Abstract
From the early 1830s, the Unitarian congregation at South Place Chapel eagerly embraced the new developments within the Unitarian movement. The lure of German Romanticism; the move towards secularised spirituality; the relationship with members of other denominations; and the acquaintance with socialist philosophies were all eagerly promoted by their minister, William Johnson Fox. Fox’s sympathy with the harsh doctrines of political economy, and his firm allegiance to Bentham and Priestley, illustrate his grounding in the old Unitarian school. However, he also absorbed the new philosophies of the modern Unitarianism (as his theories of imagination and promotion of German literature and philosophy demonstrate), and enjoyed close contact with its principal exponents.2 Within the exciting milieu of political radicalism and religious free thought which Fox fostered, a distinctive reforming creed began to emerge. As W. J. Linton proudly declared, Fox was the ‘virtual founder of that new school of English radicalism, which looked beyond the established traditions of the French Revolution, and more poetical, escaped the narrowness of Utilitarianism’ .3 Taking the Unitarian propensity for freedom of thought to new extremes, the progressive set which began to evolve at South Place derived strength from its sheer eclecticism. It was a loose, fluid coterie whose adherents were not formally attached to Unitarianism, but who embraced its central tenets and ethos.
Richard Hengist Home so dubbed W. J. Fox’s circle, cited in Margaret Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox and the Monthly Repository Circle of 1832 to 1836’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1979), p. 236.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Richard Hengist Home so dubbed W. J. Fox’s circle, cited in Margaret Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox and the Monthly Repository Circle of 1832 to 1836’ (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1979), p. 236.
Francis E. Mineka, Dissidence of Dissent. The Monthly Repository 1806–38 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944), pp. 267–72;
Richard Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox. Public Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786–1864 (John Lane, 1909), pp. 24, 70. Fox was well-acquainted with the ‘new Unitarians’, J. J. Tay1er and J. Martineau.
For Fox’s promotion of German thought and letters see Ruth Watts, ‘The Unitarian Contribution to Education from the Late Eighteenth Century to 1853’, (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1987), pp. 39–41.
William J. Linton, James Watson. A Memoir (New York: Augustus M. Kelley 1971, first published 1880), p. 58.
MS letter from W. J. Fox to Henry Crabb Robinson, 2 April 1832, Henry Crabb Robinson, Letters, 1832–3, fol. 19, Dr Williams’s Library; Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 47; Letter to Editor from James Alexander Emerton, ‘Metropolitan University’, MR, Vol. X, 1836, p. 168; ‘The Monthly Repository’, Crisis, Vol. II, no. 22, 8 June 1833, p. 174.
Letter from Lant Carpenter to W. J. Fox, 2–4 [sic] April 1833, Letter from Lant Carpenter to Editor, 12 February 1837, both reprinted in Christian Reformer, Vol. IV, 1837, pp. 234–6; R. Brook Aspland, Memoir of the Life, Works and Correspondence of the Rev. Robert Aspland of Hackney (Edward T. Whitfield, 1850), p. 546.
MS letter from Rev. S. Armstrong to James Martineau, 5 March 1835, Manchester College, Oxford, MS J. Martineau 3, 165; John Seed, ‘Theologies of Power: Unitarianism and the Social Relations of Religious Discourse’, in R. J. Morris (ed.), Class Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth Century Towns (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), p. 139;
S. K. Ratcliffe, The Story of South Place (Watts, 1955), p. 17.
T. Carlyle to John A. Carlyle, 28 October 1834, C. R. Saunders (ed.), The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1977), p. 327; James Martineau’s MS comments on Harriet Martineau’s letters to him, 5 May 1830; letter from Harriet to James Martineau, 2 January 1834, transcribed from J. Martineau’s shorthand by V. S. Coloe, Manchester College, Oxford, MS. J. Martineau 1. pp. 103, 145; P. A. Taylor’s comments were quoted in South Place Congregational Resolution, 26 May 1835, South Place Ethical Society, uncatalogued material.
Margaret Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox and the Monthly Repository Circle of 1832–1836’, (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1979).
