The Autobiography of George Müller

A Narrative of Some of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller is Müller’s own account of his life and ministry, written by himself and first published in 1837, with further parts following in 1841, 1845, and 1856. It opens with his dissolute youth in Prussia, including habitual lying, theft, and time in prison, and moves through his conversion as a student to the central work of his life: the founding and running of orphanages in Bristol, England.

The Narrative’s defining feature is its detailed record of answered prayer. Müller resolved never to ask anyone directly for money and never to go into debt, instead making his needs known only to God. The book reads in places like a ledger of provision, noting specific gifts that arrived, often at the last hour, to feed and house the children in his care. His stated aim in publishing was to offer evidence that God hears prayer and can be trusted for daily needs.

Across its parts the Narrative documents the growth of the Ashley Down orphan houses and Müller’s wider work in Christian education and missions support. It remains a widely read primary source on a ministry that, over Müller’s lifetime, cared for more than ten thousand orphans.

Our edition is a clean, readable modern typesetting of the First Part of Müller’s public-domain Narrative, the part first published in 1837, and we link a free source so you can read it at no cost.

This is a clean reading edition of the First Part of A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Müller, written by himself and first published in 1837. George Müller (1805–1898) was a Prussian-born pastor in Bristol who cared for thousands of orphans and funded the work by prayer alone — asking no one but God for money — and kept this journal as a record of answered prayer. The text is in the public domain.

Müller wrote in plain, deliberate English and quoted Scripture constantly, giving chapter and verse himself as any careful Bible teacher would. We have kept his words and his own references exactly as he set them down, and simply given them clean, readable type. This is the First Part of his Narrative, which he continued in later volumes across his long life.

A note on his name. The transcription this edition was set from holds no accented character anywhere, and writes every German umlaut as a pair of letters — which in a capitalised signature produced "GEORGE MUeLLER.", a lowercase e stranded inside a shouted name. His name has been restored to Müller in the eleven places that affected, including the minutes of a missionary committee he quotes about himself, and two towns have been restored with it: Schönebeck and Wolfenbüttel. His birthplace, Kroppenstaedt, has been left exactly as it was: a pair of letters cannot prove an umlaut stood there, and the modern town has none.

A note on layout. Müller kept this as a journal, and the printing runs his entries together in paragraphs that reach nineteen hundred words. We have broken the longest of them at sentences he had already ended — the break is a blank line and nothing else, so the words and their order are exactly as he wrote them. We added no headings and divided the narrative into no chapters: the dates are his, and they are the only divisions the journal has.

The free source is linked from this book's page.