Three London cartes de visite of prominent Victorian Dissenters, each identified in period pencil on the verso in the same hand. The key portrait is Rev. Christopher Newman Hall (center), the Congregationalist preacher and abolitionist who championed Abraham Lincoln, emancipation and the Union cause before British audiences during the Civil War. With him are Rev. Thomas Binney (right), known as the “Archbishop of Nonconformity,” and the Unitarian physician and physiologist Dr. William Benjamin Carpenter (left). All three are published celebrity portraits with a “Copyright” imprint on the mount.

Hall appears in a vignetted bust turned toward the viewer’s right, balding at the crown with full side whiskers and a clean chin, in a high-buttoned clerical coat with a broad white bow at the collar. Binney, also vignetted, faces the camera directly, with loose white hair falling over his ears, a white neckcloth and a dark coat with broad lapels. Carpenter fills the frame against a dark studio ground, his hair swept back from the forehead and a long, full gray beard reaching his chest, in a dark coat and waistcoat.

Hall (1816-1902) became minister of Surrey Chapel, London, in 1854. He gave the crowning speech at the Great Union and Emancipation Meeting at Exeter Hall on January 29, 1863, held in support of the Emancipation Proclamation, preached a published sermon on Lincoln’s assassination in May 1865, and toured the United States and Canada in 1867. His tract Come to Jesus (1848) circulated in more than four million copies in some forty languages. In 1876 he moved his congregation to the newly built Christ Church, Westminster Bridge Road, whose Lincoln Memorial Tower opened on July 4, 1876 and still stands.

Binney (1798-1874) served the King’s Weigh House Chapel, London, from 1829 to 1869 and chaired the Congregational Union in 1848. He wrote more than fifty books, among them Is It Possible to Make the Best of Both Worlds? (1853) and a life of the parliamentary abolitionist Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, and is remembered for the hymn “Eternal Light!” He was among the first Nonconformists to bring chants and anthems into chapel worship.

Carpenter (1813-1885), son of the Unitarian minister Dr. Lant Carpenter and brother of the reformer Mary Carpenter, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1844, served as Registrar of the University of London from 1856 to 1879, and was President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1872. He wrote the Principles of Human Physiology and the Principles of Mental Physiology (1874), and took part in the 1868 deep sea survey aboard HMS Lightning that preceded the Challenger expedition.

Imprints: Elliott & Fry, 55 Baker Street, Portman Square, with the firm’s monogram on the verso (Hall, Binney). Fradelle & Marshall, Photographers & Miniature Painters, 230 & 246 Regent Street, London W., a partnership active from 1872 to 1876 (Carpenter). Pencil inscriptions read “Dr Carpenter,” “Rev Newman Hall” and “Rev Thos Binney.”