Foreword

This study of the Aikin–Barbauld circle is the fourth volume to result from the work of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. Established in September 2004, the Centre is a collaboration between the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, and Dr Williams’s Library, Gordon Square, London. Its objectives are to promote the use of the Library’s unique holdings of Puritan, Protestant Nonconformist and Dissenting books and manuscripts; to encourage research into and dissemination of these resources; and to increase knowledge and understanding of the importance of Puritanism and Protestant Dissent to English society and literature from the sixteenth century to the present.

To further these aims the Centre has developed an extensive programme of conferences, seminars, workshops and publications. The annual one-day conferences have led to five volumes of essays: Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (2008), and Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (2011), both edited by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes; Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (2011), edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey; and Dissent and the Bible in Britain, 1650–1950 (forthcoming), edited by Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas, all from Oxford University Press; and now Religious Dissent and the Aikin–Barbauld Circle from Cambridge University Press. In addition the Centre’s postgraduates have published the following electronic editions online: The Letters of Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsey 1769–1794, edited by Simon Mills (2007); A Bibliography of the Writings of William Hazlitt 1737–1820 (2009) and New College, Hackney (1786–96): A Selection of Printed and Archival Sources (2010), both edited by Stephen Burley; and Dissenting Education and the Legacy of John Jennings, c.1720–c.1729, edited by Tessa Whitehouse.

On October 22, 1724, the 22-year-old dissenter Philip Doddridge, who was then ministering to a farming congregation in Leicestershire and devoting much of his time in his rural seclusion to his studies, wrote to his friend and mentor Samuel Clark, minister at St. Albans, about his current reading. After describing the works on divinity he was immersed in, he went on to another related topic that was also giving him “a great deal of pleasure”: “I am drawing up, but only for my own use, a sort of analytical scheme of the contents of the epistles of the New Testament.” Doddridge’s great-grandson and editor of his letters added a note suggesting that this might be considered the origin of The Family Expositor. His former student, editor, and biographer Job Orton described this as Doddridge’s “Capital-work,” noting that “He had been preparing for this Work from his Entrance on the Ministry, and kept it in View in the future Course of his Studies.” From these beginnings emerged the six substantial volumes of The Family Expositor: or, A Paraphrase and Version of the New Testament. With Critical Notes; and a Practical Improvement of each Section, published over a period of seventeen years, with the last three volumes appearing posthumously.

The importance and extent of John Wesley's career as an editor and publisher have long been known to historians of Methodism, although not perhaps to historians of literature. Three key individuals, two in the nineteenth century and one in the mid twentieth, established the main facts. Thomas Jackson edited and published the extended second edition of Wesley's Christian Library (1819-27), as well as the third edition of Wesley's Works (1829-31). Richard Green compiled the first chronologically ordered bibliography of The Works of John and Charles Wesley (1896; 2nd ed., rev., 1906). Building on Green, Frank Baker compiled A Union Catalogue of the Publications of John and Charles Wesley (1966), which provisionally - and very ambitiously in the pre-electronic age - listed all known editions and the whereabouts of surviving copies. The second edition of Baker's Union Catalogue (1991) added some additional materials that had been located and finalized the numbering system for Wesley's publications being used in The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. The two-volume bibliography for this edition will include Baker's extended descriptions of the text history of many of these items. In the early twenty-first century, thanks to the online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC),we have a much clearer idea both of the numbers of religious books published in the eighteenth century in relation to the whole field of publications, and of the sheer size of Wesley's output as editor and publisher.

The religious spectrum

It is now more widely recognised than it was a hundred years ago that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society and culture was essentially religious in its institutions, practices and beliefs, and that writing on religious subjects dominated the publishing market. Yet as literary readers in the early twenty-first century, we still confine our attention to a handful of explicitly religious works of the period, and we tend to downplay the religious aims and aspects of other works that we regard as predominantly literary or political or philosophical. Behind the major religious works that are still reedited and reissued today – notably Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress – stretches a vast hinterland of works that went through multiple editions in the eighteenth century and often into the nineteenth, but that are now largely neglected except by specialists. This chapter provides a map for exploring this hinterland. But in order to understand the significance of particular works it is necessary first to consider three broad topics: the range of religious denominations and groups and the main political events that affected their relations with each other; the principal theological and philosophical issues that religious writers of different persuasions addressed; and the preferred kinds of religious writing and their functions.

In the years from the Long Parliament to the Restoration, the Church of England underwent an extraordinary and violent series of changes. As a result of legislation - Parliamentary ordinances in the 1640s, reinforced by Parliamentary acts and the Protector's declarations in the 1650s - the government, liturgy, ceremonies and fabric of the reformed Church of England, established by law in the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, were all transformed. Archbishops, bishops and cathedral deans and chapters were abolished; the Book of Common Prayer was suppressed, its place offi- cially taken by the Directory for Public Worship, and its use made a crime; the ancient pattern of the Christian year and the Church festivals of Christmas, Easter and Whitsun were eliminated; many of the surviving medieval crucifixes and images of the persons of the Trinity and of angels and saints in stone, wood, paint and glass were destroyed or defaced, as were organs, fonts and priests' vestments; rails in front of altars were removed and raised chancels levelled; cathedrals were damaged and used for secular purposes, and their complete demolition was considered, though not carried out.

This book is the second of two volumes on the ways in which crucial changes in the relationship between religion and ethics from the mid-seventeenth to the later eighteenth centuries were perceived and expressed. The first volume, Whichcote to Wesley, explores what happened to the Reformation doctrine of grace from the 1650s onwards in response to an increasingly influential emphasis on human reason and free will. The central tenets of the latitudinarian movement in the Church of England – the rational basis of religion, the co-operation of human reason with divine grace, and the resulting happiness of the moral life – were challenged from the 1660s to the 1780s by the leaders of nonconformity, dissent, and methodism, who wanted in different ways to continue or return to aspects of the Reformation protestant tradition but whose views were in varying degrees marked by the dominant religion of reason.

The second volume looks at the relationship between religion and ethics from the point of view not of the tension between reason and grace but of that between reason and sentiment. It explores what happened when attempts were made from the 1690s onwards to separate ethics from religion, not necessarily for anti-religious reasons, and to locate what was known as the foundation of morals in the constitution of human nature. A number of important questions was repeatedly raised.