DICTIONARY
OF
NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY
CONDER, JAMES (1763–1823), numismatist, was the youngest son of John Conder, D.D. [q.v.], pastor of the congregational meeting of protestant dissenters on the Pavement, Moorfields, London, and divinity professor in the dissenting academy at Homerton. He was born at Mile End and educated in the dissenters' school at Ware. For many years he was a haberdasher at Ipswich, where he died on 22 March 1823.
Conder possessed an extensive numismatic collection, and his series of provincial coins was probably unique. He long meditated the publication of a 'History of the Dissenting Establishments in Suffolk,' but this design was not executed. His name is honourably recorded for assistance received in the prefaces to Wilson's 'Dissenting Churches' and Brook's 'Lives of the Puritans.' He published a work of great utility to the provincial jeton collector, entitled 'An Arrangement of Provincial Coins, Tokens, and Medalets, issued in Great Britain, Ireland, and the Colonies, within the last twenty years, from the farthing to the penny size,' 2 vols. Ipswich, 1798, 4to, also printed on one side of the paper only, 2 vols. 1798-9, and on both sides in 1 vol. 1799, 8vo. In the British Museum there is a copy of the first edition, interleaved, with engraved specimens and copious manuscript notes by W. Young.
[Suffolk Biography, by J. F.; Cat. of Printed Books in Brit. Mus.; Gent. Mag. xciii. (i.), 648-50; Davy's Athcnse Suffolcienses, iii. 129; Clarke's Ipswich, p. 468 ; Biog. Dict, of Liyinff Authors (1816); Nichols's Illustr. of Lit. vi. 331-4.]
CONDER, JOHN, D.D. (1714–1781), congregationalist minister and tutor, was born 3 June 1714, at Wimpole, Cambridgeshire, and came of an old nonconformist stock in that county. On leaving school he was taken up by the ‘King's Head Society,’ instituted in aid of the education of dissenting ministers, and studied first in the London academy of which he afterwards became the head, and which ultimately was settled at Homerton; afterwards in another London academy, for the benefit of the instructions of John Eames, F.R.S., described by Isaac Watts as ‘the most learned man I ever knew.’
Conder inaugurated his ministerial career at Cambridge, being invited to the congregational church, Hog Hill, on 23 Nov. 1738, and ordained there on 27 Sept. 1739. He restored harmony in a congregation which had been unhappy in its pastors, and remained at Cambridge till 13 Oct. 1754, when he removed to London to fill the place of Zephaniah Marryat, D.D. (d. September 1754), as theological tutor in the academy which had previously been conducted at Plasterers' Hall. It was moved to Mile End in 1755, and in 1772 to Homerton. Conder continued at the head of the academy until his death. He was elected one of the preachers at the Merchants' lecture in Pinners' Hall on 3 Oct. 1759. On 21 May 1760 he became assistant to the venerable Thomas Hall, minister at Little Moorfields, afterwards the Pavement, whose funeral sermon he preached in 1762. Succeeding Hall as pastor, Conder enjoyed marked repute in the pulpit as well as in the theological chair. William Bennet was his assistant at the Pavement from 1778. Conder was disabled by a paralytic stroke, which he survived but a few weeks, dying at Homerton on 30 May 1781. He was buried at Bunhill Fields; his epitaph, composed by himself, concludes thus: ‘Peccavi. Resipui. Confidi. Amavi. Requiesco. Resurgam. Et ex gratia Christi, ut ut indignus, regnabo.’
Conder married in 1744 a daughter of John Flindel of Ipswich, by whom he had James [q. v.] and six elder sons. He published
