‘Things not Words’: the Dissenting Academies and Paradigm Shifts in the Ordering, Definition, and Production of Knowledge, 1662–1783
p. 157-183
Texte intégral
1‘Things not Words’ is a formula often used to encapsulate Francis Bacon’s experimental philosophy, which was meant to have revolutionised knowledge from the early seventeenth century. The expression, which never actually appears in Bacon’s own writings, is a reappropriation of the old Latin expression res non verba in the sense not of ‘actions speak louder than words’ but with an epistemological resonance. This epistemological emphasis on things over words took on an additional pedagogical dimension in the pansophical writings on education of Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670), as well as those of his de facto emissary in England Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), or in turns of phrase to be found in any number of seventeeth-century works including Milton’s 1644 tractate Of Education. In Comenius’s works it appears notably in the very title of his Orbis Sensualium Pictus of 1658, aimed at children and whose English title, Visible World in Pictures, makes clear the central role of the sensorially observable in the definition and acquisition of knowledge, in stark contrast to Platonic Idealist tradition. Irene Parker (without providing a precise reference) tells of Hartlib begging Comenius for a sketch of a future ‘Janua Rerum’, or ‘Door to Things’, in the late 1630s or early 1640s.1 Letters written during the period of the English Civil War refer by name to the project, whether from the German Ramist philosopher Johann Bisterfeld (1605–1655) to Hartlib in 1647,2 or found in Hartlib’s papers, from Comenius to the Silesian educator and linguist Cyprian Kinner (?-1649) in 1644.3
2Comenius never actually completed and published a Janua Rerum in his lifetime, but all the signs suggest a great intellectual ebullition around this current of thought. Comenius even seems to have come to England on the eve of the Civil War in 1641 on the invitation of Parliament, for discussions around the idea of opening a Pansophical College in London (as opposed to Oxford or Cambridge) based on thing-centred learning.4 The tumultuous period of the War, the Commonwealth and subsequent Restoration put paid to the project – or, arguably, set it back nearly two centuries until the founding of the London University (future University College London) in 1826, if the founding of the Royal Society by Charles II in the year of the Restoration is discounted.
3According to at least one well-established – and rather Whiggish – narrative, as a result of the Restoration backlash, ‘thing-based’ models of the structuring, production, and transmission of knowledge did not conspicuously make their way into mainstream education in England which tended to remain resolutely ‘word-based’ for the two hundred years after Bacon’s lifetime, leaving only the marginal Dissenting Academies to develop the Baconian-Comenian ethos. Irene Parker’s Dissenting Academies in England asserted that the only universities in England – Oxford and Cambridge – and the aptly-named Grammar Schools for younger students, retained a dogged focus on ‘word-based’ education, cleaving obdurately to the Platonic heritage in which true knowledge is apprehended ‘only by reason and thought, but not by sight.’5
4Parker was unambiguous in her appraisal of the Academies’ role: they were ‘the greatest schools of their day’ while ‘the grammar schools slept and…the universities were sterile’,6 (‘the universities’ meaning in England the Anglican-Oxbridgian duopoly). The business of the present chapter is not to revisit the work of historians who have fairly extensively proven that Comenian-Baconian thought actually did remain widespread and was not the monopoly of non-conformist institutions. Research has just as extensively shown that eighteenth-century inventors and entrepreneurs did not all frequent such establishments.7 Indeed for Nicholas Hans, ‘Anglican, Dissenting and secular bodies and institutions played an equally important role’ in the movement towards a more scientific curriculum.8 For confirmation of this, one need only look as far as the motto chosen for the Royal Society soon after its founding in 1660: nullius in verba (‘take no man’s word for it’), emphases the virtues of empirical evidence and the new learning, arguably in contrast to the ideological hot air, verbal strife, and accompanying bloody internecine conflict from which the Society’s members hoped English society was emerging. Notwithstanding these provisos, however, it seems safe to take for granted that the Dissenting Academies stood out in their own period and, correspondingly, continue to merit a place of choice within current academic debate on the history of knowledge-organising institutions.
