SOTW 4 Annotated for LDS Ch. 1 Britain's Empire

Victoria’s England

The Great Exhibition was a very popular event. Missionaries from Utah laboring in England were among 40,000 others who visited a few days after it opened. President Franklin D. Richards recorded in his diary that he and the others “saw Queen and Prince and was in their royal presence about 3 hours (F. D. Franklin Diary, May 29, 1851 as cited in T. Edgar Lyon, Jr., John Lyon: The Life of a Pioneer Poet, p.139).”

Truman Angell, architect of the Salt Lake Temple also visited the Exhibition commenting: “I stayed there some 7 or 8 hours. The affair is grand, I will not attempt to pretend to describe it, but sum it up by saying it is intended to exhibit the genius of England as well as to exhibit many foreign articles from other nations. And it is a grand affair (Truman Angell, Autobiography, Our Pioneer Heritage, Writings of Early Latter-day Saints, p.209).”

The Sepoy Mutiny

It was during this period of time that the Gospel was first introduced in India. Two British sailors, who were LDS, introduced their friends to the Gospel in 1849. These people requested missionaries and in 1851, short-term missionary Joseph Richards arrived in Calcutta. Upon baptizing four individuals, he formed the first branch in Asia. Soon other missionaries arrived preaching the Gospel in India’s most important cities and organizing branches around the country. However, by 1856, the mission was closed for a time presumably because of the unsafe conditions created by the Sepoy Mutiny (Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 1-4 vols., edited by Daniel H. Ludlow New York: Macmillan, 1992, p.79).