Joseph M. Scriven
Musician · 1819–1886 · Seapatrick, County Down, Ireland
Best known for
Songwriter
Joseph M. Scriven was an Irish-born Canadian poet whose 1855 verse “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” set to Charles Crozat Converse’s tune in 1868, became one of the most-recorded hymns in the English-speaking world. He wrote the poem to comfort his mother in Ireland and would later live a life shadowed by two engagements that ended in his fiancée’s death.
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- Born Joseph Medlicott Scriven on September 10, 1819, in Seapatrick, County Down, Ireland.
- Graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1842.
- Lost his first fiancée in 1843, the night before their wedding, when she drowned.
- Emigrated to Canada at age 25 in 1844, settling in Woodstock, Ontario; joined the Plymouth Brethren.
- Wrote the poem “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” in 1855 to comfort his mother, who was still in Ireland.
- Became engaged again near Port Hope, Ontario, around 1857; his second fiancée died of pneumonia in August 1860.
- Originally published his hymn anonymously; the work was attributed to him only in the 1880s.
- Charles Crozat Converse set the lyric to its now-familiar tune in 1868.
- Drowned on August 10, 1886, in Bewdley, near Rice Lake, Ontario, at age 66, while recuperating from a serious fever at a friend’s home.