For biographical details of Fox, see Graham Wallas, William Johnson Fox, 1786–1864. Conway Memorial Lecture (Watts, 1924), pp. 10–27;
E. F. Bridell-Fox, Sarah Flower Adams: A Memoir and Her Hymns (Christian Life Publishing Company, 1894), pp. 6–7; ‘William Bridges Adams’, Engineering, 26 July 1872, pp. 63–4.
E. Morris Miller, ‘Australia’s First Two Novels. Origins and Backgrounds’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 6, 1957, pp. 37–49, 54–65;
Michael Roe, ‘Mary Leman Grimstone (1800–1850?): For Women’s Rights and Tasmanian Patriotism’, Tasmanian Historical Research Association Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 36, no. 1, March 1989, pp. 9–32.
Grimstone has received brief treatment in Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain. France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum, 1985), pp. 115, 116, 129, 309;
John Killham, Tennyson and The Princess. Reflections of an Age (Athlone Press, 1958), pp. 50–1. For a few examples of contemporaries’ acknowledgement of Grimstone see MR, 1834, Vol. VIII, pp. 299–303; Tatler, no. 59, 6 October 1832, p. 489; Reasoner, Vol. III, no. 63, 1847, p. 434; Leeds Times, 9 November 1839, p. 6; Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1835, p. 707.
Ann Blainey, The Farthing Poet. A Biography of Richard Hengist Home 1802–84. A Lesser Literary Lion (Longman, 1968), pp. 2–6, 62–3;
Lady Lindsay, ‘Some Recollections of Miss Margaret Gillies’, Temple Bar, Vol. 81, 1887, p. 265.
Hollingshead, My Life Time (Marston, 1895), Vol. I, p. 45; E. F. Bridell-Fox, ‘Robert Browning’, Argosy, 1890, pp. 108–4. The Mill-Taylor connection is well documented. See, for example, Alice S. Rossi (ed.), Essays on Sex Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 19–21. Charles Dickens went to make many close contacts with these circles. As we shall see, he relied upon them when he established the Daily News and was also vice-president of their Whittington Club. He was particularly well-acquainted with Douglas Jerrold — a leading radical unitarian; for his relationship with the Howitts,
see Carl Ray Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1952), p. 151.
Hollingshead, My Lifetime, p. 45; R. D. Altick, The Cowden Clarkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 19.
Mary Cowden Clarke, My Long Life (T. Fisher Unwin, 1896), pp. 24–5.
Brenda Colloms, ‘“Tottie” Fox, Her Life and Background’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. V, 1991, pp. 16–26; Blainey, Farthing Poet, pp. 66–9; MS reports for South Place Chapel for 1845, 1849, 1851, South Place Ethical Society (uncatalogued material).
Gillian Darley, Octavia Hill (London, 1990), pp. 21–7; ‘Prospectus’, Star in the East, Vol. I, no. 1, 17 September 1838.
G. J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), pp. 182–6; Banks, Biographical Dictionary, pp. 6–7.
MS letter from W. H. Ashurst to Wendell Phillips, 17 June 1840, MS letters from W. H. Ashurst to William Lloyd Garrison, 18 June 1840, 30 June 1840, 26 July 1840, Boston Public Library, MS.A.l.Z.v.9. The conference had a striking effect upon the views of James Stansfeld, for example. Barbara and J. L. Hammond, James Stansfeld. A Victorian Champion of Sex Equality (Longmans, Green, 1932), p. 286.
Jessie White Mario, The Birth of Modern Italy (T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), p. 93; MS letter from Elisa Bardouneau-Narcy, to Elizabeth Neall Gay, October 1841, Sydney Howard Gay Papers
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library, letter from Jane Welsh Carlyle to Jennie Welsh, 24 April 1847 in L. Huxley (ed.), Jane Welsh Carlyle: Letters to her Family. 1839–1863 (John Murray, 1924), no. 129, pp. 299–300.
