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The First Evangelical Tract Society*

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The First Evangelical Tract Society* The Historical Journal, 50, 1 (2007), pp. 1–22 f 2007 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0018246X06005899 Printed in the United Kingdom THE FIRST EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY* ISABEL RIVERS School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London ABSTRACT. The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth- century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century. I Interest in the publication and distribution of popular literature in the British Isles in the long eighteenth century grows apace. The eagerly awaited fifth volume of The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, dealing with the years 1695–1830, should provide the fullest picture of the period yet available.1 William St Clair has uncovered a wealth of information about the dramatic effects on the publishing market of the Lords’ decision of 1774 that the booksellers’ claim to perpetual copyright was illegal: the result was that many thousands of cheap copies of what St Clair has called ‘the old canon’ were made available by enterprising publishers to readers who hitherto could not have afforded them.2 However, in considering School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS [email protected] * This article is partly a development of material in my forthcoming book, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: dissenting, methodist, and evangelical literary culture in England, 1720–1800. Some of it has been delivered as seminar papers at the universities of Sheffield, Cambridge, Wittenberg-Halle, Greenwich, and Sussex, and at Dr Williams’s Library. 1 The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, V: 1695–1830, ed. Michael Turner and Michael Suarez (Cambridge, forthcoming). 2 William St Clair, The reading nation in the romantic period (Cambridge, 2004). 1 http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 2 ISABEL RIVERS the growth of popular publishing and the attempt to reach out to new readers it is important to differentiate the activities of commercial publishers from those of the tract distribution societies, whose motivation was heavenly not worldly profit. What we lack is a comparable account of non-commercial publishing in the eighteenth century. Two recent studies of such publishing in the nineteenth century, Leslie Howsam’s of the British and Foreign Bible Society and Aileen Fyfe’s of the Religious Tract Society, have usefully helped to fill the gap, but they pay scant attention to these societies’ predecessors.3 Hannah More’s Cheap repository tracts of the 1790s have been well analysed, most recently in Anne Stott’s sympathetic biography.4 But what of the tract societies that antedated More? There is no full recent history of the largest and most important distributor of religious books in the eighteenth century, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK): students are largely dependent on the sixty-year-old work of W. K. Lowther Clarke and the hundred-year-old work of Allen and McClure.5 However, the story of the SPCK properly told would still not give us the whole story of the distribution of cheap religious books in the period. Despite its size and influence, for doctrinal and denominational reasons the SPCK could not satisfy the demand for certain kinds of religious book. Founded in 1698 by Dr Thomas Bray, it was a Church of England society with an extremely ambitious pro- gramme both at home and in the American colonies for improving the education of the clergy through the establishment of libraries, teaching poor children to read and write and to understand the principles of the Christian religion, and dis- tributing Bibles and devotional and didactic works to poor families, servants, prisoners, soldiers, and sailors. In 1701 its overseas activities were brought under a separate society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The SPCK was a major educational force, but it was hostile to dissenters and in due course, when they arrived on the scene, to Methodists. From the point of view of dissenters it was largely irrelevant because much of its material was concerned with the work of the established church: it distributed guides for candidates for holy orders and for parishioners, guides explaining baptism, 3 Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: nineteenth-century publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge, 1991); Aileen Fyfe, Science and salvation: evangelical popular science publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London, 2004). Fyfe (p. 10) claims erroneously: ‘With the exception of itinerant hawkers, these societies [the Religious Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society] were virtually the only sources of cheap print at the beginning of the nineteenth century.’ 4 G. H. Spinney, ‘Cheap repository tracts: Hazard and Marshall edition’, The Library, 4th ser. 20 (1939), pp. 295–340; Susan Pedersen, ‘Hannah More meets Simple Simon: tracts, chapbooks, and popular culture in late eighteenth-century England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), pp. 84–113; Anne Stott, Hannah More: the first Victorian (Oxford, 2003). 5 W. O. B. Allen and Edmund McClure, Two hundred years: the history of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 1698–1898 (London, 1898); W. K. Lowther Clarke, Eighteenth century piety (London, 1944); W. K. Lowther Clarke, A history of the S.P.C.K. (London, 1959). See also Scott Mandelbrote, ‘The English Bible and its readers in the eighteenth century’, in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and their readers in eighteenth-century England: new essays (London, 2001), pp. 47–50. The SPCK’s activities in Wales and India have been charted respectively by Mary Clement, The SPCK and Wales, 1699–1740 (London, 1954), and Victor Koilpillai, The SPCK in India, 1710–1985 (Delhi, 1985). http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 3 confirmation, communion, and the catechism, and guides to Church of England services, notably the non-juror Robert Nelson’s enormously successful Companion for the festivals and fasts of the Church of England (first published in 1704). From the point of view of evangelicals both within and outside the Church of England it was objectionable because the devotional works it distributed, especially the much reissued Whole duty of man (first published in 1658), ignored what they regarded as the essential doctrines of the gospel.6 In the second half of the eighteenth century two smaller societies competed with the SPCK, one interdenominational, with dissenting and evangelical Anglican members, the other Wesleyan. The first, the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, is now little known, despite the range of surviving evidence. Some (but not much) attention has been paid to the second, the Society for Distributing Religious Tracts among the Poor, founded in 1782 by the Methodist leader John Wesley and his assistant Thomas Coke, later to become the first Methodist bishop in America. There are only two direct sources of information for this Society: a folded leaflet inserted at the end of the Arminian Magazine for November 1784, entitled A plan of the society instituted in January, 1782, to distribute religious tracts among the poor, and a very rare pamphlet entitled A state of the Society for Distributing Religious Tracts among the Poor, for the year 1782.7 A later Methodist tract society was instituted in 1809 and reformed in 1828.8 In the nineteenth century Methodists on the one hand and evangelical dissenters and Anglicans on the other disagreed as to which of them had started a tract society first, with the Methodists claiming Wesley as victor, and as a result misleading statements were published in reputable twentieth-century works and the importance of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor as the first evangelical tract society failed to be appreciated.9 It is the object of this article to remedy this failure. II The Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor deserves to be much better known. Though it was an important predecessor of the Religious 6 For Methodist and evangelical dislike of The whole duty of man see Isabel Rivers, Reason, grace, and sentiment: a study of the language of religion and ethics in England, 1660–1780 (2 vols., Cambridge, 1991–2000), I, pp. 22, 252. 7 This is listed in Frank Baker, A union catalogue of the publications of John and Charles Wesley (Durham, NC, 1966; 2nd edn, Stone Mountain, GA, 1991), no. 371A, with one exemplar in America (though not in the English Short Title Catalogue (hereafter ESTC) ). I am grateful to Duke Divinity School Library for providing me with a copy. 8 There is a rare leaflet in the Bodleian entitled ‘The Methodist Tract Society; instituted, October 25, 1809’ (shelfmark G.Pamph.2920 (31)). For the 1828 society see Frank Cumbers, The Book Room: the story of the Methodist Publishing House and Epworth Press (London, 1956), p.
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