THE FIRST EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY

2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
ISABEL RIVERS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
The Poor

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals The Materiality of English Suicide Letters, c. 1700 – c. 1850

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Ella Sbaraini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Emotional Distress ◽  
History Of Emotions ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
Writing Practices ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Abstract Scholars have explored eighteenth-century suicide letters from a literary perspective, examining issues of performativity and reception. However, it is fruitful to see these letters as material as well as textual objects, which were utterly embedded in people's social lives. Using thirty manuscript letters, in conjunction with other sources, this article explores the contexts in which suicide letters were written and left for others. It looks at how authors used space and other materials to convey meaning, and argues that these letters were epistolary documents usually meant for specific, known persons, rather than the press. Generally written by members of the ‘lower orders’, these letters also provide insight into the emotional writing practices of the poor, and their experiences of emotional distress. Overall, this article proposes that these neglected documents should be used to investigate the emotional and material contexts for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century suicide. It also argues that, at a time when the history of emotions has reached considerable prominence, historians must be more attentive to the experiences of the suicidal.

Islam without Europe

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad S. Dallal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Islamic Thought ◽  
European Colonization ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Ganges

Replete with a cast of giants in Islamic thought and philosophy, Ahmad S. Dallal’s pathbreaking intellectual history of the eighteenth-century Muslim world challenges stale views of this period as one of decline, stagnation, and the engendering of a widespread fundamentalism. Far from being moribund, Dallal argues, the eighteenth century--prior to systematic European encounters--was one of the most fertile eras in Islamic thought. Across vast Islamic territories, Dallal charts in rich detail not only how intellectuals rethought and reorganized religious knowledge but also the reception and impact of their ideas. From the banks of the Ganges to the shores of the Atlantic, commoners and elites alike embraced the appeals of Muslim thinkers who, while preserving classical styles of learning, advocated for general participation by Muslims in the definition of Islam. Dallal also uncovers the regional origins of most reform projects, showing how ideologies were forged in particular sociopolitical contexts. Reformists’ ventures were in large part successful--up until the beginnings of European colonization of the Muslim world. By the nineteenth century, the encounter with Europe changed Islamic discursive culture in significant ways into one that was largely articulated in reaction to the radical challenges of colonialism.

The Revival of Practical Christianity: the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, Samuel Wesley, and the Clerical Society Movement

2008 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 116-127
Author(s):  
Geordan Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Regular Feature ◽  
Evangelistic Preaching ◽  
The Church

Reflecting on the early endeavours of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) following its establishment in 1699, John Chamberlayne, the Society’s secretary, confidently noted the ‘greater spirit of zeal and better face of Religion already visible throughout the Nation’. Although Chamberlayne clearly uses the language of revival, through the nineteenth century, many historians of the Evangelical Revival in Britain saw it as a ‘new’ movement arising in the 1730s with the advent of the evangelical preaching of the early Methodists, Welsh and English. Nineteenth-century historians often confidently propagated the belief that they lived in an age inherently superior to the unreformed eighteenth century. The view that the Church of England from the Restoration to the Evangelical Revival was dominated by Latitudinarian moralism leading to dead and formal religion has recently been challenged but was a regular feature of Victorian scholarship that has persisted in some recent work. The traditional tendency to highlight the perceived dichotomy between mainstream Anglicanism and the Revival has served to obscure areas of continuity such as the fact that Whitefield and the Wesleys intentionally addressed much of their early evangelistic preaching to like-minded brethren in pre-existing networks of Anglican religious societies and that Methodism thrived as a voluntary religious society. Scores of historians have refuted the Victorian propensity to assert the Revival’s independence from the Church of England.

The Roots of Divergence? Some Comments on Japan in the ‘Axial Age’, 1750–1850

Itinerario ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 24 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 75-88
Author(s):  
Janet Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social History ◽  
Major Part ◽  
The Other ◽  
Axial Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Great Divergence

Much of the recent work on the economic and social history of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) has been driven by a desire to identify what T.C. Smith has called ‘native sources ofJapanese industrialisation’. From the Marxist-influenced historians in the 1920s who sought to explain the pre-industrial roots of the structure of production in interwar Japan, through to contem-poraryJapanese historians' studies of the pattern of Japanese development, a major part of the agenda has been to identify how Japan had got to where it was, in other words, what was the secret of its twentieth century successes and weaknesses. It is not possible to explore the situation of Japan's economy in the century 1750–1850 without benefit of this hindsight, without being aware that while Japan's situation may have been in many ways analogous to that of China and Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, its economic fortunes were by the latter part of the nineteenth century experiencing their own ‘great divergence’ from those of China, India and the other countries of Asia and the near East. To search for the antecedents of this divergence is for economic historians of Japan a parallel exercise o t any search for the sources of the European ‘miracle’. While a focus on the period 1750–1850 as an era of European/Asian divergence means, therefore, that we must highlight the situation inJapan during that century, it must also be accepted that in the case of Japan any comparison with other countries or regions may also suggest the causes of Japan's own divergence some fifty to a hundred years later.

Land Inequality on the Frontier: The Distribution of Land in East Tennessee at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century

1981 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Soltow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Land Settlement ◽  
Uniform Size ◽  
Land Inequality ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Minor Portion ◽  
A Minor

The settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky in the decades before and after statehood can be thought of as displaying great inequality. Large tracts owned by nonresidents contrasted with those of rather uniform size held by resident settlers. The fact, however, that at least a minor portion of settlers were tenants can distort this view. The very presence of the poor leads to the suspicion that relative inequality among settlers may have been rather great, whether or not unoccupied holdings of nonresidents are considered. A clear understanding of the concept of a proper statistical distribution of holdings and a study of the available evidence can add meaning to land settlement at the end of the eighteenth century.