5The Academies punched above their numerical weight in much the same way as the Dissenters did as a whole. For the period 1715–1718 in England and Wales, Michael Watts found population percentages only for certain Dissenters (Presbyterians, Independents and Particular Baptists), only in certain regions only, scraping past 5% as a maximum. General Baptists and Quakers did not even reach 5%, except for the Quakers in the city of Bristol.9 And yet we find Henry Sacheverell in Saint Paul’s Cathedral in 1709, in his infamous, incendiary, and very lengthy anti-Dissenter sermon, ‘The Perils of False Brethren’, hyperventilating about ‘Obstinate, Moody, Wayward, and Selfconceited Hypocrites, and Enthusiasts’ and ‘Miscreants, Begot in Rebellion, Born in Seduction and Nurs’d up in Faction’; as for the Academies, they were ‘Seminaries wherein Atheism, Deism, Tritheism, Socinianism, with all the Hellish Principals of Fanaticism, Regicide, and Anarchy, are openly Profess’d and Taught, to Corrupt and Debauch the Youth of the Nation’.10 And it is this kind of strength of feeling which was reactivated towards the end of the century – this time in the context of fear of French Revolutionary influence – when Joseph Priestley’s laboratory (and home) was burnt down in Birmingham in 1791. Whether as paragons or bogeymen, Dissenters and their academies wielded clout above and beyond their numerical presence, which is why it is safe to conclude with Isaac Kramnick that ‘the institution critical for science, for the increasing amelioration of human life, and for ushering in the millennium was the dissenting academy, certainly not Oxford or Cambridge.’11
6One crucial factor to bear in mind is that the Academies were part of a bitter power struggle between an existing and an upcoming elite, and that they were closely intertwined with the latter. Once this struggle was resolved they essentially disappeared, or metamorphosed in upwardly-mobile fashion, as did for example Joseph Priestley’s Warrington Academy, which in 1893 finally transmuted into the theologically-anchored Harris Manchester College at Oxford University, a striking symbol of the merging with the English elites. There is no doubt that the Dissenting Academies, a good illustration of the Weberian thesis of the complementarity between Protestantism and capitalism, were very strongly linked to the emergence of a proto-bourgeoisie whose economic interests were tied to trade, finance, colonial expansion (and its concomitant insurance sector), and the embryonic stages of the industrial revolution (surface coal/heat-based industry such as pottery, water-powered textile production and the like). It is not only the fact that these institutions were less homogenous than one might think (as the young Joseph Priestley’s refusal in 1752 to attend the Calvinist academy at Mile End illustrates) that complicates our understanding of the Dissenting Academies,12 or that other more apparently conventional institutions could find overlap with Dissenting curricular preoccupations (for example hybrid Grammar-Commercial Academies in urbanising, industrialising cities like Manchester).13 There is also the backdrop of the oft-discussed question of the absence of violent bourgeois revolution in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Britain. To simplify, the violence of the seventeenth century having done much of the dirty work, so to speak, and despite a large degree of squabbling, the up-and-coming bourgeois class and the traditional aristocracy essentially closed ranks: to reference Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice of 1813, the Mr Darcys and Mr Gardiners learnt to go fishing together. It can be expected that this coming to terms between the elites, however fractious it might have been, should be just as messily reflected in the educational landscape of the eighteenth century and the epistemological orientations which underlay the whole.
7I am drawing a direct line in terms of cultural and institutional history here between the birth of the Academies in a context of brutal, often lethal persecution in the late seventeenth century, on the one hand, and on the other, the foundation of the University of London in the 1820s as part of a wave of confident bourgeois conquest embracing the 1832 Reform Act and – even more importantly – the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws and its concomitant rending of the Tory Party. Can a Weberian line of descent in fact be drawn connecting the highly representative and frequently represented strain of nineteenth-century capitalist dissenter (for example Josiah Bounderby in Dickens’ Hard Times or Nicholas Bulstrode of George Eliot’s Middlemarch) back to a ‘proto-bourgeoisie’ of the late seventeenth and of the eighteenth century? Michael Watts put up a certain resistance to the Weberian thesis of complementarity between the growth of capitalism and a Dissenter mindset, but concedes that Dissenters in the 1690–1730 period tended to be present in large numbers in towns where clothing was produced; that religious radicalism probably had connections with the clothing trade as far back in England as fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Lollardy; that ‘a much higher proportion of Dissenters than the population at large were engaged in commerce or manufactures as merchants, tradesmen, or self-employed artisans’; and that Quakers were indisputably highly upwardly mobile over the period.14
8Whilst the question is complexified by what has been called ‘gentleman capitalism’, the economic and enduringly predominant political role of the aristocratic and Anglican Whigs, and the tendency of many other participants in the new economic landscape to remain nominally and safely Anglican, Dissent was indissociable from a very real transformation, to use the classical Marxist formulation, of the means of production. The nominal political dominance of the Whig aristocrats, rather than domination directly by the proto-bourgeoisie itself, should not mask this up-and-coming economic power, later transformed into the direct political power wielded almost hegemonically by the Liberal coalition of the nineteenth century. In other words, the instincts of Henry Sacheverell, for all the luridness of his 1709 sermon, were in fact perfectly correct: the winds of change were blowing in precisely the direction he thought they were.
