Reforming Character: William Law and the English Theophrastan Tradition

Eighteenth-century devotional writer William Law employed the Theophrastan character genre in his book A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life in order to habituate his readers to certain ways of thinking about their own moral characters. I have sifted through the reception history of A Serious Call for evidence of the ways in which readers used Law’s characters as rhetorical points of reference and as aids for examining and modifying their own characters. Considered together, Law’s moral guidebook and the extant readers’ responses to it provide a picture of eighteenth-century resourcefulness in adapting a form of fictional character to support the reform of personal character.