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 distributing 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. 50. 9 Luke Tyerman, The life and times of the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. (3 vols., 3rd edn, London, 1876), III, p. 369; Nehemiah Curnock, ed., The journal of the Rev. John Wesley, A. M. (8 vols., London, 1909–16), VI, p. 343n; Frank Baker, A charge to keep: an introduction to the people called Methodists (London, 1947), p. 171.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 4 ISABEL RIVERS Tract Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society, it has been neglected by their recent historians, and no detailed analysis of its work has hitherto been made.10 Our surviving sources of information are the annual reports it published under the title An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor,11 the anniversary sermons that were designed to raise money for its activities, the short history by the Baptist minister John Rippon, entitled A discourse on the origin and progress of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor (published in 1803, with a second edition the following year),12 the prize essays published for the Society’s Centenary in 1850,13 and the books it distributed (though, judging from the ESTC, not many of the last appear to have survived in the editions produced for the Society). These sources, particularly the annual reports and Rippon’s Discourse, contain invaluable information about the rules of the Society, its function, the names of the organizers and subscribers and the date they joined, the books that were chosen, their cost, the numbers distributed to subscribers, who in turn distributed them to ministers or clergy for their con- gregations or parishioners, and the reception of these books by the poor for whom they were designed, as reported in letters written to the Society by those distributing them. It is extremely unusual to have so much detailed and illuminating information available about the choice, distribution, and reception of religious books. The Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge (or Book Society as it later became known) was founded in August 1750 by a group of young lay dissenters in the City of London, led by Benjamin Forﬁtt. Forﬁtt had begun in a small way in 1749 by sending Bibles to the dissenting minister and academy tutor Philip Doddridge in Northampton for him to distribute to the

10 It is not mentioned in Howsam, Cheap Bibles, or Fyfe, Science and salvation. It is covered in a short paragraph in F. W. B. Bullock, Voluntary religious societies, 1520–1799 (St Leonards on Sea, 1963), p. 237, and Roger H. Martin, Evangelicals united: ecumenical stirrings in pre-Victorian Britain, 1795–1830 (Metuchen, NJ, and London, 1983), p. 24, and in a page (the fullest modern account) in Ken. R. Manley, ‘Redeeming love proclaim’: John Rippon and the Baptists (Carlisle and Waynesboro, GA, 2004), pp. 242–3. It is mentioned in William Jones, The Jubilee memorial of the Religious Tract Society: containing a record of its origin, proceedings, and results, A.D. 1799 to A.D. 1849 (London, 1850), p. 6. My attention was first drawn to the Society by two works which refer to it briefly: G. F. Nuttall, Calendar of the correspondence of Philip Doddridge DD (1702–1751) (London, 1979), letter 1703, and D. Bruce Hindmarsh, John Newton and the English evangelical tradition (Oxford, 1996), p. 197. 11 The ESTC records surviving copies for eighteen separate years between 1759 and 1797; COPAC records two more in the 1760s. I have studied eight of these between 1763 and 1797. There are also six surviving nineteenth-century reports, four from the 1830s and two from the 1860s, of which I have studied five. A surviving small collection of tracts in the British Library dating from the 1920s or 1930s shows that the Society was still functioning then. I am not aware of a surviving archive. 12 John Rippon, Discourse on the origin and progress of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, from it’s [sic] commencement in 1750, to the year 1802 (London: Sold by the Bookseller to the Society, ?1803); 2nd edn enlarged (London, ?1804). 13 John Blackburn, Centenary retrospect of the Book Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor (London: for the Society, 1850); Edwin Owen Jones, Religious knowledge among the poor, not less important in 1850 than in 1750. With an account of the rise, progress, and present state of the Book Society for promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor (London: for the Society, 1850).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 5 poor,14 and six months after the Society began work he sent Doddridge some news about its progress, telling him effusively that he had been fired by sermons he had heard him preach in London the previous year.15 According to Rippon, the Society held its first meeting on 8 August 1750 under the wing of the dissenting minister Thomas Gibbons in the vestry of his meeting house at Haberdashers’ Hall.16 Gibbons was to become one of the Society’s warmest supporters, but judging from the entries in his manuscript diary he may not have been immedi- ately involved – he made no reference to the initial meeting. He began attending its monthly meetings regularly from November 1750, and he gave it a number of unofficial names, such as ‘the Society lately set up for distributing Bibles’ and ‘the Society for distributing good Books’, before he referred to it by its longlasting title, ‘the Society for promoting religious Knowledge’.17 On 4 November 1751 he preached the first anniversary sermon at Haberdashers’ Hall. The preachers of the anniversary sermons were listed in Rippon’s Discourse,18 and the surviving published examples provide helpful information about the Society’s aims and perceived successes. Although the impetus for the Society came from dissenters, it is clear from the lists of subscribers and from statements made in these sermons and by Rippon that its membership was interdenominational. Gibbons said it was ‘founded upon a Catholic Plan’; the Society as such had no interest in the differences between the established and the dissenting churches, its aim being ‘to promote vital and experimental Religion’ and to unite Protestants against the Church of Rome. Speaking on the anniversary of the landing of William of Orange at Torbay, Gibbons urged his hearers: ‘as Patriots and as Christians encourage this Society for promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor; and do it under the Sense of the wonderful mercies of the REVOLUTION,