9The key values the Academies nurtured and diffused reflect the complexity of the wider relationship between Dissent and ‘progress’. The emphasis on freedom of debate in many of them, for example, is of a piece with multiple features of Dissenting belief. Antinominanism, or the idea that salvation by faith alone means that actual adherence to the Ten Commandments or the laws enacted by temporal governments is of relative unimportance, was widespread among Dissenters including Calvinists, the only exceptions being Methodists. This general openness to new ideas (if not outright general propensity to rebelliousness) combined in the case of Quakers and Congregationalists with remarkably horizontal authority structures in their internal organisation. Presbyterians were more inclined towards strong internal hierarchy, but this was based on a meritocratic belief in the education of its presbyter elders, and Presbyterian rationalism was highly conducive to the rediscovery of Arianism and Socinianism in what would come to be called non-trinitarian or Unitarian. This initially transversal current in Dissenting Protestantism grew in prominence especially after the 1719 Committee of the Three Denominations (Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Baptists) at Salters’ Hall in London refused to incorporate into ‘articles of advice’ any definitive position on the Trinity.15 Denial of the Trinity meant denial of the divinity of Christ, and a belief that Christ was merely human was compatible with a deist view of God as a watch-maker to whom all creation was owed but who no longer intervened in it, a version of Christian belief which was the most secularised and open to the new science of the Enlightenment. So what Presbyterians lacked in confidence in horizontal authority structures, they made up for in receptiveness to new scientific ideas, and it is unsurprising to find widespread encouragement of debate in almost all Dissenting Academies.
10With respect to the slippery concept of ‘progress’, such emphasis on the exchange of ideas can take on different resonances. It is of course ‘pro-democratic’ and politically charged in its potential for subversion, and among Dissenters of more modest incomes, in particular the self-employed artisans, the potential for a future culture of proletarian organisation is clear.16 On the other hand, in the destiny of the ever-wealthier, ever more powerful Dissenters, the centrality of debate could however also become ‘democratic’ in the sense of an oligarchical challenge of new interests to older interests, an ideology of aggregate witnessing of the indisputable, empirically and materially ‘real’ in the service of consolidating power.
11This brings the discussion back to the question of ‘things not words’, and the fate of such seventeenth-century educational aspirations once the vagaries of political conflict had not only removed obstacles to their pursuit but created near-perfect laboratories (figuratively and literally) for their undiluted application. ‘Thing-heaviness’ in Dissenting Academy curricula takes on a particular resonance against the backdrop of the contexts discussed above. It could be described as materialistic in the multi-faceted way that the universe of Robinson Crusoe (1719) is, as created by one of the Academies’ most famous alumni and published in the same year that the Salters’ Hall Dissenters declined to condemn non-trinitarianism. Crusoe is materialistic in his approach to knowledge: an observant, empirical, dogged, and resourceful adept of the experimental method in both his entrepreneurial ventures and his efforts to survive on his island. He is also materialistic in other modern senses of the term not only in his incessant inventorying, cataloguing, and harvesting of colonial experience data, but as a one-man experiment in dissecting the capitalist economic experience, whether in the moments when Robinson Crusoe reads almost like a handbook on how best to hedge bets, or when it seems to anticipate du Monceau or Adam Smith in its implicit dissection of the concept of division of labour. And there is a materialism of imperial conquest, encapsulated of course by Crusoe’s relationship with Friday, a fictional dabbling in slave-owning which echoes the involvement in the slave trade of fellow Dissenters of Defoe.17 That these different materialisms co-exist in the novel with Crusoe’s unrelenting, ever-inconclusive spiritual torments circling his individual relationship with God not only reinforces the singularity of this indisputably powerful early novel, but also offers a taste of the thing-centred universe, and its aporias, encompassed by Dissenting Academy curricula.
12In the following pages I will explore two major facets of the question of the role of the Dissenting Academies in the refashioning of knowledge and its divisions over the long eighteenth century, with a broad methodological adhesion to Foucauldian-inspired discursive approaches, with the assumption that whether an ideological dichotomy is framed as ‘things not words’ or otherwise it is still words: part of a language-game and an eternal competition for power. The fairly clear dichotomy of an earlier period underwent strains throughout the eighteenth century, which in turn shaped the emergent tension between Utilitarianism and its adversaries in the nineteenth century. I am not claiming that the ‘things not words’ formula was an explicit slogan for educational reformers in the early eighteenth century, but ‘materialistic’, thing-based approaches undoubtedly emerged in the pedagogical practices at this time in sharp contrast to the abstract classical heritage implied in the very appellation ‘Grammar School’.
13The epistemological dimension of the period’s essential dichotomy in approaches to knowledge needs to be retraced, on its own terms and as it could appear in curricular form; and the question of what socioeconomic interests were pitted against each other via the intermediary of this discursive conflict – what uses this discursive conflict could be put to – must be raised. In terms of ideas this can be variously framed as classical education pitted against a new ‘realist’ form of education, inspired by empiricist thought and practices, or to use the terminology deployed by contemporaries to describe the parallel struggle in literature, the dichotomy is that of the Ancient against the Modern, as reflected in Jonathan Swift’s 1704 Battle of the Books, originally entitled An Account of the Battle between the Ancient and Modern Books in St James’s Library.