Information on the Biggs brothers may be found in A. Temple Patterson, Radical Leicester 1780–1850 (Leicester: University College Leicester, 1954), passim.
Details of this group emerge in Hammond and Hammond, James Stansfeld; E. F. Richards, Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family 1844–1845 (John Lane, 1920). The correspondence of Eliza Ashurst is also most useful — MS letters from Elisa Bardouneau-Narcy to Elizabeth Neall Gay, Sydney Howard Gay Papers, The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.
Shaen’s life has been documented in M. J. Shaen (ed.), William Shaen. A Brief Sketch (Longmans, Green, 1912). Some information on the career of John Humphreys Parry emerges in Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels. The Origins of the British Secularist Movement 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), see pp. 79–80, 85 and 146.
Robert Spears, Memorable Unitarians (British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1906), p. 392.
Richards, Mazzini’s Letters, p. 40; Mrs E. Epps (ed.), Diary of the Late John Epps, M. D., Edinburgh (Kent and Co., 1875), pp. 376–7.
See Rasor’s entries in J. O. S. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979);
Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, ‘The CAB: A Trans-Atlantic Community, Aspects of Nineteenth Century Reform’ (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1977).
Owen Stinchcombe, ‘Elizabeth Malleson (1828–1916)’, and Alan Ruston, ‘dementia Taylor (1810–1908)’, in Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, Vol. XX, no. 1, April 1991, pp. 56–61, 62–8. A good picture of the Chapman circle emerges in Chapman’s diary, Gordon S. Haight (ed.), George Eliot and John Chapman. With Chapman’s Diaries (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1969, second edition).
Harry W. Rudman, Italian Nationalism and English Letters (George Allen and Unwin, 1940); Richards, Mazzini’s Letters; Tyne and Wear Record Office, TWAS 634/ A. 13, A.8, A.166.
The Barmbys have been well covered in the Owenite literature. For a particularly clear account see the entry in J. M. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (Macmillan, 1982). Ashurst’s view of Barmby emerges in Richards, Mazzini’s Letters, pp. 63–6.
Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel. Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading 1835–80 (Bowling Green, Kentucky: University Popular Press, 1981) provides some insight into the work of these writers.
Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property, Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 84–5 has a useful sketch of Hays’s career.
See also the entries in V. Blain, P. Clements and I. Grundy (eds), Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Batsford, 1990).
The Bray and Hennell families are best approached through the George Eliot literature, for example, Gordon S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters (Oxford University Press, 1954), Vol. I, passim. See pp. 242–3 for the impact of George Dawson. Useful information on Dawson may also be found in Emily Bushrod, The History of Unitarianism in Birmingham from the Middle of the Eighteenth Century to 1893’, (MA thesis, University of Birmingham, 1954), pp. 10, 134;
F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan. William James Linton 1812–1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 108.
J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living 1790–1960. A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 118–51. The Gaskell-Gillies relationship is indicated in MS letters from Mary Gaskell to Samuel Wilderspin, December 1846 and 1 July 1846, University College, London, Wilderspin Collection, MS 917.
Margaret Howitt (ed.), Mary Howitt, An Autobiography (Isbister, 1889), Vol. II, p. 38; Woodring, Victorian Samplers, p. 115.
Mazzini to George Sand, 16 January 1847, G. Lubin (ed.), Correspondance de George Sand (Paris: Gamier Frères, 1964), Vol. VII, p. 603; Liberator, 26 March 1847.
Mrs Newton Crosland, Landmarks of a Literary Life (Sampson Low, Marston, 1893), p. 153. Although women did not escape Jerrold’s love of satire; see, for example,
Walter Jerrold, Douglas Jerrold. Dramatist and Wit (Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), Vol. II, pp. 505–6.
Such views were most clearly explicated in Jerrold’s ‘Q’ articles for Punch. See Bruce A. White, ‘Douglas Jerrold’s “Q” Papers in Punch’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 25, no. 4, Winter 1982, pp. 131–7.
