William James Dawson

Dawson wrote in Autobiography of a Mind, "All around these dismal habitations of the dead, were narrow alleys and foul rookeries, feculent with thronged and neglected human lives.

The dilapidated houses looked as though they had known no cleansing or repair since the days of the Great Plague, when Bunhill Fields received the dead in thousands.(p.

177-178) Deliverance came in a whole unexpected and in a manner wholly unforeseen that a church was vacant in Glasgow where few English preachers coveted a charge so distant."

In Autobiography of a Mind Dawson wrote: "The house to which I came was one of these grey stone houses, one of the twenty or thirty in a somber crescent, built round a mangy grass plot defended with rusty railing and adorned with a broken foundation, long ago derelict" (p. 204) He described his years in Glasgow writing, "In Glasgow a different spirit reigned.

(p.271) In her memoir his daughter, Hilda wrote: "My farther decided to leave the Wesley Methodism, with its restrictions, furnished manses, and continually returning three-year moves with a growing family of children to be educated.

He was a prolific writer completing The Man Jesus Christ, The Quest of the Simple Life, and The House of Dreams as well as his first attempt at writing short stories, London Idylls.

He wrote in Autobiography of a Mind that the Life of Christ Jesus was totally unsuccessful in England, but attracted attention in the United States; another The Quest of the Simple Life interested Theodore Roosevelt and his first deliberate attempt at short-story writing was read before publication, the that kindliest of critics, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (p. 292).

After he returned to London, his American friends pursued him with importunities to continue among them a career, which promised large opportunities of public usefulness.

And so the farewell to London came on a certain morning (May 6, 1906) in Euston Station, among a crowd of sorrowing friends, young and old, all of whom were to recede slowly from any active participation in our lives.

This was simply a continuation of his mode of life in England, where he lectured in almost every city and considerable town during a period of twenty years.

In Twenty years in America Dawson wrote: “On a lecture platform I found an opportunity of public usefulness and a means of reputation, much wider that that afforded by the pulpit.” However Hilda wrote: “after four years of travelling my father began to consider more and more the possibility of accepting a call to a permanent ministry and settling down to home-life again.” In 1911 Dawson left Taunton for Newark, where he was minister of the Old First Presbyterian Church (Newark, New Jersey).

By the fall of that year the family had purchased 40 acres at Willow Point, five miles north of Nelson on the west arm of Kootenay Lake.

Reginald labored to develop an apple orchard[2] This property became a favorite destination for the whole family who traveled from America by train for the summer.