicine at night, left London in December for southern Africa; he had wanted China, but a war closed it and Robert Moffat's talk of "the smoke of a thousand villages" turned him south. That same year Judson finished revising his Burmese Bible, first completed in 1834, twenty-one years after he landed.
1854Hudson Taylor lands at ShanghaiHe was twenty-one, under-funded, and arrived in the middle of a civil war. Within a few years he had done what no missionary did, put on Chinese dress and gone inland, away from the treaty ports and the protection of gunboats.
1859The '59 Revival, and Spurgeon's foundation stoneAwakening ran through Ulster and Wales after a season of prayer meetings begun in New York two years earlier; contemporaries counted converts in the tens of thousands, though the figures were estimates made in the moment. In August the foundation stone was laid for Charles Spurgeon's Metropolitan Tabernacle, which opened in 1861 and seated around five thousand.
1865The China Inland Mission and the Salvation ArmyIn June, walking the beach at Brighton in anguish over inland China, Taylor wrote in his Bible that he was asking God for twenty-four workers, a mission that would ask no one but God for money. The same summer William and Catherine Booth opened a mission in London's East End; it took the name Salvation Army in 1878.
1873Livingstone dies on his kneesHe was found on the morning of May 1 at Chitambo's village, kneeling by his bed. His African companions Chuma and Susi buried his heart under a tree, dried his body, and carried it roughly a thousand miles to the coast so England could bury him in Westminster Abbey.
1885The Cambridge SevenSeven young men from Britain's most privileged circles, including the cricketer C. T. Studd, gave up sport, money, and careers and sailed for China with the Inland Mission. Their farewell tour of the universities sent a wave of students into missions on both sides of the Atlantic.
1904Clouds gathering over WalesIn the autumn a young miner named Evan Roberts began meetings at Loughor, and within months chapels across Wales were full night after night. Reports of about a hundred thousand converts in a year are the era's own estimate, not a count, but the world was watching, and the next era was already breaking.
1910EdinburghIn June, some 1,200 delegates met in Edinburgh for the World Missionary Conference under the chairmanship of John R. Mott. For the first time since the apostles the church could look at a map and say it was genuinely worldwide, and the delegates from the younger churches asked, politely and firmly, when they would be treated as equals.

The Missionary Century: the whole era→

Go further

Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.

Search Fanny Crosby at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites

Why this one hangs here

Blind since infancy, she wrote over eight thousand hymns and spent her royalties on the Bowery missions where she worked.

Hangs on The Hymn Writers: The poets who taught the church to sing what it believes.

Standing beside himThe Missionary Century · 29 on this stretch of wall

William Carey1761–1834

A village cobbler who expected great things from God, attempted great things for God, and opened the missions era.

Adoniram Judson1788–1850

Survived Burma's death prisons and buried his family there to give the Burmese the Bible they still read.

George Müller1805–1898

Housed ten thousand orphans in Bristol and never asked anyone but God for a penny.

David Livingstone1813–1873

Walked Africa open for the gospel, shamed the slave trade in print, and died on his knees.

Horatio Spafford1828–1888

Wrote 'it is well with my soul' on the deck of a ship crossing the exact water where his four daughters had drowned.

William Booth1829–1912

Built an army out of the people no church wanted, with soup, soap, and salvation.