1876 Invitation to Moncure Daniel Conway, American Abolitionist

London, Monday 27 March 1876 — a century after the United States Declaration of Independence.

This historic invitation asks its recipient to attend South Place Chapel in Finsbury, London, to hear Moncure Daniel Conway, the American abolitionist, minister and radical writer, following his return from a speaking tour of the American West.

Conway had grown up in a slave-owning family in Virginia before becoming an outspoken opponent of slavery. His own journey from that background to abolitionism gives this small surviving document a particularly compelling historical context.

Someone received this invitation. Someone thought it worth keeping. And, somehow, someone else did too.

Passed from hand to hand and generation to generation, this fragile piece of Victorian paper has survived for 150 years, preserving a small but tangible connection to the people and ideas that shaped the nineteenth century.