The subject of Dissent and charity has received surprisingly little attention from historians for the period 1660–1720. Although there are individual studies of a number of major Dissenting charities established in this period, there has been no attempt to consider the importance of charity to Dissent, particularly in support of the ejected ministers, or later in funding ministers and meetings. Historians have also failed to examine the forms it took, the denominational distinctions, or how Dissenting charity differed from that given to the Church of England. Nor has the wider charity of Dissenters, to relieve the poor generally or to promote religion by encouraging literacy and supplying bibles and copies of other texts, been much considered. The major charities established for the benefit of Dissent, particularly after toleration, were important and helped shape Dissent, but there were many individuals at the local level who supported their minister and meeting though in much more modest and informal ways. Without this large-scale support Dissent could not have survived the period after 1662, let alone developed and expanded in the decades following toleration. Dissenting charity in this period covered three main areas: first and foremost the support and encouragement of religion (especially the support of ministers and meetings), education, and the relief of poverty. This chapter will examine the extent, nature and importance of charity in the development of Dissent for the first two generations after 1660. The Toleration Act (1689) proved to be a crucial watershed. The change in the legal status of Dissent led to the rapid expansion of meetings and to new and more organised forms of charity.

Charity and the ejected ministers

Between 1660 and 1662 a great many ministers gave up their livings and, by surrendering the vicarage or rectory, their homes, for the uncertainty of nonconformity. Edmund Calamy's accounts of the ejected ministers reveal that 100 or so had considerable private means, and perhaps another 100 at some point kept a school, while about 60 practised medicine, and 20 took up trade or farming. The majority of the remainder if they did not retire from ministry continued to depend upon preaching for their livelihood.2 About fifty were fortunate to be appointed as chaplains or tutors in the households of the peerage or gentry, but most had to rely on private charity.

Dissent, charity and philanthropy: the current historiography

This volume examines the distinctive contribution made by Protestant Dissenters from the Church of England to the history and development of charity and philanthropy in Britain from 1660 to the beginning of the twentieth century. The key terms used in the volume will reflect the definitions made by the Unitarian minister Abraham Rees in his Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature in 1819. Drawing upon Matthew xxii, 37–40, Rees defined charity as ‘one of the three grand theological virtues; consisting in the love of God and our neighbour’, implying altruism primarily in a personal or individual sense, although frequently involving financial generosity on a substantial scale. He defined philanthropy as ‘a general benevolence towards the species’, signifying a more organised, although nonetheless private and voluntary, method of alleviating hardship and, by implication, thereby contributing to the public good.

Religion has long been seen as a primary motivation for charity; indeed charity has formed a central part of Christian teaching from the earliest days. While the Church was the vehicle for providing much of the charity in the medieval period, historians see a decisive transformation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in response to major economic, social and religious changes. The Protestant Reformation, together with the development of a capitalist economy in many parts of Europe and the rapid growth in numbers of the labouring poor, required new strategies for relieving poverty, not least in the role of the individual, which led to major changes in emphasis. Charity initiated and controlled by secular authorities increasingly supplemented the work of the Church. Historians more recently have labelled the benevolence of this earlier period as charity, and identified a major change in the late eighteenth century with the beginnings of ‘philanthropy’, the relief of human suffering, as something distinctive from ‘charity’. The first person to be recognised publicly as a philanthropist in England was the prison reformer John Howard, a member of the Congregational Church in Bedford, whose career is the subject of Hugh Cunningham's chapter in this volume (Chapter 3).

The history of charity and of philanthropy has attracted increasing scholarly interest in recent years. Over the last two decades there have been studies of changes in attitudes to poverty and its relief, health care, histories of specific charitable and philanthropic institutions, and of public provision through the poor law and, in more recent times, the welfare state. Recognition that charity played an important part in the lives of the English poor is now widely accepted.

