Grief, Faith and Eighteenth-Century Childhood: The Doddridges of Northampton

Abstract

The Doddridge family of Northampton were an active, eighteenth-century, non-conformist family, led by the popular spiritual writer, Philip Doddridge. They left a remarkable correspondence between themselves and the wider congregation that provides insight into how this religious group dealt with child death. This chapter explores how the faith of this group, and their understanding of salvation for children, informed their grief responses and how they drew on each other in a process of sympathetic engagement as a form of consolation. It also highlights how the children of this sect were educated to respond to child death and the ways that conceptions of childhood and adolescence informed expectations of their grief responses and the resulting spiritual implications for child faith.