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  • The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent: 1720–1800 by Tessa Whitehouse
  • Kenneth J. Stewart
Tessa Whitehouse. The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent: 1720–1800. Oxford: Oxford, 2015. Pp. vi + 250. $100.00.

The dilemma faced by eighteenth-century English Nonconformists was multifaceted and daunting. Barred from England’s two universities by religious tests designed to ensure that only those conforming to the national church gained admission, Nonconformists had to erect their own educational foundations, that is, the “academies.” These existed to prepare leaders for both ecclesiastical and community leadership. The target of lingering prejudice regarding a supposed collective responsibility for the regicide of the preceding century, Nonconformists struggled to alter perceptions of their movement as both rustic and seditious in tendency. Nonconformity—whether of the Quaker, Baptist, Independent, or Presbyterian variety—was also thoroughly decentralized such that all concerted action was made highly difficult.

In her Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent, Tessa Whitehouse explores the ways in which eighteenth-century Nonconformists (or Dissenters), by their cultivation of literary networks, sought to demonstrate that they were productive members of polite society. These networks bound together their leaders by both epistolary correspondence and the publication and careful reissuing of important books. The networks extended into central Europe (involving correspondence with Pietist leaders) and across the Atlantic, where they engaged Christian leaders in New England. Not only leading Nonconformist figures such as Isaac Watts (1678–1748) and Philip Doddridge (1702–1751) benefited through these exchanges but so did their communities, inasmuch as all labored to overcome the effects of the social marginalization that was the consequence of Nonconformity. Ms. Whitehouse traces these literary networks to the year 1800, by which time Nonconformity was battling the additional risk of association with a radicalism engendered [End Page 52] by some in its ranks. These saw in the cross-channel French Revolution a possible way forward for the obviating of their political disabilities.

It is apparent that in Textual Culture Ms. Whitehouse has given us her doctoral dissertation in revised form. In places, the text suffers from excessive documentation such that the reader will struggle to follow any clear sense of narrative. As well, numerous chapters begin with programmatic indications of what the following pages will aim to accomplish. The transition from dissertation to a more general work is therefore not fully complete, although this liability does not compromise the value of the work taken as a whole.

As readers press on, they will find an illuminating discussion of the wide literary and pedagogical influence of Dissenting minister Isaac Watts, some of whose works such as Logic (1725) were written for use in the Dissenting Academies. Ms. Whitehouse also shows that the relationship and correspondence between Watts and Academy tutor Philip Doddridge epitomize the operation of the epistolary culture that was widespread among Dissenting leaders in this period. Though living a good distance apart, their relationship had begun through letters exchanged when Doddridge, the younger man, solicited advice about future improvement of education in the Academies.

On the basis of so cultivated an epistolary correspondence between them, it was perhaps natural that the prolific Watts would include Doddridge among his literary executors. Those executors understood that sustaining the circulation of the writings of Watts after his decease was one means of continuing the gains that Nonconformists had achieved through his impressive literary profile. The consolidating of Watts’s reputation for these ends was manifested in the publication of his complete Works in six leather-bound volumes in 1754.

Doddridge, who barely outlived Watts (a generation his senior), was himself a major participant in this textual culture. The circulation of his Northampton academy lectures, first in multiple authorized handwritten copies and—after his death—in three print editions, went far to achieve a measure of uniformity of instruction and conviction within the various Nonconformist academies across England. Once in print, his Course of Lectures in Pneumatology, Ethics and Divinity (1764)—just like the various writings of Watts—served to draw the admiration of Christian readers well beyond Nonconformity, both in England and abroad, in Europe and America. As the whole Works of Watts had been gathered together with a view...

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