14 Benjamin Forfitt to Philip Doddridge, 5 Oct. 1749, Dr Williams’s Library (hereafter DWL), New College MSS L1/5/176; Benjamin Forfitt to Philip Doddridge, 28 Apr. 1750, DWL, New College MSS L1/5/177; Nuttall, Calendar, letters 1543, 1606. I am grateful to Dr David Wykes on behalf of the Trustees of Dr Williams’s Library for permission to cite and quote from manuscripts in their possession. 15 Benjamin Forfitt to Philip Doddridge, 23 Feb. 1751, The correspondence and diary of Philip Doddridge, D.D., ed. J. D. Humphreys (5 vols., London, 1829–31), V, p. 192; Nuttall, Calendar, letter 1703. 16 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), p. 5. 17 ‘The diary of Dr. Thomas Gibbons 1749 to 1785’, 21 Nov. 1750, 5 Dec. 1750, 13 Feb. 1751, DWL, Congregational Library MS II.a.3. In later entries he sometimes returned to the earlier names, with variations. 18 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), 53–4. Notable names include: Andrew Kippis (1762), George Whitefield (1767), Martin Madan (1772), William Romaine (1777), Henry Venn (1778), Samuel Palmer (1781), John Newton (1787), Rowland Hill (1791), Abraham Rees (1792), John Rippon (1796). (The sermons were usually published in the year following delivery; the dates given are those of delivery not publication.) Rippon’s Discourse had its origin in the sermons he preached in 1796 and 1802. The range of information he provides is spelled out in the subtitle: Including a succinct account of the separate publications in their catalogue, with the benefit which has attended them; and of the different modes which the members and their friends have adopted, in distributing the books to advantage: delivered before the Society November 17, 1796, and November 17, 1802. To which is added, a complete list of the treasurers and other officers, as well as of the ministers who have preached the annual sermons, and of the gentlemen who have served the office of stewards.

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without which we might not have had a BIBLE to read, much less a BIBLE to distribute’.19 The Society thus appealed to members of the Church of England as well as to dissenters, and its Anglican (predominantly evangelical) members at different stages of its first fifty years as recorded in the annual reports included Thomas Haweis, James Hervey, Rowland Hill, the Countess of Huntingdon, Martin Madan, Erasmus Middleton, Joseph Milner, John Newton, William Romaine, the Thornton family of Clapham, Henry Venn, George Whitefield, and William Wilberforce. Not all the dissenters were of an evangelical persuasion; they included Philip Furneaux, Andrew Kippis, Joseph Priestley,20 and Abraham Rees on the liberal wing of dissent, as well as the two John Rylands, father and son, whose doctrinal views were Calvinist. Other notable dissenting members of various persuasions were Caleb Ashworth, Caleb Evans, John Fawcett, John Howard, Joseph Johnson, Job Orton, Richard Pearsall, and Samuel Morton Savage. The Society also had American members, such as Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia and John Joachim Zubly of Savannah. Rippon boasted that ‘Few are the societies in the Metropolis, if any, in which all the denominations of protestants so generally and cordially unite.’ Lay support was extremely important: Rippon reckoned that the Society had about 1,000 subscribers, of whom 10 per cent were gospel (i.e. evangelical) ministers of different denominations.21 Despite the fact that some liberal or rational dissenters were subscribers, it is fair to assume that the majority were moderate Calvinist evangelicals, whether dissenters or Anglicans. This assumption is supported by the tendency of the books the Society distributed and by the nature of the societies set up on the same model in Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1756 and New York in 1794: the last of these distributed books that inculcated the doctrine of the Trinity, original sin, redemption, sanctification, and holiness.22

III In the ﬁrst anniversary sermon Gibbons summed up the Society’s objectives: The Design of this Society is to distribute Bibles, Testaments, and other good Books, which may be judged useful, gratis among the Poor; and particularly to send such Books to such Ministers and Gentlemen in the Country, as the Society may have Reason to believe will faithfully distribute them among those who most need, and may be most likely to improve them.23 Rippon, drawing on the Society’s archives, says the Society made its ﬁrst donation of books on 6 September 1750 to Doddridge; it consisted of a dozen

19 Thomas Gibbons, The excellency of the gospel … preached at Haberdashers-Hall, Nov. 4, 1751. To the Charitable Society, for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor (London, 1752), pp. 37, 39–40. 20 Priestley joined in 1761; he appears in the reports for 1763 and 1769, but is no longer on the list in 1782. I have not tried to track the dropping out of other members. 21 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 48, 47. 22 Rippon, Discourse, 2nd edn (?1804), pp. 64n, 65n. 23 Gibbons, The excellency of the gospel, p. 36.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 7 Bibles, three dozen of the Westminster Catechism, and three dozen of Watts’s catechisms.24 The inclusion of the Westminster Catechism is surprising: it suggests a false start, an initial hardline commitment to dissenting theological principles that was inconsistent with evangelical interdenominationalism and that the Society soon dropped. The full list of books, their prices, and the numbers distributed, both in the year concerned and cumulatively, were set out in tables in the annual reports. Unlike the Religious Tract Society, founded in 1799, the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge did not commission specially written tracts; it arranged for the printing and distribution of established classics. Rippon divided them into the following categories in addition to the Bible, the most important item in the list (though the annual reports to do not arrange them in this way): books for children and youth; in opposition to vice; on the nature and necessity of the new birth; on family religion; on the present and future state; on personal and progressive religion; poetry; and books on the sacred scriptures. According to the Rules of the Society as they evolved, books could only be chosen or withdrawn by the unanimous consent of members. Rule no. IX in 1769 required That no book shall be received as a gift, be purchased to be given away, or being already approved of be rejected and cast out of the society, unless with the unanimous consent of the members at a second quarterly meeting, after having been ﬁrst proposed at a former; and that in the printed summons’s [sic] for such second quarterly meeting the proposal for the reception, purchase or rejection of the said book be expressly mentioned.25 This strictly democratic method of choosing books seems to have had a very conservative eﬀect: between 1763 and 1797 there were remarkably few changes. (Because of the way in which the book lists were set out in the annual reports, it is easy to see when new books were introduced and others withdrawn.) At some point after 1797 the rule requiring unanimity was altered. In the report for 1830 (the earliest that survives after the one for 1797), Rule II states that no new book is to be introduced or rejected after approval unless with the consent of seven- eighths of the members present at a special meeting.26 The report for 1833 records an important decision made the previous year, the addition of works by modern and living authors, and the list is much expanded from those of the 1790s.27