14There is surprisingly little extant primary source material upon which to base an analysis of Dissenting Academy curricular content; but in any case, the scope of this chapter precludes any attempt at exhaustiveness. Glimpses into the universe in question will, therefore, be gleaned from two early post-Glorious Revolution timetables – one from a Dissenting Academy and one from a Grammar School and from the only document from the main period of the Academies which attempted to explicitly theorise an institutional nonconformist educational approach, published by the renowned Unitarian polymath Joseph Priestley (1733–1804). It is of course important, even in this rapid overview of evidence, to take the eighty-year chronological difference into account.
15Priestley’s Essay on Liberal Education (1765) and the Lectures of History and General Policy with which a later edition of the Essay was published (1793) are important for these considerations and others, notably concerning the ideologies of nation and of progress. But the Essay and Lectures on History are also key documents in a phase of Dissenting Academy development by which ‘things, not words’, or the pre-eminence of practical and empirically-derived knowledge, had started to reach its limits. It continues to surface in the writings of Priestley and others. By this phase, the remaining Academies were an increasingly accepted, indeed sought out, part of the offer on the educational market and their clientele was an ever-more powerful segment of society, both because the Dissenting bourgeoisie was more prosperous and because the Academies now appealed to a broader cross-section of society. What is interesting is how the heritage of the ‘things not words’ dichotomy interacts with the problem of designing a broader curricular offer, and how this translates into emergence of disciplinary fields. Part of this process, for the Dissenting Academies, involved the institutional minting of a new form of cultural capital to use Bourdieu’s expression. The Dissenting Academies of the later eighteenth century played a strong role in displacing the high value of classical polish and substituting the polish of the modern. Nonetheless, however much Priestley and his contemporaries continue to appeal to science as a source of legitimacy, it is striking that a vaguely-defined but definite place is re-forged for something like the domain of letters.
Curricula compared
16School timetables are a good, palpable piece of evidence to use as a starting point in discussing the curricular-epistemological junction with respect to the Dissenting Academies. Irene Parker provides two such usefully contrastable documents, one from St Paul’s Grammar School in 1690 and another from Frankland’s Dissenting Academy in 1695. Before turning to these, however, it is worth very rapidly recalling the context of the emergence of the Academies.
17A confusing aspect of the Dissenting Academies is that they straddled both what we now call secondary and higher education. This straddling makes sense, in fact, since the institutional emergence in question was the result of exclusion from both levels of education. Daniel Defoe, whose alma mater was Charles Morton’s Dissenting Academy at Newington Green, summed up the situation from the Nonconformist point of view in his ironically titled pamphlet More Short-Ways with the Dissenters published in 1704, addressing the Anglican establishment:
And when all is done, Gentlemen, why do we erect private Academies, and Teach our Children by themselves, even for the same Reason that we don’t Communicate with you, viz. Because you shut us Out, and Exclude us, by Imposing unreasonable Terms. Open a Door to us in your Universities, and let our Youth be fairly admitted to Study there, without Imposing Oaths and Obligations upon them, and it shall no more be said that we erect Schools in opposition to you. ’Tis confess’d, we wou’d ask you to Reform the University Morals a little, as the Trifles of Drunkenness and Leudness, if it might be; but upon a Freedom of Study without Unjust and Unfair Terms, and Oaths Impos’d, we wou’d venture their Morals, and it shou’d not be our Faults, if your Universities had not 2,000 of our Children always there.18
18The exclusion Defoe refers to, requiring a parallel system of education shadowing as it were both secondary and higher levels of education, began after the 1660 Restoration. This regime change initially resulted in swift retribution and purging, in the form of the legislation collectively known as the Clarendon Code. The 1662 Act of Uniformity resulted in the ‘Great Ejection’, from church ministry positions and from teaching appointments at Oxford and Cambridge, of more than 2,000 clergy who refused above all the obligatory use of the Book of Common Prayer, through adhesion to Free Prayer. The 1665 Five Mile Act tightened existing statutes and was crucial to the establishment of the first wave of Dissenting Academies, which were transient, almost improvised, parallel arrangements.
19Crucially, however, this was the high-water mark of generalised persecution of Nonconformists. The reign of Anne from 1702 to 1714, accompanied by a degree of popular anti-Dissent feeling embodied by Sacheverell’s 1709 sermon, marked a certain renewal of restrictions, notably with an attempt to close loopholes through the Occasional Conformity Act of 1711; nonetheless, the general tendency from the 1688–1689 revolution onwards was a relaxation of legislation targeting Dissenters and, over the long Hanoverian-Whig hegemony of the eighteenth century, a certain neglect of existing legislation anyway. The Whigs were aristocrats and, at least nominally, Anglicans, but in matters of religious freedom as in others, the Dissenters generally had their ear. The revolution of 1689 had resulted in an immediate Toleration Act which did not remove all restrictions but authorised worship and opened the door to a more serene second wave of Dissenting Academy establishment. The Whigs repealed the Occasional Conformity Act in 1719, thereby securing a useful ambiguity in which anti-Dissent legislation was neither openly undone, nor facilitated in its practical application. This ambiguity itself was ultimately cleared – in the favour of the Dissenters – by the 1779 Protestant Dissenters’ Relief Act. Finally, in the nineteenth century, the messy edges of the question were resolved first by the Unitarian Relief Act of 1813, and then by legislation in the nineteenth century de-institutionalising the grip of the Anglican Church upon Oxford and Cambridge, in particular, and English higher education in general.
