Harris, Alexander, 1805-1874 : Alexander Harris (1805-1874) was born at 72 Fleet Street, London, on 7 February 1805. He was the eldest of the 11 children of William Harris (b. ca. 1785), a law student who later became a clergyman, and his wife Mary (née Redford) [1784-1823]. Alexander grew up at Wallingford, Berks., where his father was minister of the Congregational church, and went to London in 1823 to work as a printer's proofreader. In 1825 he emigrated to New South Wales and spent some 16 years there as an itinerant cedar getter, sawyer, carpenter and clerk. Having been converted from atheism to evangelical christianity, ca. 1838, he returned to England at the end of 1840 and a year later married his childhood sweetheart, Elizabeth Atkinson, five weeks before she died of tuberculosis.
For several years, Harris served as a lay missionary in the East End of London and wrote a spiritual autobiography entitled Testimony to the Truth (London, 1848), that was republished in 1852 as A Converted Atheist's Testimony to the Truth of Christianity. The publication was greatly valued by Charlotte Brontë, whose Jane Eyre had been published a year earlier by the same firm of Smith, Elder & Co.
Secular works by Harris include Settlers and Convicts or Recollections of Sixteen Years' Labour in the Australian Backwoods, by An Emigrant Mechanic (London, 1846); an emigrant handbook, A Guide to Port Stephens in New South Wales, the Colony of the Australian Agricultural Company (London 1849); and a novel, The Emigrant Family: or, The Story of an Australian Settler (London, 1849), republished in 1852 as Martin Beck: or, the Story of an Australian Settler. The Emigrant Family is regarded as one of the major works of Australian fiction of this period, and all three of the books provide accurate, comprehensive and vivid descriptions of early colonial life in New South Wales. They have become valuable reference sources for Australian social historians, despite the problems created for scholars by their original anonymity including the descrepancies between Harris' various semi-fictional autobiographical works, and the difficulty of obtaining substantiating evidence for some of his statements about his life.
In 1842, Alexander Harris married Ursula Sarah Carr (b. ca. 1809), eldest daughter of John Smith Carr (d. 1863), a prosperous London businessman. This second marriage foundered as a result of basic incompatibility and Harris' persistent efforts to convert his wife from the Swedenborgianism she had embraced shortly after their marriage. About 1847, Ursula Harris left her husband and took their three sons to the Isle of Man. In 1851, Harris emigrated to the U.S.A. He eventually settled at Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, and supported himself by free lance writing for various newspapers and schoolteaching. In 1858, the Saturday Evening Post of Philadelphia serialized Harris' third autobiography, Religio Christi, which was later published in an edited version as The Secrets of Alexander Harris, a frank autobiography by the Author of "Settlers and Convicts" (Sydney, 1961).
In 1858, Harris was rejoined by his wife and sons and the family lived at Appleton, Wisconsin, until 1860, when, in anticipation of the coming Civil War in America, Ursula Harris moved with their three sons to Berlin (Kitchener) in Canada West. Harris later joined her there, but the marriage broke down permanently in 1863 when she left him again, taking the family to Nova Scotia. Contact was, however, maintained by correspondence. Harris returned to the U.S.A. in 1864 and became an American citizen in 1870. He seems to have continued teaching and writing, largely in Wisconsin and Michigan, but also in Ontario. His campaign against profane swearing led to the publication in Ontario of his The Sacredness of the Name of God (Hamilton, 1872). He died at Copetown in Wentworth County, Ontario, on 1 February 1874.
