Foreword

This study of the Aikin–Barbauld circle is the fourth volume to result from the work of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. Established in September 2004, the Centre is a collaboration between the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, and Dr Williams’s Library, Gordon Square, London. Its objectives are to promote the use of the Library’s unique holdings of Puritan, Protestant Nonconformist and Dissenting books and manuscripts; to encourage research into and dissemination of these resources; and to increase knowledge and understanding of the importance of Puritanism and Protestant Dissent to English society and literature from the sixteenth century to the present.

To further these aims the Centre has developed an extensive programme of conferences, seminars, workshops and publications. The annual one-day conferences have led to five volumes of essays: Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (2008), and Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (2011), both edited by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes; Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (2011), edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey; and Dissent and the Bible in Britain, 1650–1950 (forthcoming), edited by Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas, all from Oxford University Press; and now Religious Dissent and the Aikin–Barbauld Circle from Cambridge University Press. In addition the Centre’s postgraduates have published the following electronic editions online: The Letters of Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsey 1769–1794, edited by Simon Mills (2007); A Bibliography of the Writings of William Hazlitt 1737–1820 (2009) and New College, Hackney (1786–96): A Selection of Printed and Archival Sources (2010), both edited by Stephen Burley; and Dissenting Education and the Legacy of John Jennings, c.1720–c.1729, edited by Tessa Whitehouse.