Isaac Watts and Philip Doddridge: letters, lectures and lives in eighteenth-century dissenting culture.
Abstract
Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and Philip Doddridge (1702-1751) were among the
most frequently published religious writers of the eighteenth century and each
man’s identity as a Protestant dissenter was an important aspect of his
intellectual reputation. This thesis draws on letters, lecture notes, manuscript
accounts of academies, and a range of printed texts and paratexts to explore the
connections between dissent, education and publishing in the eighteenth
century. It emphasises the importance Watts, Doddridge and their associates
attached to personal relationships in their private interactions and in print.
The first chapter describes how Doddridge developed the educational
scheme of his own tutor, John Jennings, and it examines the use of lectures
attributed to Doddridge at other academies in order to determine how his
methods were adapted by later tutors. Chapter two provides publishing
histories of Doddridge’s three major posthumous works, The Family Expositor,
A Course of Lectures and ‘Lectures on Preaching’. It emphasises the
collaborative nature of these editing projects, and contains completely new
information on relations between booksellers and copyright holders in the
eighteenth century. Chapter three describes the content and rhetoric of Isaac
Watts’s educational writings, his editorial roles, and the process of publishing
his collected Works after his death in order to examine the creation of a place
for dissenting modes of learning in eighteenth-century culture. The final
chapter surveys published biographies of Watts and Doddridge. The difficulties
of smoothing over the more controversial elements of each man’s activities are
explored and competing claims over the memory of Watts are investigated.
The chapter examines biographical compendia and denominational magazines
to consider the uses of print by dissenters into the nineteenth century.
Authors
Whitehouse, Marie ThereseCollections
- Theses [4223]