Henry Caswall

Born in Yateley, Hampshire, on May 11, 1810, he emigrated to the United States in 1828 and studied at Kenyon College in Ohio, where he earned his degree in 1830. He was ordained in the Episcopal Church soon afterward and served both as a minister and as a teacher, including work connected with Kemper College in Missouri.

As a writer, he was active across several kinds of nonfiction. He published travel writing such as America, and the American Church and The Western World Revisited, along with religious and historical works including The Martyr of the Pongas. He is especially remembered for books criticizing the Latter-day Saint movement, including The Prophet of the Nineteenth Century and Mormonism and Its Author.

His career reflects the intense religious arguments of the mid-1800s, when clergy often wrote for a wide public as well as for church readers. He died on December 17, 1870, leaving behind a body of work that blends observation, polemic, and the concerns of the Anglican world on both sides of the Atlantic.