20Irene Parker identified three founding phases of in the emergence of the Dissenting Academies.19 First came one of great instability, an initial flurry between 1663 to 1690 of numerous semi-improvised academies, until the events of 1688 to 1689 created more serene perspectives for the Dissenters. Then, between 1690 and 1750, came a second wave of much steadier institutions being founded, arguably corresponding to a political atmosphere of just enough ambiguity to fuel a sense of need for a place apart, but enough security to permit many of them to stabilise and thrive. These academies were essentially left in peace to go about their business, especially after 1715. Finally, Parker identified a mere three academies founded after 1750, with one, Warrington, punching above its weight in historical terms through its association with Joseph Priestley, and in all three the religious element fading to the benefit of concepts of professional business training and good general education.
21The timetables referred to at the beginning of this section need to be seen in this broad contextual sweep. They are in fact from the beginning of Parker’s second phase, post-Glorious Revolution but pre-Hanoverian, in a period when very specific territories with regard to education were being staked out. The two timetables are very revealing and worthy of comment. The first is a 1690 timetable from St Paul’s Grammar School:20
Table 1. Curriculum of St Paul’s Grammar School in 1690
| Class | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday | Friday | Saturday |
| 1-4 | Latin Grammar | Latin Grammar | Latin Grammar | Latin Grammar | Repetition of week’s work | Latin Grammar |
| ln the afternoon Ovid’s Metamorphosis read in 4th class and the Tristia in the 3rd | ||||||
| 5. Morning Afternoon | Latin grammar Psalms into Latin Verse | Greek grammar Vergil | Latin grammar Psalms to Latin Verse | Greek grammar Martial | Latin grammar Psalms to Latin Verse | Greek grammar Sallust |
| 6. Morning Afternoon | Greek grammar Moral theme | Greek grammar Greek Test | Greek grammar Moral theme | Greek grammar Martial, Vergil | Greek grammar Moral theme | Greek grammar Divine theme |
| 7. Morning Afternoon | Minor poets Moral theme | Greek grammar Horace, Apollodorus | Minor poets Theme | Greek grammar Clcero Oratione | Minor poets Theme | Greek grammar |
| 8. Morning Afternoon | Hebrew Psalter or Grammar Moral theme | Hebrew Homer, Demosthenes | Hebrew Moral theme | Hebrew Persius Juvenal | Hebrew Theme | Hebrew Divine theme |
22The second is the 1695 timetable from Frankland’s Dissenting Academy:21
Table 2. Curriculum of Frankland’s Dissenting Academy, 1695
| 7 am | Prayers Breakfast | Thursdays: Theses and public Disputations appointed by Tutor | |
| 9 (?) | Lectures: | Logic Metaphysics Somatology Pneumatology Natural Philosophy | |
| 12 (?) | Dinner Private reading or Recreation | Saturdays: (before evening prayer) Analysis, i.e. methodical and critical dissertation on some verses of psalm or chapter | |
| 6 pm | Prayers Supper Student’s Discussion in own rooms | ||
23Although arguably these examples suffer from originating in a particularly factional period (the first of Parker’s three waves), the juxtaposition of the two documents certainly illuminates with clarity the Grammar School’s curricular emphasis on the side of ‘words’, and that of the Academy more clearly on the side of ‘things’. The very explanation of the designation ‘grammar school’ becomes apparent given the colossal volume of Latin and Greek grammar in the first syllabus, especially given that ‘theme’ in ‘moral theme’ and ‘divine theme’ is used in the old scholastic sense of ‘translation’. In the second timetable, from Frankland’s Dissenting Academy, in comparison, what immediately comes over is above all that there is not grammar everywhere; but once the seventeenth-century terminology is understood, other, alternative curricular content is also of note. ‘Somatology’ is what would now be called the study of the human body – medicine – and ‘pneumatology’ the study of the mind – in modern terminology, psychology. Finally, ‘natural philosophy’ is of course what we would now call ‘science’, the study of the observable universe. This is coherent, from a practical curricular point of view, with the Dissenting Academies’ well-documented tendency to go out of their way to procure themselves the most modern and highly expensive, emblematic experimental method equipment of the period, such as the air-pump, thermometers, mathematical instruments and later, increasingly, electrical equipment.22
24The ‘modernity’ of the Frankland’s Academy curriculum, up to and including the provision for free time and private reading most afternoons, seems intuitively self-evident. There is in fact more to be unpacked in its contents than it might initially seem. But for reasons of scope, let us turn to the more blatant oddity and opacity of 1690 St Paul’s fixation upon grammar and how it related to classical educational norms. The trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) seems to have arisen, in medieval Carolingian thinking, as a prerequisite for access to the higher, Socratically-anointed quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, theory of music, astronomy), as a result of the rediscovery of Cicero’s thinking on the training of a professional governing class, in De Oratore (55 B.C.), combining with the diffuse omnipresence of logic underpinning all Socratic discussion of knowledge, and with the idea that grammar and rhetoric provide the keys to the linguistic unlocking of sensory experience. Together, the trivium and quadrivium constituted the seven liberal arts separating the free citizen from the mechanical knowledge of the slave.