24 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 6–7. See also Blackburn, Centenary retrospect, pp. 48n, 52. Doddridge’s letter of 26 Oct. 1750 thanking Forﬁtt and containing the names of eighteen ministers who would be suitable future recipients, including Risdon Darracott, Richard Pearsall, Benjamin Fawcett, and Job Orton, is given in Rippon, Discourse, 2nd edn (?1804), 8–9n; see also G. F. Nuttall, Philip Doddridge: additional letters. A supplement to Calendar of the correspondence of Philip Doddridge (London, 2001), letter 1667A. 25 An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: began anno 1750 (London: for Thomas Field, 1769), p. 7. 26 An account of the Book Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: instituted anno 1750 (London: Depository, 1830), p. 18. 27 An account of the Book Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: instituted anno 1750 (London: for the Society, 1833), pp. 5, 26–31.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 8 ISABEL RIVERS The lists for 1763 and 1795 chosen for analysis have three striking features.28 They show that the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor was first and foremost a Bible society. It is thus quite wrong for modern historians to assume that the only Society distributing Bibles in the second half of the eighteenth century prior to the establishment of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804 was the SPCK. As Rippon said, ‘from our very formation the Bible was our staple article, and so it continues to this day’.29 Bibles and Testaments large and small (the choice for subscribers had grown from four formats to seven by 1795) always appeared first in the lists. By 1797 (the last surviving eighteenth-century list) the Society had distributed 152,863 Bibles and Testaments from a total number of books distributed of 574,760.30 The lists demonstrate, secondly, the continued importance of the ‘old canon’ of seventeenth-century nonconformist books in the later eighteenth century, and, thirdly, the circulation of eighteenth-century dissenting books, the largest group in the lists, among evangelical Anglicans. The SPCK on the other hand published very few books in these last two categories. The most widely distributed seventeenth-century book was the Protestant’s resolution against popery, i.e. the anonymous A protestant’s resolution: shewing his reasons why he will not be a papist (earliest surviving edition 1679), which had reached 26,875 copies by 1795, thus bearing out Gibbons’s statement in his anniversary sermon about the Society’s anti-Roman aims. The most important of the books by notable nonconformist ministers were James Janeway’s A token for children (first published 1671?–1672?), of which 21,731 copies had been distributed by 1795, Richard Baxter’s A call to the unconverted (first published 1658), of which 18,922 had been distributed, and Joseph Alleine’s An alarme to unconverted sinners (first published 1672, with a preface by Baxter), of which 16,775 had been distributed. John Shower’s Serious reflections on time and eternity (first published 1689) had reached 16,623 copies in 1795. Richard Steele’s The religious tradesman (first published as The tradesman’s calling, 1684), was introduced in 1761 on Benjamin Forfitt’s rec- ommendation;31 4,253 had been distributed by 1795. An important Puritan work also introduced in 1761 was Henry Scudder’s The Christian’s daily walk (first published 1627, strongly recommended by Baxter in an edition of 1674); possibly because it was relatively expensive, only 3,369 had been distributed by 1795.32 Works by prominent eighteenth-century dissenting ministers dominate the lists. Isaac Watts’s Hymns (first published 1707, enlarged 1709), Divine songs … for the use of children (first published 1715), Psalms (first published 1719), Prayers … for the use … of children (first published 1728), Short view of the whole scripture history (first published 1732), and First and second set of catechisms (published in various

28 The lists for 1763 and 1795 are set out in the Appendix. 29 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), p. 7. 30 An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: for Thomas Wyche, 1797), p. 42. 31 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), p. 29. 32 For the seventeenth-century publishing history of these and similar works see Ian Green, Print and protestantism in early modern England (Oxford, 2000).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 9 combinations from the early 1730s) taken together reached a larger audience than all other books including the Bible: by 1795 these totalled 163,914 copies, with Songs for children the clear favourite at 37,635 copies, followed by Psalms in small twelves at 34,449 and Hymns in small twelves at 33,124. The second most widely distributed work on the list, John Reynolds’s A compassionate address to the Christian world (1730 or earlier), is now almost unknown, yet by 1795 36,384 copies had been distributed. Other early eighteenth-century dissenting works are Matthew Henry’s Pleasures of religion, i.e. The pleasantness of a religious life (first published 1714), introduced to the list in 1758, of which 12,705 had been distributed by 1795, and Jabez Earle’s On the sacrament, i.e. Sacramental exercises (first published 1708), introduced in 1762 but not especially popular, with 3,507 distributed. Doddridge was represented by only two works, The rise and progress of religion in the soul (first published in 1745), of which 8,307 had been distributed by 1795, and Family religion, i.e. A plain and serious address to the master of a family on family religion,33 of which 10,182 had been distributed. A group of five tracts by Isaac Toms, himself a recipient of the Society’s publications for distribution and a correspondent about their reception, together totalled 49,575 copies by 1795: however, only the most popular of these – A sabbath-breaker’s monitor, of which 15,900 copies were distributed – appears to have survived.34 The last work by an eighteenth-century dissenter was Job Orton’s Three discourses on eternity (first published 1762), introduced to the list in 1777, of which 7,668 copies had been distributed by 1795. Two works by prominent seventeenth-century conformists, one an Anglican and the other a Scottish episcopalian, appear in the lists alongside those by nonconformists and dissenters, though neither was very popular in this Society: Simon Patrick’s The devout Christian (first published 1673), introduced in 1761, of which 1,673 had been distributed by 1795, and Henry Scougal’s The life of God in the soul of man (first published 1677), introduced in 1765, of which 4,058 had been distributed. Alongside these works on the lists that were steadily reissued each year after their introduction, the Society also made special purchases and took advantage of occasional offers: in 1760–1 10,000 copies each of Address to the soldiers and sailors and Persuasive to observe the Lord’s day,35 in 1762–3 1,499 copies of Watts’s Songs for children in Welsh,36 and in 1764–7 3,910 copies of Watts’s First catechism and 1,947 copies of his Second catechism in Welsh were distributed.37 In 1770 the Society bought 1,000 copies of an edition of the Bible in Welsh printed by the SPCK, and

