Introduction 1 Dissenting Origins
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Notes Introduction 1. William Godwin, obituary in Morning Chronicle, 21 December 1809, quoted in Tyson, p. 215. 1 Dissenting Origins 1. John Palmer (1729–90), King David’s Death, and Solomon’s Succession to the Throne, Considered and Improved (London: C. Henderson, R. Griffiths and J. Johnson, [1760]), pp. 1–2; and John Johnson (1706–91), Jesus the King of Kings (London: J. Johnson, 1762), p. 28. 2. See Chard, 52; and Tyson, pp. 3–4. 3. Byrom Street’s fortunes picked up markedly after 1772 with the appointment of Samuel Medley (1738–99). Following Medley’s death, Johnson published a volume of his original Hymns (1800) and a set of Memoirs (1800) compiled by his son. 4. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 30n1; and Donald Read, The English Provinces, c.1760–1960: a Study in Influence (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), pp. 4–5. 5. J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 277. 6. Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 48. Successive attempts to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts were made by dissenters in the 1730s but, despite (or, perhaps, even because of ) their loyalty to the Whigs in government, had been defeated. 7. Robert Halley, Lancashire: Its Puritanism and Nonconformity (2 vols; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1869), II. 312n, 375. 8. Gentleman’s Magazine, 30 (1760), 519–20. 9. Simon Maccoby, English Radicalism 1762–1785 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955), p. 7. 10. See Halley, Lancashire, II. 163. 11. Medicine as a profession was not off-limits to dissenters who, by training in Scotland or on the continent, could evade the proscriptions of the Test Act. Guy’s Hospital had been founded by a Baptist in 1723 and its treasurer (Dr Benjamin Avery), a former Presbyterian minister, was one of three medical men to serve as chairman of the lay London Protestant Dissenting deputies in the eighteenth century. 12. John Almon (1737–1805), (anon.) An Impartial History of the Late War (London: J. Johnson and J. Curtis, 1763), pp. 387–8, 303. 13. Almon, Memoirs of a Late Eminent Bookseller (London: n.p., 1790), pp. 14–15. 14. As well as introductions to Johnson, Fuseli was given letters of credit to Thomas Coutts, with whom he also struck up a lifelong friendship. William West speaks 182 Notes 183 of Johnson handing him ‘a check on Coutts for upwards of 300l.’, suggesting not only considerable means but that the bookseller (as well as the king) used Coutts as banker. See West, p. 205. 15. See Tyson, p. 16n39. Among the ranks of Lancashire dissenting ministers who trained at Kendal Academy was one ‘William Davenport of Hindley’ and one of the officers in charge of the widows’ fund for Protestant dissenters in Lancashire and Cheshire, set up by Joseph Priestley at Warrington in 1764, was a ‘Mr. Davenport of Chowbent’. 16. See Herbert McLachlan, The Warrington Academy (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1943), p. 6; and David L. Wykes, ‘The Dissenting Academy and Rational Dissent’, in Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Knud Haakonssen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 130–9, which pursues these points more thoroughly. 17. Memoirs, I. 54, 61n. 18. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London: C. Henderson, T. Becket and P. De Hondt, and J. Johnson and B. Davenport, 1765), pp. 10, 34–5, 32; and Memoirs, I, pp. 47–8. The section beginning ‘Only tyrants . .’ was quoted approvingly in the first number of the Analytical Review. 19. A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), ed. Robert E. Schofield (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1966), p. 17; and MS 12.57 (61) Dr Williams’s Library (hereafter DWL). 20. John Macgowan (1726–80), (pseud.) The Arians and Socinians Monitor (3rd edn, London: W. Row, G. Porter, M. Priestley and J. Barker, 1795), p. 4. 21. DNB entry for Edward Harwood (1729–94); and James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 744. The Analytical Review even felt obliged at this stage to plead the writer’s cause: ‘Dr. Harwood’s labours in the cause of literature have not, we fear, been duly rewarded. It gives us pain to learn, that in his old age he feels the pressure of want. Should not some of his rich pupils see to this, and gild the evening of their respectable master with a comforting ray of beneficence?’ See AR, 4 (1789), 341n. 22. William Hazlitt, ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’, Liberal, 2 (1823), 28. 23. Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington (7th edn, London: printed for the author, 1794), pp. 153–6. Originally published in 1756, Buncle in many ways took its religious and romantic cue from Amory’s Memoirs: Containing the Lives of Several Ladies of Great Britain (1755). This was also previ- ously the property of the London bookseller John Noon (d. 1763), whose stock Johnson bought, and would, in turn, be reissued by him. 24. Rutt, 1. 69. Priestley’s editor highlights the inappropriateness of this label, even though Priestley used it himself. Unlike Faustus Socinus, the sixteenth-century originator of the sect, Priestley no longer upheld the worship and adoration of Christ and was, therefore, strictly speaking, a Unitarian. The two terms, however, appear to have been used almost interchangeably during this period. 25. Priestley was sent a copy of Macgowan’s remarks (possibly by his bookseller) but thought them ‘altogether unworthy of notice’. See Rutt, I. 142. 26. Priestley had submitted some of his early scriptural observations to Fleming and Lardner (which they part-published in 1761) and visited them in Hoxton Square whenever he was in London. 27. By the 1780s Lardner’s writings had become so scarce and expensive that Johnson arranged for a cheap edition of his Works (11 vols, 1788), edited by 184 Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent Andrew Kippis (1725–95), to be published by subscription. The Analytical Review hailed it as a fitting monument to the memory of ‘one whose fame is above our praise, and whose works are of such allowed utility, importance and merit, as to recommend themselves to the regard and approbation of persons of dif- ferent tastes and various parties.’ See AR, 6 (1790), 67–78. Personal testimony of Johnson’s regard for Lardner’s principles can be found in his business letter book. 28. The same group of booksellers was responsible for Priestley’s History and Present State of Electricity (1767) and Familiar Introduction to the Study of Electricity (1768). 29. Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government (London: J. Dodsley, T. Cadell and J. Johnson, 1768; 2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, 1771), pp. viii (1771), iv–vi, 16–17, 59, 38–9. 30. Ibid., pp. 128–9, 134–5, 22. 31. Ibid., pp. 19–20, 16–17 (1771), 119–20. 32. Ibid., pp. 20, 108, 139–41 (1771), 113. 33. Ibid., p. 175. 34. Ibid., pp. 158, 165–6; and Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Common- wealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 272. 35. Andrew Kippis, who reviewed it in the Monthly, found this the ‘most excep- tionable part of his treatise’ and friends and former colleagues at Warrington were worried that it would make others think less favourably of the academy. Johnson’s close friend Henry Fuseli, however, who designed a frontispiece for the book, was sufficiently impressed to order copies for friends. See Monthly Review, 39 (1768), 473; and MS 12.12 (13) DWL. 36. Essay on . Government, pp. 119, 116. 37. Richard Baron (c.1720–68), The Pillars of Priestcraft and Orthodoxy Shaken (4 vols; 2nd edn, London: T. Cadell, G. Kearsley, J. Payne and J. Johnson, and N. Young, 1768), II. iii–iv. This had first appeared in 1752. All profits from the 1768 edition were to go to Baron’s family. 38. James Murray (1732–82), (anon.) Sermons to Asses (London: J. Johnson and T. Cadell; and Newcastle: W. Charnley, 1768), pp. 5, 93; and Priestley, A View of the Principles and Conduct of the Protestant Dissenters (2nd edn, London: J. Johnson, [1770]), p. 4. 39. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (4 vols; Oxford, 1765–69), IV. 46, 53. 40. Priestley, Remarks on Some Paragraphs in the Fourth Volume of Dr. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Relating to the Dissenters (London: J. Johnson and J. Payne, 1769), pp. 2–3. Priestley had quoted from Blackstone and dubbed him an ‘excellent author’ in his Essay on a Course of Liberal Education (1765). Blackstone replied in a curt but civil pamphlet in September 1769. 41. Priestley, A View of the Principles . of the Protestant Dissenters, pp. 41–2; and Rutt, I. 73n. 42. Anon., An Alarm to Dissenters and Methodists (London: G. Keith, and Johnson and Payne, 1769), p. 23. 43. Anon., An Ode to the People of England (London: G. Kearsly [sic], Johnson and Payne, and G. Woodfall, 1769), pp. 3, 10. 44. An early example of this was A Suitable Present for Every Free-Born Englishman; or, The People’s Antient and Just Liberties Asserted (1771), a centennial edition of the trial of the Quaker preacher William Penn, which had done much to enshrine the right to trial by jury. Notes 185 45. A View of the Principles . of the Protestant Dissenters, pp.