author

F. Jewell

Best known for a warm, earnest Victorian biography of the Yorkshire preacher Abraham Lockwood, this little-known writer brings everyday faith and working-class life into focus. The surviving record is sparse, which gives the book an added sense of period texture and mystery.

1 Audiobook

Little Abe, or, the Bishop of Berry Brow

Little Abe, or, the Bishop of Berry Brow

by F. Jewell

About the author

F. Jewell is a little-documented nineteenth-century author known for Little Abe; or, The Bishop of Berry Brow, a life of Abraham Lockwood, a Yorkshire local preacher in the Methodist New Connexion. The text itself places the author at "Bethel Villa, Hull" and dates the preface to 1880, giving one of the few concrete clues about Jewell's time and location.

The book presents Lockwood's story in a plain, devotional style, aiming to be both readable and spiritually useful. Jewell thanks friends who helped gather material and prepare the work for print, which suggests a practical, community-based approach to biography rather than a highly literary one.

Very little biographical information about F. Jewell appears to survive in widely available sources. Because of that, the author is remembered mainly through this single work, which preserves a vivid slice of Victorian Methodist culture and local religious life.