33 The publication date of this work is uncertain; the earliest surviving copy is the third edition of 1750 in DWL. On 4 June 1752 Joseph Forfitt, Secretary to the Society, wrote to Mrs Doddridge thanking her for her ‘Favour in consenting that they [the Gentlemen of the Society] shall have what Number they think fit at the bare Expense of Paper and Printing. They … will accept of five Hundred, at the Value you will please to set on them, and the Amount of them will be paid to your Order in Town’ (DWL New College MSS L1/5/179). 34 Isaac Toms is not yet in The Oxford dictionary of national biography. The earliest surviving copy of A sabbath-breaker’s monitor is in DWL, dated ?1746 (the earliest listed in ESTC is for 1753). It is not attributed to Toms. 35 Account of the Society (1763), pull-out table. I have not been able to identify either of these. 36 Account of the Society (1769), pull-out table. 37 Ibid.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 10 ISABEL RIVERS distributed them in 1771–5.38 The Welsh experiment is worth noting in view of the fact that it was the lack of Welsh Bibles that was to prove the trigger for the founding of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804.39 In 1795 five new formats for the extremely popular Watts items were introduced: Psalms in large twelves, Hymns in large twelves, Psalms and hymns in one in large twelves, Psalms and hymns in one in small twelves, and Psalms and hymns in one in 24mo. The lists give the prices for each book, and make it possible for changes in price to be traced. In 1763 the most expensive were the large Bibles at 3s 9d, the small Bibles at 2s 8d, and Doddridge’s Rise and progress and Patrick’s Devout Christian at 2s 4d; the cheapest were Protestant’s resolution at a penny and Watts’s first catechism at a penny halfpenny. Toms’s tracts Against intemperance and Against impurity were sold by the dozen at 2s and 1s 8d respectively. In 1795 the most expensive were the large, or minion, Bibles at 4s 1d, the small, or nonpareil, Bibles at 3s 1d, and the smallest, or twenty-four, Bibles at 2s 8d; Watts’s Psalms and hymns in one in large twelves was 2s 7d, while Doddridge’s Rise and progress and Patrick’s Devout Christian had come down to 2s 2d. The cheapest were still Protestant’s resolution at a penny and Watts’s first catechism at a penny halfpenny, and the price of Toms’s tracts by the dozen remained unchanged.

IV The thirteen Rules of the Society in the 1769 report give a full account of how it functioned (the report for 1763 only had seven rules).40 The subscriber of a guinea (the minimum annual subscription) was entitled to a nomination (i.e. selection) of books worth 40s, and the subscriber of two guineas to a nomination of £3 (Rule II). The Society’s title was printed on a slip of paper and pasted inside the cover of each bound book. Nominations were delivered by the bookseller on production of a warrant (Rule XI); the carriage of nominations sent into the country was defrayed by the Society (Rule XII). Books were printed to be sold by the bookseller for the Society. The Account for 1759 identiﬁes John Ward as the bookseller; he was succeeded by Thomas Field, whose name appears as such on the title page of the surviving Accounts between 1763 and 1788, and who is listed in the Account for 1763 as one of the members to whom contributions should be sent; he in turn was succeeded by Thomas Wiche or Wyche, who joined the Society in 1794, and whose name appears on the title page of the Accounts for 1795 and 1797. Wiche’s premises were later called the Book Society Oﬃce.41 The advertisement at the back of Field’s edition of Henry’s The pleasantness of a religious life (1761) lists books

38 An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Field, 1779), pull-out table; Account of the Book Society (1830), p. 11; Blackburn, Centenary retrospect, p. 93; Jones, Religious knowledge among the poor, p. 83. 39 Howsam, Cheap Bibles,p.3. 40 Account of the Society (1769), pp. 5–8. The rules appear to have been modiﬁed from time to time, but there were still thirteen in 1797. 41 Ian Maxted, The London book trades, 1775–1800 (Folkestone, 1977), gives the name of Wiche’s premises (but with the spelling Wicke).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 11 printed for Thomas Field, Bookseller to the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, with items given away by the Society asterisked.42 There was clearly a difference in price for the general buyer who bought a single copy, for those who bought in bulk, and for members of the Society whose contributions entitled them to nominations and to further purchases at a discount. Thus Watts’s Divine songs are listed here as 6d bound or 5s per dozen (i.e. 5d each); in the Account for 1763 they are listed at 4 1/2d. Nevertheless, Field states: ‘N.B. Those Persons who buy Numbers of any of the above-mentioned Books to give away, shall be supplied at the very lowest Prices.’ The reports from the 1830s and 1860s and the prize essays of 1850 make it clear that at the turn of the century the Society considerably altered its practices. In the absence of the intervening reports it is impossible to determine why this happened. The Account for 1830 contains a statement on the origin and progress of the Society from 1750 to the present which suggests that from about 1799 gratuitous distribution was discontinued, so that instead of books being sent to persons and places nominated by the subscribers they were only issued to the subscribers themselves. The author of the statement deeply regretted this change, and urged the Society to reverse it: Let the Society return to, what the Committee must consider, the original design con- templated by our forefathers, the gratuitous distribution of Books, – let them not only issue nominations of Books to their Subscribers, but let them assist in the formation of Village and Congregational Libraries for the use of the Poor, – let them send their valuable publications, as they were wont to do of old times, to hospitals, jails, charity schools, and other benevolent Institutions.43 The Society seems to have metamorphosed from an organization devoted to giving or lending books to the poor, to a publishing club whose members bought books primarily for themselves, to the embarrassment of the writers of the reports. In 1824 it was decided that instead of issuing books through a bookseller the Society should have its own depository. This was initially in Coleman Street, then at 19 Paternoster Row, then (in 1867) at 28 Paternoster Row.44 The surviving nineteenth-century reports are different in character from the eighteenth-century ones. Because of anxieties about the state of the Society’s finances, and in order for it to meet requests for donations that were no longer met by subscribers, the rules governing subscription were altered. The original rule that a subscription of a guinea entitled a subscriber to a nomination of books worth 40s was changed in 1832 to 20s, and in 1866 to 10s. As already mentioned, the nineteenth-century