MS letter from R. H. Home to Edgar Allan Poe, 16 April 1844, Boston Public Library, MS. Gris. 582; William Blanchard Jerrold, The Life and Remains of Douglas Jerrold (W. Kent and Co., 1859), p. 229; Letter to Garrison from Edward Search, Liberator, 11 June 1847.
MS letter from Mary Howitt to Eliza Meteyard, 5 August 1847, Houghton Library, Harvard University, IMS Eng 883.1. Quoted by permission of Houghton Library, Harvard University; Harrison, Learning and Living, pp. 32–3, 140–151; Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse. A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class Literature (Croom Helm, 1974), pp. 117, 161.
J. S. Mill to Thomas Carlyle, 17 September 1832, F. E. Mineka, The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), pp. 117–18;
Mary A. De Morgan (ed.), Three Score Years and Ten. Reminiscences of the Late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan (Richard Bentley and Son, 1895), pp. 90–1.
For the relationship between secularism and feminism, see J. A. Banks, Victorian Values. Secularism and the Size of Families (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Holyoake’s contact with Unitarianism emerges in Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, pp. 35, 47–8, 76–7; ‘Letter to the Rev. Joseph Barker now a Preacher among the Unitarians’, Reasoner, Vol. III, no. 58, 1847, pp. 359–60. For radical unitarian views of Holyoake’s philosophy, see Panthea, ‘Criticisms of the Reasoner’, Reasoner, Vol. V, no. 130, 1848, pp. 408–10; MS letter from Charles Bray to G. J. Holyoake, 28 May 1848, Co-operative Union, Manchester, G. J. Holyoake Collection, no. 277 and MS letter from W. H. Ashurst to G. J. Holyoake, 20 December 1863, ibid., no. 1518.
Wordsworth, ‘On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway’, reprinted in Thomas Hutchinson (ed.), Wordsworth’s Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 224; Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, first published 1844–6), p. 290;
William Bridges, ‘The Railway’, People’s Journal, Vol. III, no. 60, 20 February 1847, p. 53. ‘Modern Painters’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Vol. IV, July-December 1846, p. 11.
John Saunders, ‘Some Points for a New People’s Charter’, Illuminated Magazine, Vol. IV, 1846, pp. 17–23. ‘Rustic Townsmen’, Household Words, 1859;
H. J. Dyos, ‘Railways and Housing in Victorian London’, in D. Cannadine and D. Reeder (eds), Exploring the Urban Past. Essays on Urban History by H. J. Dyos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 101–18.
W. J. Linton, ‘Fair Field Festival’, People’s Journal, Vol. III, no. 76, 12 June 1847, pp. 333–4; Reasoner, Vol. II, 1847, no. 52, p. 53; ‘Junius Redivivus on the Working Classes’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. I, April 1834, pp. 179–83.
Mrs Leman Gillies, ‘Rational Revolution’, People’s Journal, Vol. V, 1848, p. 199.
Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 118–82; John Bowring, Autobiographical Recollections of Sir John Bowring, With a Brief Memoir by Lewin B. Bowring (Henry S. King, 1877), pp. 384–5.
Westminster Review, Vol. I, January 1824, cited in G. L. Nesbitt, Benthamite Reviewing. The First Twelve Years of the Westminster Review 1824–1836 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1934), p. 42. ‘Lectures on the Morality of the Various Classes, By the Rev. W. J. Fox’, NMW, Vol. II, no. 61, 26 December 1835, p. 72.
See, for example, Mary Gillies, ‘Associated Homes for the Middle Classes’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 20, 15 May 1847, p. 271;
W. Howitt, ‘Observations on the Proposed Whittington Club’, People’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 43, 17 October 1846, p. 238.
For example, Andrew Winter, ‘A Visit to the Model Lodging House, St. Giles’, People’s Journal, Vol. IV, no. 88, 4 September 1847, pp. 132–4.
Goodwyn Barmby, ‘United Service Family Associations’, Howitt’s Journals, Vol. I, no. 25, 19 June 1847, p. 344. For the Owenite position, see Harrison, Owen and the Owenites, pp. 59–60.
William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett (Trübner, 1876), p. 50.