In the mid-nineteenth century the Baptists, Congregationalists and Unitarians were supported nationally by a number of major charities. Some, such as the Presbyterian Fund and the Congregational Fund, dated from the last decade of the seventeenth century, others, such as the Lady Hewley's Charity and the Particular Baptist Fund, from the first decades of the eighteenth century, and the support they provided was still significant over a century later. Yet more had been established at the end of the eighteenth century, such as the largely Congregational London Missionary Society and the Baptist Missionary Society, or at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a period when evangelical dissent grew vigorously. Unitarians responded with their own funds intended to propagate Unitarianism. All three denominations had benevolent societies for the support of their indigent ministers, or the widows and families of ministers. Surprisingly they still co-operated in distributing grants from the ‘Society for the relief of Aged and Infirm Protestant Dissenting Ministers’ established in 1818, though there was an attempt to exclude ministers who were not doctrinally orthodox from benefitting. They also supported their own colleges for training students for the ministry. There were nevertheless important differences. The Baptists and Congregationalists were involved in two major areas, overseas missions (and later home missions to convert the heathen at home) and chapel building, both involving significant denominational engagement and fund-raising, areas in which Unitarians did not engage nationally. There were other important differences between the three denominations. The Congregational Union of England and Wales was founded in 1831, and the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 1832, but the Unitarians lacked an effective national organisation. In 1825 the Unitarian Fund and a number of other Unitarian bodies established to propagate unitarian doctrine were brought together to form the British & Foreign Unitarian Association (B&FUA), which was the only central organisation for Unitarians until 1928, but it was poorly supported. The Unitarians were easily the smallest of the three denominations, with only 250 congregations in 1852, mainly inherited from the English Presbyterians. The Congregationalists were the largest with over 3,200 congregations in England and Wales by 1851. The Baptists had 1,134 churches organised in associations by this date.

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.

John Aikin senior was the first member of an extraordinary eighteenth- and nineteenth-century provincial family of Dissenters to gain distinction, and is today largely remembered because he taught at the celebrated Warrington Academy, serving first as tutor in belles-lettres and then as theological tutor or principal. Aikin had earlier conducted an important school at Kibworth Harcourt in Leicestershire, the subject of much recent interest among scholars because it was at Kibworth that his children, John Aikin junior and Anna Letitia Barbauld, were born and began their schooling. Among his contemporaries Aikin also gained some celebrity as a scholar in languages and literature both classical and modern, but his failure to publish more than a couple of essays in the Monthly Review and a preface to his son’s essays on Pliny means his scholarship has been little considered. Although Aikin’s reputation is largely derived from his work as a tutor at Warrington Academy, it is clear his school was of regional significance, and that his contribution as a schoolmaster was at least as important as his role as a tutor at Warrington.

Aikin’s education and early career

John Aikin was born in London on 28 December 1713. His father, also John, a London linen draper, was originally from Kirkcudbright in south-east Scotland. Aikin was at first intended for his father’s business, and after some time in his father’s shop he was placed as a clerk in an overseas merchant house where he learned French, and indeed acquired a remarkable proficiency in the language as a result of living with a family where only French was spoken. Ill-health caused him to be sent to school in St Albans. The school was kept in the old manor house of Newland Squillers, on the edge of the town, on the road leading to Hatfield and Hertford. The house ‘had been let as a Boy’s Boarding-School; and . . . it was a very reputable school among the Dissenters, where the celebrated Dr. Doddridge, Dr. Aikin, and others, ministers, and other persons of that profession, received the rudiments of their education’. It seems likely that this was the Dissenter’s charity school at St Albans which was a cause célèbre at the end of Queen Anne’s reign. In May 1714 Dissenters were accused of also taking in church children and forcing them to attend the local Dissenting meeting – a hugely damaging charge just at the time when the Schism Bill was introduced into parliament. The master was said to have ‘once been upon the stage’, and was fond of exercising his boys in dramatics. William Turner speculated that this gave Aikin ‘an early taste for poetry, and also that force and clearness of enunciation, by which he was eminently distinguished’. Almost certainly through the influence of the local Dissenting minister in St Albans, Samuel Clarke, who was Philip Doddridge’s friend and patron, Aikin was sent to Doddridge’s Academy in Northampton in midsummer 1732 at the age of 19. At Northampton, according to his granddaughter Lucy, ‘the bent of his mind towards learning so strongly manifested itself, that he obtained his father’s permission to change his views and devote himself to the Christian ministry’.