42 Matthew Henry, The pleasantness of a religious life, opened and proved (4th edn, London: Thomas Field, 1761). 43 Account of the Book Society (1830), pp. 12, 14. See also Blackburn, Centenary retrospect, p. 100. 44 Account of the Book Society (1830), p. 13. The move from no. 19 to no. 28 Paternoster Row is evident in the two surviving reports from the 1860s, The one hundred and sixteenth annual report of the Book Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: established 1750 (London: 19, Paternoster Row, 1866); The one hundred and seventeenth annual report of the Book Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: established 1750 (London: 28, Paternoster Row, 1867).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 12 ISABEL RIVERS book lists are considerably longer. The list for 1830, for example, contains c. 170 items, and that for 1832 c. 220 items, as against 39 in 1795; in both there is a separate catalogue of 133 volumes of a lending library, complete with book case, at a cost of £13 13s to subscribers and £15 to non-subscribers. The two reports from the 1860s do not include lists of books at all – these were presumably issued separately. Regrettably for the modern historian, the Society stopped keeping records of yearly and cumulative sales for individual items, which form such a fascinating part of the eighteenth-century reports. Only general figures are given. The statement in the 1830 account, already cited, says that over the period of its history ‘more than 212,000 Bibles and Testaments have been circulated by this Society, and about a million Books and Tracts’.45 As the figure of Bibles and Testaments distributed by 1797 (given above) was 152,863, this shows that Bible distribution had become a less significant part of the Society’s activities. The 1832 report notes that 16,095 books were issued from the Depository the previous year, an increase of 6,000 on 1830, but that the fund for the gratuitous issue of books was very small – ‘the applications have been very numerous, but the grants have been very few’.46 In the following year the number issued was 23,500.47 Even more to be regretted than the absence of cumulative figures is the fact that the Society no longer published records of the reception of its books once free distribution had ceased to be its main function.

V What is particularly valuable about the eighteenth-century reports and Rippon’s Discourse is the detailed information they provide about how the books were distributed and how their recipients responded. It is clear that from its early days the Society attached great importance to acquiring and circulating news of this kind. The dissenting minister Benjamin Fawcett of Kidderminster, in the preface to his devotional work The grand enquiry, am I in Christ or not? (1756), which antedates any of the surviving reports, surveys religious societies in the present age, the Societies for Reformation of Manners and the Societies for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts, and gives the palm to the Society for Religious Knowledge among the Poor. He continues: God grant, that the Accounts, which this Society appears to have received already, from various and remote Parts of these Islands, as well as from our remoter American Colonies, may only prove an Earnest of yet more numerous and more delightful Accounts, which shall be communicated to them in Time to come!48 We know from Rippon that the Society kept a record of the correspondence it was sent by recipients of nominations, consisting of a large quarto volume which

45 Account of the Book Society (1830), p. 13. 46 An account of the Book Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: instituted anno 1750 (London: for the Society, 1832), p. 7. 47 Account of the Book Society (1833), p. 5. 48 Benjamin Fawcett, The grand enquiry, am I in Christ or not? (Salop, 1756), p. xiii.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 13 contained copies of the originals made by Joseph Forfitt, Benjamin’s brother.49 Both the annual accounts and Rippon’s Discourse quote at length from ministers’ letters describing the ways in which they distributed books and the effect these had on their people. In 1755 Benjamin Fawcett provided details in a letter included by Rippon in the second edition of the Discourse of the way in which he had distributed thousands of books over the past ten years, most of them not supplied by the Society (it is not clear how Fawcett acquired these books). He kept a list of books and the names, over 900, of those to whom he gave them, in order to ensure that no one received the same book twice; most had had three or more books.50 John Griffiths of Hinckley, Leicestershire, wrote in 1769 that he applied two rules in distributing books: The first was to give to the religious poor who appeared to be very serious, and earnestly longing after such helps to forward them in the divine life … The second was to give to such as seemed very ignorant, having little or no sense of religion, but appeared to be sober-minded, of good morals, and willing to receive religious instructions.51 Rippon suggested in his concluding summary that though Bibles and Testaments were given away, other books were frequently lent on the understanding that they should be returned at a specified time and some account of the contents given.52 The report for 1795 included the very full answer made by James Stillingfleet, the evangelical incumbent of Hotham, Yorkshire, to a formal questionnaire: I observe, in my parcel of books this time, a printed paper requesting some account of the manner in which the lot of books, sent to each member, is generally used or disposed of … [M]y general mode is is to give away the bibles to such of my parishioners or poor neighbours as stand in need. The other books I now prefer to lend out to the poor, &c. I give away some of them as I see proper, but I find it is better to lend them in general than to dispose of them absolutely; for, when they are given, too frequently they put them upon the shelf, where they remain neglected from year to year; whereas, if only lent, it urges them to make use of them, that they may bring them back again in a proper time. Besides, by this means, the several persons are enabled to receive greater instruction; for, when they bring back a book of one sort, they have another in exchange; and so they are enabled to go through many books instead of only having one or two.53 As Benjamin Fawcett indicated in 1756, these letters came not only from the British Isles but from North America. The 1763 report, for example, contains letters from Charles Town, South Carolina; New Jersey College; Maryland; and New York; the 1788 report contains one from Saint John’s, Newfoundland.54

