Those that say youth is wasted on the young might be surprised to hear that William Ralph Featherston (1846-1873) is believed to have written "My Jesus I Love Thee" at the age of 16!
Featherston, a Weslyan Methodist from Montreal, wrote the text at the time of his conversion and sent it to his aunt in Los Angeles. Somehow, the poem made its way to England where it was published anonymously in The London Hymn Book two years later. Adoniram Judson Gordon (1836-1895), who was compiling a Baptist hymn book, liked Featherston's text, but decided it needed a better tune than the one that was used in The London Hymn Book, so he wrote a new tune for it which he published in The Service of Song for Baptist Churches. This is the tune that is still used today.
It's astounding the variety of people, lands, and circumstances that came together in the creation of this song. Certainly God wanted it to be used in our worship of Him. —Greg Scheer, 1994
In some sources in the early twentieth century, this hymn was attributed to James H. Duffell of West Bromwich, England. Duffell's authorship was corroborated by people who knew him. Featherston's purported authorship is troublesome, not least because he was a teenager in Canada when the hymn first emerged in England, and the hymn did not appear in any known sources in Canada (hymnals, books, newspapers, magazines) until much later. His aunt, Elizabeth Featherston Wilson, was living in Canada in the 1860s and did not emigrate to the U.S. until around 1895, first in Minnesota, then settled in Los Angeles around the time she contacted Ira Sankey; thus the popular notion of William sending the hymn to his aunt in Los Angeles is an anachronism, considering William died in 1873. For more details, see Hymnology Archive. —Chris Fenner
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