25The trivium and quadrivium seem also to have been theorised as some sort of coherent and achievable pedagogical sequence, despite their finalities seemingly remaining in many curricula as a kind of virtual horizon. As early as 1639, Milton, foremost of sages for many later Dissenters, was already lambasting what also seems to have been part of the trivium’s curricular legitimacy: the idea that from a didactic standpoint a pupil needed to master the linguistic dimension of knowledge first before acceding to the higher quadrivium. For Milton this was nonsense: ‘our understanding cannot in this body found it self but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature.’23 According to Milton the ‘unballasted wits’24 of children in the existing (classical) educational system were only trained to use language in a vacuum and because of this, were not even very good at getting anywhere with language either. For Milton, in classical education, the word-cart was placed before the thing-horse, pedagogically enhancing comprehension of neither thing nor word:
[F]irst we do amiss to spend seven or eight years meerly in scraping together so much miserable Latine and Greek, as might be learnt otherwise easily and delightfully in one year…These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the Nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit.25
26What drove this curricular divergence, which with the right choice of examples (such as these two timetables) can reach the point of caricature? Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump examines very comparable epistemological divergences in the early part of the same period, albeit outside of the directly educational and curricular context, noting for example that Hobbes’s refusal of the experimental method espoused by Robert Boyle and others at the Royal Society was not purely (or indeed, at all) a question of science but rather based on a fear that knowledge derived from the senses and from aggregate witnessing is a more socially and politically unstable model of epistemology than one based on pure, immutable reason. The curricular questions we raise here can equally, and in fact in very similar ways, be approached in terms of a sociology of knowledge. The question is then, not which of the timetables is per se epistemologically more valid or pedagogically more effective, but for what it is politically or ideologically useful. Just as in science, for an aristocratic world-view, the needs of education are best served by an epistemological-curricular slant which privileges pure reason rooted in and reflecting a permanent cosmic order, rather than the educational encouragement of aggregate witnessing and assent – much more useful for a nascent bourgeois democracy or at least parliamentary oligarchy. Similarly, on the question of language, presenting the acquisition of Greek and Latin as an absolute priority had value for the late seventeenth-century traditional aristocracy – regardless of practicalities such as whether pupils or students were really succeeding in learning any – because doing so located true knowledge as beyond the remit of the national vernacular. Platonic epistemology is ideologically exploitable, in this sense, for situating knowledge, authority and power on the level of the cosmopolitan and the dynastic rather than on that of the national. Conversely, the apparent total absence of this priority in the 1695 Frankland’s academy timetable indirectly emphasizes the national vernacular, and the construction of authority and legitimacy by the ‘ordinary’ individual user of that vernacular.
27An emphasis on the national vernacular, and indirectly, the concept of a ‘people’ made up of individuals, would be a constant in the history of the Dissenting Academies. Later in 1764, in the closest we have to a theorization of Dissenting Academy didactics, Joseph Priestley’s Essay on Liberal Education would concede that a knowledge of Latin was ‘very desirable’ if ‘not absolutely necessary’, but to a large degree to help understand ‘those more difficult English words which are derived from the Latin’.26 For Priestley the linguistic priorities of previous ages could not be those of the present: previous scholars ‘would have been ashamed to have expressed themselves in bad Latin, but not in the least of being guilty of any impropriety in the use of their mother tongue, which they considered as belonging only to the vulgar’, whereas now ‘every British author is studious of writing with propriety in his native English’.27 In Priestley’s Essay and proposed curriculum, the primacy of English, with a few concessions to the ‘learned languages’, parallels the way in which his Lectures on History and General Policy conclude upon seven chapters devoted to English History after only five covering the whole of antiquity.