49 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), p. 6. Rippon also says, p. 39, that the ﬁrst letter in the book is by Doddridge and the last by Caleb Evans. This book does not appear to have survived. 50 Rippon, Discourse, 2nd edn (?1804), pp. 60–1. 51 Account of the Society (1769), pp. 50–1. 52 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 44–5. 53 An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Wyche, 1795), p. 44. 54 Account of the Society (1763), pp. 32–4; An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Field, 1788), pp. 49–50.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 14 ISABEL RIVERS Many of the letters from both sides of the Atlantic lament the shortage of books, or the poverty of the people that put purchasing books out of reach, and they convey the often ecstatic gratitude of the recipients, who were eager to share what they were given with family members and friends, or to read them to those who were illiterate. The shortage of Bibles is often noted, and the fact that those who did have access to one usually only had a piece (presumably this reflects the sale of Bibles in parts). Thus Mr Callender of Newcastle upon Tyne is quoted in the 1763 report: ‘One poor widow had only a few leaves of the blessed Word of GOD, these she had read over and over again, but when a bible was given her, how did she 55 praise GOD, and pray for those who had sent her such an acceptable present!’ Rippon records a letter of 1765 from John Newton, evangelical curate of Olney: the poor woman to whom he gave a Bible ‘received it with a joy bordering upon astonishment … She had before shewn me a borrowed one, which, though greatly torn and defaced, she should have esteemed as her choicest treasure if she could have called it her own.’56 The report for 1779 included a poem entitled ‘To the Society for promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor’ by the Baptist minister John Fawcett of Brierly Hall near Halifax, containing a similar account: A pious aged widow I have known, Who ne’er a Bible could have call’d her own: She all the depths of poverty had seen, And number’d almost threescore years and ten: At length your kindness did the gift impart; She, in a rapture, clasp’d it to her heart!57 The 1797 report contains examples of grateful responses from other poor women provided by Mr Palmer of Shrewsbury: ‘Bless the Lord who always gives me more than I ask; I only asked him for a Bible, and he has also sent me a Hymn- book and Psalm-book!’; ‘the Lord sends us all we want. I had been thinking this week we would have a new Bible; that I would put by three pence every week till I had money enough to buy one.’58 In contrast, Josiah Townsend, Anglican clergyman at Pewsey, reported his recipients’ sceptical curiosity: ‘The Bibles have had a very particular effect; the people look upon them as presbyterian Bibles, not having the service of the Church of England adjoined to them, and read them diligently to find the difference.’59

VI The letters supplement the lists of numbers in the reports in providing valuable evidence of the popularity of particular books among both distributors and recipients. Thus Robert Wells of Royston is quoted in the 1779 report as saying that the recipients found most useful the Bible, Alleine’s Alarm, Reynolds’s

55 Account of the Society (1763), p. 35. 56 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 41–2. 57 Account of the Society (1779), pp. 47–8. 58 Account of the Society (1797), p. 44. 59 Rippon, Discourse, 2nd edn (?1804), p. 48n.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 15 Compassionate address, Baxter’s Call to the unconverted, Watts’s Hymns and Songs for children, and Scudder’s Daily walk; Mrs Howard Hull in a letter of 1782 listed Baxter, Shower, Reynolds, and Alleine as particularly adapted for the careless and unconcerned and the Bible and Scudder for the awakened.60 Samuel Medley of Liverpool (who was himself first awakened when wounded at sea in 1759 by reading one of the Society’s Bibles) was quoted in the 1782 account as asking for a nomination of Watts’s Psalms and Hymns: ‘I have many poor and pious persons almost daily applying to me for them.’61 Rippon, in his section on ‘Books on the nature and necessity of the new birth’, quotes from several letters detailing responses to Baxter’s Call, Alleine’s Alarm, and Reynolds’s Compassionate address. Thomas Mott gave Alleine’s Alarm to a poor Lincolnshire man who took it with him when he worked in the fens; ‘at dinner time he collected together as many labourers as he could, and used to sit down and read it to them’. Isaac Toms of Hadleigh in Suffolk, the author of five of the Society’s tracts, recounted in a letter of 1759 how he gave Reynolds’s Compassionate address to an aged poor man who said after reading it, ‘I would not take a golden guinea for this book.’ Samuel Walker of Truro gave it to 160 soldiers; three weeks later 100 of them came to his house asking what they must do to be saved, whereupon he formed them into a Soldier’s Society.62 Eliza Toms, Isaac’s daughter, answering the printed request for information, spelled out in a long and circumstantial letter included in the 1795 Account the ‘ardent desire’ the poor villagers had for the Society’s books, especially A compassionate address, and her father’s attempt to satisfy it. This letter indicates as well as any the way in which the distribution and circulation of books functioned and the excitement that the process could generate forty-five years after the Society’s inception: Applications to my father for books are innumerable; not only the poor in this place, but those of ten or twelve villages round, petition for them: it is painful to him to send them away without granting their desire, though he is often obliged to do it, and they wait till a supply comes … Many parents, to whom he gave a Bible in their youth, beg for a large one, as their eyes fail, by which means they can spare the old one for their children … A cripple, who lived at some distance, saw, at a neighbour’s, one of the Compassionate Address to the Christian World, was so delighted with that piece, sent directly, but we could not gratify him; he will now have his wish, as his name is put into one which came in this parcel … One, who found good impressions from perusing it, lent it to her neighbour, who reading aloud was overheard by a man returning from his day’s work: he stopped

60 Account of the Society (1779), p. 47; An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Field, 1782), p. 48. 61 An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Field, 1786), p. 48. For Medley’s conversion see Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 42–3, Memoirs of the Late Rev. Samuel Medley, compiled by his son (London 1800), pp. 67–76, and Blackburn, Centenary retrospect, pp. 64–8. 62 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 17, 22–3. Edwin Sidney, The life, ministry, and selections from the remains, of the Rev. Samuel Walker (London, 1835), ch. 7, discusses Walker’s Soldiers’ Society but makes no mention of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge, perhaps because of its dissenting associations.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 16 ISABEL RIVERS some time, went home and told his wife he must have the book: though he could not read, she was able. The next day they inquired after it, found it was borrowed, went to the owner, who readily gave them what they asked for, and my father has now made up her loss.63 The popularity and longevity of Baxter’s Call and Alleine’s Alarm are well known, and will not be surprising to readers of Ian Green’s Print and protestantism.64 The evangelical clergyman Henry Venn, in his anniversary sermon to the Society preached in 1778, summed up the regard in which both were held: ‘We may compare these two small volumes to the relics of Elisha – who was not only highly honoured during his ministry, but years after his decease, when a dead man touched the great prophet’s bones, he was instantly made, by divine virtue proceeding from them, to live again.’65 It is worth noting that these two books are the only ones published by the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge that overlap with the list of John Wesley’s Society for Distributing Religious Tracts among the Poor.66 John Reynolds’s Compassionate address, on the other hand, has almost disap- peared from view. Only thirteen surviving copies are listed in the ESTC, and none of these is identiﬁed with the Society, though the 1791 edition was published by T. Field and the 1799 edition by T. Wiche, each in turn the Society’s booksellers.67 Rippon gives Reynolds’s date of death as 1727,68 which means he can be identiﬁed with the dissenting minister of Shrewsbury (1668–1727) in The Oxford dictionary of national biography, but there is no mention of A compassionate address in the anonymous Memoirs of Reynolds published after his death,69 nor in the ODNB article. The earliest surviving edition is a Boston reprint of 1730, but it must have been published earlier than this. Reynolds’s little book does not deserve this obscurity. As already noted, it was (apart from the Bible) the second most widely distributed book on the Society’s list, closely following Watts’s Songs for children; indeed, in the Society’s earlier years, it was far more popular than the Songs. At 2 1/2d in 1763 and 4 1/2d in 1795 it was among the cheapest. This massive discrepancy between a book’s documented distribution in the eighteenth century

