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.