“Charity Properly Understood”: Changing Ideas about Poor Relief in Liberal Spain

1991 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anrian Shubert
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Poor

When the English cleric Joseph Townsend visited Spain at the end of the eighteenth century, he was impressed by the apparent tolerance with which beggars were treated and by what he called the “excessively generous” way in which charity was distributed. He cited, with both surprise and disapproval, the Bishop of Cordoba, who daily fed some 7,000 people by distributing 1,000 kilograms of bread.1 This image of Spain as a paradise for the poor persisted until well into the nineteenth century. George Borrow, who travelled through the country in the 1830s trying to sell Bibles without much luck, remarked approvingly that poverty was not despised in Spain as it was in other countries:Yet to the honour of Spain be it spoken, it is one of the few countries in Europe where poverty is never insulted nor looked upon with contempt.…In Spain the very beggar does not feel himself a degraded being for he kisses no one's feet and knows not what it is to be cuffed or spitten upon.

Dreams of a More Perfect Union By Rogan Kersh. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. 358p. $39.95.

2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 642-643
Author(s):  
Robert W. T. Martin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
National Union ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Rogan Kersh's ambitious and well-researched book traces the history of the concept of American national “union” from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, when the concept lost the peculiar force it had had and fell out of use (more or less replaced by such concepts as “nation,” “country,” and, especially, “America”). The analysis demonstrates how the concept of national union has been used in exclusive as well as inclusive ways. The subject is an important one, especially to an America united by terrorist threats. And it is a topic made more conspicuous in the last decade by our ongoing discourse over multiculturalism. So the concept of national union is perhaps less obscure and more relevant than Kersh suggests (p. 3). Connections to the recent work of Rogers Smith (Civic Ideals, 1997) are also apparent. Still, the term itself has been out of favor for about a century now, so Kersh's study is a welcome effort to get us thinking about a relatively novel topic.

CHRISTIAN HEROES, PROVIDENCE, AND PATRIOTISM IN WARTIME BRITAIN, 1793–1815

2015 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
GARETH ATKINS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century

AbstractThe use by British crowds of victorious admirals to articulate patriotic and libertarian ideas during the wars of the long eighteenth century is well known. But conflict also posed awkward questions about masculinity and issues surrounding it. Was military prowess compatible with politeness, with religiosity? During the 1790s, the fight to the death with revolutionary France made such questions hard to ignore, being compounded by the fact that Britain's most celebrated leader – Nelson – was not a paragon of virtue. This article shows how evangelicals sought to resolve these tensions by advancing a different set of ideals founded on piety and professionalism: by finding heroes of their own. This has crucial consequences for our understanding of how they and the ideas they championed became so prominent in late Hanoverian public life. In contradistinction to recent work suggesting that they exploited causes that were already popular – moral reform, antislavery – this article shows how they advanced a powerful providential narrative in which Christian heroes and godly policy were what made Britain great, a narrative whose veracity was ‘proven’ by wartime successes, especially in the navy, and which would remain highly influential well into the nineteenth century.

Prenuptial pregnancy in a rural area of Devonshire in the mid-nineteenth century: Colyton 1851–1881

1986 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Robin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Rural Area ◽  
Sexual Behaviour ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Long Duration

The popularly held belief that in Victorian times a rigid code of sexual behaviour was in operation throughout the country, and that transgression of the code resulted in loss of respectability, has been under attack for some time now. One of the weapons used in the assault has been the extent of prenuptial pregnancy during the period compared with earlier centuries. In the first of his two papers on prenuptial pregnancy in England, published in 1966, P. E. H. Hair demonstrated that the phenomenon was of long duration. Roughly one-third of his sample of 1,855 brides traced to a maternity between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had been pregnant at marriage, and he considered that this was an under-estimate of the true proportion. Data from a number of reconstitution studies published in a recent work edited by Laslett, Oosterveen and Smith show that prenuptial pregnancies, measured in 50-year periods from 1550–1849, peaked in the second half of the sixteenth century at 31 per cent of all marriages traced to the birth of a child, only to decline over the next hundred years through the heyday of Puritanism and beyond to their nadir of 16 per cent by the end of the seventeenth century. From the early eighteenth century onwards, however, the proportion of such pregnancies increased, at first slowly and then gathering pace until by 1800 the previous peak at the end of the sixteenth century had been passed, the proportion of prenuptial pregnancies standing at 33 per cent. The rate continued to rise through the early years of the nineteenth century into the Victorian era, reaching 37 per cent for the 50 years ending in 1849.

scholarly journals Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 645-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Steinfeld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Primary Responsibility ◽  
History Of ◽  
Immigration Regulation

Kunal Parker's “State, Citizenship, and Territory” can be read in at least two ways. Read one way, it tells an important story about how regulation of the poor was driven upward in Massachusetts during the nineteenth century, from the localities to the state. In the seventeenth century, Massachusetts had imposed primary responsibility for care of the poor on its towns. But during the eighteenth century, with the growth of a landless, wandering population, town poor relief budgets came under increasing pressure. The towns responded by lobbying the Massachusetts legislature to pass a series of statutes that made it more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement. People who fell into need in Massachusetts but who had not acquired a town settlement became state paupers for whom the state, rather than any town, was fiscally responsible. As it became more and more difficult to acquire a town settlement, the number of state paupers increased, shifting a portion of the fiscal burden of poor relief from the towns onto the state.

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