63 Account of the Society (1795), p. 44. 64 Green, Print and protestantism, p. 338. 65 Henry Venn, The conversion of sinners the greatest charity … preached on the 19th of November [1778], at St. Peter’s, Cornhill, before a Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge amongst the Poor (London, 1779), pp. 19–20. 66 The works on Wesley’s list, containing thirty in all, which differentiate it sharply from the other Society’s are a group of his own sermons and one by his brother Charles, and abridgements of three works by the non-juror and mystical writer William Law, A serious call to a devout and holy life (1729), The nature and design of Christianity (from A practical treatise upon Christian perfection, 1726), and The spirit of prayer (1749–50). See Richard Green, The works of John and Charles Wesley: a bibliography (London, 1896), p. 217, and Baker, Union catalogue, no. 377A. 67 I have examined the editions of 1791 and 1797: A compassionate address to the Christian world (London: T. Field, 1791); A compassionate address to the Christian world (London: T. Wilkins, 1797). On the first blank page of the British Library’s copy of the 1791 edition (BL 1607/2041) is handwritten: ‘John Durrell His Book Given him by the Rev.d Mr Snape January 5: 1798’. 68 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), p. 22. The ESTC identifies this Reynolds as the author of A compassionate address, but no basis for the attribution is given. 69 Memoirs of the life of the late pious and learned Mr. John Reynolds (3rd edn, London, 1735).

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 17 and its survival in the twenty-first should warn us against relying on the ESTC as a safe indicator of popular publishing. Thomas Field singled out A compassionate address in his advertisement at the back of his 1761 edition of The pleasantness of a religious life: This book is written with such a tender and truly Christian Concern for the Souls of Mankind, and is so extremely well adapted to the Capacities and Circumstances of the poorer Part, that some particular Gentlemen, at one time, purchased Five Thousand of them to disperse among them: And many Thousands of them have been likewise given away by other pious disposed Persons.70 Rippon summed up the Society’s view: ‘no uninspired book, in our distribution, has been more beneficial than Reynolds’s compassionate address’.71 The edition of 1797 published by T. Wilkins is a short work of seventy-two pages, stylistically much clearer and simpler than Baxter’s Call and Alleine’s Alarm, but with the same essential argument. Throughout the writer addresses the reader in a series of short exclamations and questions. In the first of six sections the reader is invited to make a number of ‘Serious Considerations’, on sin, conscience, conversion, heaven, and hell, among other topics; in the next three sections the reader is taken through a process of self-examination on each item or sentence in the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments. In a compact elemen- tary work Reynolds thus incorporates both the process of conversion and the basic principles of Christianity. In the fifth section he deliberately raises the intellectual level: dismissing his own effort, he urges the reader, in a voice very similar to Baxter’s in many of his longer works, to read ‘searching, quickning, sanctifying’ books, recommending among other works A sure guide to heaven (i.e. Alleine’s Alarm), and such Puritan favourites as Bayly’s Practice of piety and Scudder’s Daily walk.72 Reynolds perceived his own little book essentially as a beginner’s way in to religious life and religious writing. This is perhaps why Risdon Darracott in a letter to the Society said of it: ‘I know not a book which is so fit to be the first book to put into the hands of the ignorant and careless, as it is level to the meanest capacities, and is penned in so moving a strain.’73

VII Judging from the surviving accounts, in its first fifty years the Society considerably increased its membership and the number of books it distributed, though with a deliberately short list of titles, and met a recognized need. Later in the nineteenth century, judging from the sparser records, it functioned effectively as a religious publishing company with a much larger list, but for a time it lost sight of its original design ‘to distribute Bibles, Testaments, and other good Books, which may be judged useful, gratis among the Poor’.74 The problem lay partly in its

70 Henry, The pleasantness of a religious life. 71 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), pp. 24, 38. 72 A compassionate address (1797), pp. 46–7. 73 Rippon, Discourse (?1803), p. 24. 74 Gibbons, The excellency of the gospel, p. 36.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 18 ISABEL RIVERS position vis-a`-vis other distribution societies. In the eighteenth century it had no evangelical rival; the SPCK did not distribute the same books (with the exception, of course, of the Bible, and of a handful of dissenting works such as Watts’s Divine songs for children), though the annual accounts of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge warily included a note appended to ‘The proper Form for a Donation to the Society, by Will’, warning prospective donors not to write ‘Christian’ instead of ‘Religious’ by mistake. John Wesley’s Society for Distributing Religious Tracts among the Poor was concerned with a different constituency. But with the formation of new single issue societies at the beginning of the nineteenth century the wind had been taken out of the Book Society’s sails. The 1830 Account noted that there had been a division of labour in the last twenty to thirty years: the Religious Tract Society, the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the Sunday School Societies had ‘embraced, as their specific and exclusive objects, some of the plans combined in the original constitution of this Society’.75 In his 1850 prize essay Blackburn wrote mournfully, ‘the slumbering managers of the Book Society saw, from the want of flexibility in its plans, and energy in its administration, the two main objects of its usefulness separately undertaken, each by a young and vigorous Society’.76 However, this was not the end of the story. In 1867 the committee was able to report that over 600,000 copies of the Sunday Scholar’s edition of Pilgrim’s progress had been distributed complete for one penny.77

75 Account of the Book Society (1830), p. 4. 76 Blackburn, Centenary retrospect, 103. 77 The one hundred and sixteenth annual report of the Book Society (1866), pp. 10–11; The one hundred and seventeenth annual report of the Book Society (1867), p. 11.