‘Associated Homes’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. IV, no. 89, 11 January 1851, p. 172; Mary Gillies, ‘Associated Homes for the Middle Classes’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 20, 15 May 1847, p. 270.
Lewis A. Coser, Men of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1965), see p. 47 especially;
T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (Croom Helm, 1982), passim, also considers the rise of the middle-class reading audience, and to a lesser extent, the labour aristocracy.
G. Anderson, Victorian Clerks (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976);
Geoffrey Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society. Kentish London 1840–1880 (Croom Helm, 1978);
Robert Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).
Mary Leman Gillies, ‘The Commonwealth of Industry’, People’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 15, 11 April 1846, p. 200.
‘Junius Redivivus on the Working Classes’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 1, April 1834, p. 180. See also Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox’, pp. 94ff. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Middle-Class Schools for Girls’, English Woman’s Journal, November 1860, reprinted in C. A. Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Circle (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 77.
Judy Lown, Women and Industrialisation. Gender at Work in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 159–66.
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (Chapman and Hall, 1898, first published 1841), pp. 155–6; Bridell-Fox, Sarah Flower Adams, p. 10.
Mary Leman Grimstone, Cleone. A Tale of Married Life (Effingham Wilson, 1834), Vol. II, p. 276;
John Stores Smith, Social Aspects (John Chapman, 1850), p. 102.
F. L., ‘Wrongs of Englishwomen’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 75, 9 October 1850, p. 354. Correspondents to the New Moral World often discussed these themes. E.g. John Finch, ‘Ralahine Letter XII’, NMW, Vol. IV, no. 194, 14 July 1837, pp. 298–9.
MLG, ‘Sketches of Domestic Life — The Insipid’, MR, Vol. IX, 1835, p. 644; Mary Leman Gillies, ‘The Vanity of Wealth. A True Story’, People’s Journal, Vol. III, no. 62, p. 138.
A point mentioned in A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen. Genteel Poverty and Female Education 1830–1914 (Croom Helm, 1979), p. 22].
GEJ, ‘How Agnes Worral was Taught to be Respectable’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Vol. V, 1847, pp. 249, 24; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986, first published 1849–50), p. 669.
For a useful treatment of the translations and Sand’s relationship with the Ashurst family, see Patricia Thompson, George Sand and the Victorians. Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth Century England (Macmillan, 1977).
W. J. Linton, ‘Noble Women’, Reasoner, Vol. IV, no. 88. 1848, p. 136; Republican, Vol. I, 1848, p. 59.
See for example, Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 247–54; Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (Hutchinson, 1987), p. 62.
P. Hollis, ‘Anti-Slavery and British Working Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform’, in C. Bolt and S. Drescher (eds), Anti-slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Kent: Dawson and Sons, 1980), pp. 294–315;
B. Radeland, Abolitionists and Working Class Problems in the Age of Industrialisation (Macmillan, 1984);
S. Drescher, ‘Cart Whip and Billy Roller: Or, Anti-Slavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrialising Britain’, Journal of Social History, Vol. 15, no. 1, 1981, p. 9.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1966, first published 1767), pp. 83, 185; Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism, pp. 24–5.
Alan Ruston, ‘Radical Nonconformity in Hackney. 1803–45’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, Vol. XIV, no. 1, 1967, pp. 1–9; Le Breton (ed.), Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin, passim.
‘On the Requisite Adjuncts, Social and Political of National Education’, in W. J. Fox, Reports of Lectures Delivered at the Chapel in South Place, Finsbury (Charles Fox, 1860), lecture 4, see p. 58.
Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres. The Opposition to Woman’s Suffrage in Britain (Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 73–5;
M. L. Shanley, ‘Marital Slavery and Friendship. J. S. Mill’s Subjection of Women’, Political Theory, 9 May 1981, pp. 229–47.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1995 Kathryn Gleadle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gleadle, K. (1995). ‘The Assemblage of the Just’ — the Radical Unitarians. In: The Early Feminists. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26582-4_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26582-4_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-73502-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-26582-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)