Prayer, Feeling, Action: Anna Barbauld and the Public Worship Controversy

In this essay, I consider Anna Barbauld's pamphlet addressed to Gilbert Wakefield about the propriety of public prayer. Barbauld's work participates in what Bruce Graver calls "the public worship controversy": a pamphlet battle that took place in 1791 and 1792, partly during and partly after the Revolution controversy stimulated by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. This second pamphlet war reveals, as Graver has pointed out, dissent among dissenters who nonetheless shared politically revolutionary principles:

The public worship controversy in the early 1790s . . . showed wide splits between radical Dissenters that few have really talked about. In this regard, we have taken the Tory line on the English Jacobins, treating them as a homogenous band of rabble rousers.¹

In Wakefield's own words, "the dissenters are a very numerous, heterogeneous, and unconnected body."² The blindness in literary history that writes Enlightenment dissent as unified in its commitment to purely rationalist discourse has very unfortunate ideological consequences: it injures our capacity to understand that varieties of political radicalism may be linked to various types of Enlightenment rationalisms; and further, it detracts from the radical potential of the work produced by eighteenth-century feminist thinkers. Equating their thinking with sensibility rather than reason confines them anew to the private sphere, disarming them of public power.

One major attempt to correct this blindness has focused on Anna Barbauld. Daniel White argues on the one hand that the dissenting circle in which she participated was organized upon principles of community, and, on the other, that Barbauld brought sensibility into the world of dissenting principles. In White's view, Barbauld differed from rationalist dissenters insofar as she approved of passionate devotion that was not fanatical enthusiasm but could instead be moderated by taste. However, insofar as we categorize these important insights under the rubrics of sensibility and the aesthetic, we once again misconstrue Barbauld's contribution to literary history. Whenever a text valorizes emotion and sentiment, literary critics and historians typically oppose it to rationalism. "Sensibility" is often positioned as rationality's aesthetic antagonist and all too often gendered: that is, (feminine) sensitivity opposes (male) rationality.

This essay undertakes to show the role of both affect and reason in Barbauld's theology—or really, in her theologically motivated aesthetic theory. Barbauld is neither the cold rationalist that Charles Lamb imagined her to be, nor the feminine butterfly caught in sensibility's net, as Mary Wollstonecraft depicted her.³ As can be seen especially in the public worship controversy among dissenters, she is an affective rationalist.

In 1791, after losing students and ultimately leaving the Dissenting Academy at Hackney because of his refusal to attend any public worship service, Gilbert Wakefield published a pamphlet defending his decision not to participate. I wish to show in describing Barbauld's response to Wakefield that the rationalism valued so highly among dissenters need not be individualistic, as it is in Wakefield, nor instrumental in the pejorative sense of the term. Barbauld's rationalism differs from Wakefield's because it is sensual, materialistic, and spatial. Because she embraces material differences—worldly embodiedness as such—Barbauld is able to formulate what is definitely a communal and what might even be called a "cosmopolitan" rationality.⁴ Wakefield's impassioned defense of free rational inquiry, of the necessity for him and others "to speak and write of [the dissenters] and their opinions, and all other things, as they are," eventuates in a written version of the Terror.⁵ Thus, most importantly, Barbauld's pamphlet addressing Wakefield exposes exactly how and why Enlightenment rationality ramifies as violence in Wakefield's hands, telling us something about the difference between privative and disinterested objectivity.⁶

The Controversy

Most famous perhaps for having been imprisoned in 1799 along with Joseph Johnson for writing and publishing what was construed by the government to be Jacobin propaganda, Gilbert Wakefield was educated to be an Anglican minister, attending Jesus College, Cambridge, on scholarship as the son of a living clergyman. He became incredibly erudite, learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and several eastern languages. He developed during...