28It is not going too far to assert that there was a nationalistic dimension to the new construction of knowledge, not nationalistic with the virulent, bigoted connotations that are now associated with the term, but an active tendency seeking to displace the dynasty and replace it by the nation as vehicle and platform of authority and power. The Dissenting Academies emerged initially in a political context defined to a large extent by Whig and proto-bourgeois impatience with a Stuart Restoration widely perceived as being in the pocket of Louis XIV and unwilling to fight the French for dominance in the rush for colonization, with all that entailed in terms of access to markets and raw materials. These were the interests of an up-and-coming merchant class and the diversified income streams of Whig aristocrats, as distinct from the old agrarian sources from which the traditional Tory aristocracy derived their power, income and authority.
29In a way which may seem paradoxical, the trivium and quadrivium also functioned discursively – in the sense of providing what was needed – in the world of Tory and Anglican values because of their very impracticality. The rising bourgeois classes and the traditional Tory aristocracy would squabble over the notion of ‘usefulness’ in one way or another for another century and a half after the events of 1688–1689, with a frequent sense of the landed classes fighting a losing battle. In his 1790 defence of aristocratic tradition Reflections of the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke comes over as somewhat on the back foot when asserting that ‘large proprietors…are at the very worst, the ballast in the vessel of the commonwealth.’28 The question of usefulness is everywhere in the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and is at the heart of the Evangelical reformist movement in the Anglican church, in which movement aristocratic paternalism played a key role. But in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, it was still possible for aristocratic culture to positively embrace its detachment from the useful and the purely mechanical. The seven liberal arts were ‘liberal’ because they denoted the education of the free gentleman, versed in the true knowledge according to Platonic precepts and aloof from slave pseudo-knowledge mired in the vulgarity of the visible. The socio-economic groups who frequented the Dissenting Academies begged of course to differ. In targeting Oxford and Cambridge with his barb ‘’Tis confess’d, we wou’d ask you to Reform the University Morals a little, as the Trifles of Drunkenness and Leudness, if it might be’ (see above), Daniel Defoe was only one of many to see only sloth and decadence in the mores of the contemporary Anglican universities, where the landed classes saw acquisition of polish, rite of passage, and bonding in common elite culture: that it was often only a smattering of culture could even conceivably be a badge of honour.
Educational modernity according to Priestley
30It is a sign of how problematic the concept of ‘progress’ has turned out to be that, although the twenty-first-century reader may feel baffled by the 1690 timetable of St Paul’s Grammar School and reasonably comfortable with that of Frankland’s Dissenting Academy in 1695, the politics of usefulness, or at least direct usefulness, have not necessarily played out up to and including our present period in the way which might be expected. Many twenty-first-century academics and students bitterly resent modern governmental efforts and the effects of job market forces in demanding an ever-greater focus within higher education and research on the immediately applicable, on public-private partnerships, and on the economically viable. John Newman’s Idea of a University from 1873 (based on a series of lectures given in 1852) is often cited as exemplifying a conception of academia and knowledge which lifts the latter above the base needs of the economy. And yet, as Stefan Collini has noted, ‘the inviolable standing of Newman’s book…is…one of the most curious things about these debates.’29 Newman had been part of the Tractarian movement within Anglicanism at Oxford, had converted to Catholicism in 1845, and his ideas on academia were full of essentially aristocratic values and part of a pushback against, among other things, the beliefs of the Utilitarians, for their part deeply embedded in a Nonconformist intellectual lineage which had included the Dissenting Academies. All this is merely to say that some values today widely considered as enlightened as regards knowledge – as a means of individual emancipation not directly connected to economic needs – have their oldest roots in aristocratic values rather than in those of the proto-bourgeois milieu which was socio-economically related to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century nonconformist education.
31Interestingly, as the new merchant classes progressed and the Dissenting Academies reached a stage in their development when they were no longer perceived as purely marginal institutions, Joseph Priestley seems to have felt the need, albeit within a curriculum in which the trivium and quadrivium are all but forgotten, to replicate a form of aristocratic detachment from the directly applicable. The most striking word in Priestley’s famous essay on education, derived from his experience as a tutor at Warrington Dissenting Academy from 1761 to 1767, is that of ‘liberal’, not to be understood particularly in terms of ‘economic liberalism’ or belief in the free market, but as a Priestleyan, nonconformist avatar of the old classicist, itself Platonically-derived ideal of the free man.