http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 31 Oct 2011 IP address: 141.217.20.120 EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY 19 APPENDIX Names and number of books distributed by the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor in 1763

Number in Price 1751 [the ﬁrst Number Total Author and title in sd year’s record] in 1763 to 1763

1. Large Bibles 3.9 115 731 5,101 2. Small Bibles 2.8 160 916 7,243 3. Large Testaments 1.4 167 373 4,105 4. Small Testaments 0.11 249 530 6,344 5. Shower on Time and Eternity 0.7 25 673 5,092 6. Baxter’s Call to the 0.5 200 694 5,079 Unconverted 7. Allein’s Alarm to ditto 0.7 62 439 3,487 8. Janeway’s Token for Children 0.4 50 293 4,026 9. Reynolds’s Compassionate 0.2 1/2 110 1,678 17,526 Address 10. Protestant’s Resolution 0.1 200 722 7,698 against Popery 11. Dr. Watts’s Scripture History 2.4 12 119 668 12.------Prayers for 0.8 100 292 3,167 Children 13.------Songs for ditto 0.4 1/2 125 778 5,329 14.------thesamein 0.4 1/2 ––– 885 1,475 Welch [from 1762] 15.------Psalms 1.3 ––– 449 1,817 [from 1759] 16.------Hymns 1.3 ––– 392 1,473 [from 1759] 17.------First Catechism 0.1 1/2 ––– 504 1,265 [from 1761] 18.------Second ditto 0.4 1/2 ––– 373 900 [from 1761] 19. Toms’s Humble Attempt, &c. 0.4 150 ––– 550 20. - - - - - Swearer’s Monitor 0.3 200 465 3,199 21. - - - - - Sabbath-breaker’s 0.3 225 255 3,410 ditto 22.----- against Intemperance, 2.0 ––– 159 1,483 per doz. [from 1759] 23. - - - - - against Impurity, 1.8 ––– 266 1,428 per doz. [from 1759]

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Appendix (Cont.) Number in Price 1751 [the ﬁrst Number Total Author and title in sd year’s record] in 1763 to 1763

24. Dr. Doddridge on Family 0.4 ––– 319 1,412 Religion [from 1753] 25.------Rise and 2.4 ––– 235 1,903 Progress of Religion [from 1753] 26. Henry’s Pleasures of Religion 0.5 1/2 ––– 541 3,154 [from 1758] 27. Patrick’s Devout Christian 2.4 ––– 54 117 [from 1761] 28. Scudder’s Daily Walk 1.8 ––– 148 409 [from 1761] 29. Address to the Soldiers and — — — 10,000 Sailors [1760–1 only] 30. Persuasive to observe the — — — 10,000 Lord’s Day [1760–1 only] 31. Religious Tradesman 0.9 — 231 691 [from 1761] 32. Earle on the Sacrament 0.9 — 187 197 [from 1762] Total 2,150 13,801 119,887

Source: An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Field, 1763), pull-out sheet between pp. 6 and 7. The titles and order are as given in the Account. The numbering of titles is mine. Only two of the columns for yearly sales are provided here. The information in square brackets about the ﬁrst date of distribution of a title comes from yearly columns that are not included.

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Price Number Total to 1795 Author and title in sd in 1795 [since 1751]

1. Large, or Minion, Bibles 4.1 912 36,744 2. Small, or Nonpareil, Bibles 3.1 1,216 45,188 3. Smallest, or twenty-four, Bibles 2.8 1,105 12,055 4. Small, or Nonpareil, Bibles, inferior 2.2 111 111 [from 1795] 5. Largest Testaments 2.3 262 4,813 6. Large Testaments 1.5 627 17,528 7. Small Testaments 1.0 916 29,982 8. Dr. Watts’s Psalms, large twelves 1.6 104 104 [from 1795] 9.------Hymns, ditto 1.6 100 100 [from 1795] 10.------Psalms and Hymns, 2.7 89 89 ditto, in one [from 1795] 11.------Psalms, small twelves 1.2 982 34,449 12.------Hymns, ditto 1.2 998 33,124 13.------Psalms and Hymns, 2.2 92 92 ditto, in one [from 1795] 14.------Psalms and Hymns, in 1.6 202 202 one, 24 mo [from 1795] 15.------Scripture-History, 2.2 267 6,008 with Plates 16.------Prayers for Children 0.8 397 13,917 17.------Songs for ditto 0.5 1/2 1,320 37,635 18.------First Catechism 0.1 1/2 661 21,504 19.------Second Catechism 0.4 1/2 577 16,690 20. Shower on Time and Eternity 0.9 335 16,623 21. Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted 0.7 313 18,922 22. Janeway’s Token for Children 0.5 209 21,731 23. Reynolds’s Compassionate Address 0.4 1/2 336 36,384 24. Protestant’s Resolution against 0.1 173 26,875 Popery 25. Toms’s Humble Attempt 0.4 131 4,328 26. ------Swearer’s Monitor 0.3 356 13,429 27. ------Sabbath-Breaker’s ditto 0.3 460 15,900 28. ------against Intemperance, 2.0 106 9,031 per doz. 29. ------against Impurity, per doz. 1.8 175 6,887

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Appendix (Cont.) Price Number Total to 1795 Author and title in sd in 1795 [since 1751]

30. Henry’s Pleasures of Religion 0.6 1/2 336 12,705 31. Scudder’s Daily Walk 2.5 78 3,369 32. Religious Tradesman 0.9 114 4,253 33. Earle on the Sacrament 0.10 1/2 105 3,507 34. Dr. Dodderidge [sic] on Family 0.4 328 10,182 Religion 35.------Rise and Progress 2.2 224 8,307 of Religion 36. Patrick’s Devout Christian 2.2 58 1,673 37. Life of God in the Soul of Man 1.1 102 4,058 38. Orton on Eternity [from 1777] 0.4 587 7,668 39. Allein’s Alarm to the Unconverted 0.9 340 16,775 Total 15,804 552,962

Source: An account of the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor: begun anno 1750 (London: Thomas Wiche, 1795). Only one of the columns for yearly sales is provided here.

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