32Priestley’s Essay on Liberal Education is widely considered to be one of the founding texts of modern education. It comes over as enlightened and progressivist because Priestley espouses ‘a proper mixture of dignity and freedom’30 in teaching style, describing a system of ‘lecturing’ which in its emphasis on students’ own reading, class discussion, and a semi-improvised, semi-unscripted teaching style from the tutor strongly resembles what could today be termed a seminar-based approach.31 In this, Priestley is of course within a Dissenting Academy tradition which can be seen as early as 1695 in the Frankland’s timetable, with entire afternoons given over to private reading and scheduled ‘students’ discussions in own rooms’ after 6pm. At the same time Priestley’s essay advocates a resolutely practical education: Latin and Greek are largely eschewed in favour of modern languages, in particular French, and Priestley proposes a curriculum including applied English grammar, civil history, civil policy, commerce, and the English constitution and laws. Arithmetic is mentioned as a pre-requisite for entry into the proposed course of study and so presumably would continue to be part of the curriculum, but it is not presented in a way which could be assimilated to the Ideal purity of the quadrivium: it is one of ‘the more useful branches of practical mathematics’.32 And yet Priestley seems conscious that this very practicality – with regard to mathematics and the rest – raises problems. Without ever explicitly defining what he means by the word ‘liberal’ in ‘liberal education’, he seems careful to offer up a model which is not simply about learning to execute a specific professional task:
It must be allowed, that the mechanical parts of any employment will be best performed by persons who have no knowledge, or idea, of any thing beyond the mere practice. When a man’s faculties are wholly employed upon one single thing, it is more probable that he will make himself compleatly master of it; and, having no farther or higher views, he will more contentedly, and more cheerfully, give his whole time to his proper object. But no man who can afford the expence of a liberal education, enters upon any business with a view to spend his whole life in the mere mechanical part of it, and in performing a task imposed upon him. A man of spirit will laudably aspire to be a master in his turn; when he must be directed by his own lights, and when he will find himself miserably bewildered, if he have acquired no more knowledge than was sufficient for him while he followed the direction of others. Besides, in the case of merchandise, if one branch fail, there is no resource but in more extensive knowledge. A man who has been used to go only in one beaten track, and who has had no idea given him of any other, for fear of his being tempted to leave it, will be wholly at a loss when it happens that that track can be no longer used; while a person who has a general idea of the whole course of the country may be able to strike out another, and perhaps a better road than the former.33
33This extract from the Essay is interesting in a number of ways. Firstly, even here there is a certain hesitation due doubtless to the target audience, comprising members of the ever more powerful and confident class of merchants and early industrialists whom Priestley frequented and indeed into which he had married: for example, his steelmaker brother-in-law, John Wilkinson, and his lifelong friends, the pottery manufacturers Thomas Bentley and Josiah Wedgewood.34 As a result even this proviso implicitly sketching the benefits of a wider, ‘liberal’, view of knowledge is in the end wrapped up in an appeal to business-like hedging of investment: if one line of trade goes under, the true entrepreneur will not be a prisoner of that narrow trade and draw on his knowledge of the state of the world as a whole and on the suppleness of mind learnt from far-ranging studies, to find another lucrative avenue of exertion. Beyond this, however, it is striking to see, in a period of history during which a profound modification of the means of production was indeed taking place, echoes of previous aristocratic discourse distinguishing elite from slave, master from underling. The Priestleyan pupil will aspire to the top of the hierarchy, to no longer perform ‘a task imposed upon him’, and to be ‘a master in his turn; when he must be directed by his own lights’. So, Priestley’s educational programme is one that offers certain specific practical goals in the fields of say commerce, or science, but which can be seen as constituting a different discursive means to the same ends as the previous aristocratic dispensation: the freedom of the scholar-citizen or at least those scholar-citizens who are in charge.
34Also striking in the Essay is the emphasis on History, which is presented in terms of the experimental method. Works of fiction, Priestley writes, are like globes and orreries (mechanical models of the solar system), for the exploration of ‘philosophy’, by which he seems to mean here the science of what cannot be empirically verified with the senses, but which must be rationally extrapolated. ‘Real history’, on the other hand, ‘resembles the experiments made by the air pump, the condensing engine, or electrical machine, which exhibit the operations of nature and the God of nature himself, whose works are the noblest subject of contemplation to the human mind and are the ground work and materials of the most extensive and useful theories.’35 For Priestley, then, History is actually part of what we would now call the ‘hard sciences’. It is part of his rational optimism to believe in a fully apprehensible, comprehensible human experience, access to which has merely been blurred by the superstitions and tyrannies of the past and present, but which the new understanding is finally breaking down, resulting in progress:
We may easily be sensible of the importance of history to the advancement of knowledge in general, was well as of political knowledge in particular, if we consider that the most exalted understanding is nothing more than a power of drawing conclusions, and forming maxims of conduct, from known facts and experiments, of which necessary materials of knowledge the mind itself is wholly barren. How then can knowledge be gained without experience? And very scanty and dear bought, would be the wisdom that was the result of the experience of one man, or of one age only. How slow then must have been the progress that mankind would have made in wisdom, and improvements of all kinds, before, by some means or other, one age could be made acquainted with the observations of their ancestors.
It was requisite, therefore, in order to the improvement of human kind, and of human conduct, and to give mankind clear and comprehensive views of their interest, together with the means of promoting it, that the experience of some ages should be collected and compared, that distant events should be brought together….36
35It is striking that Priestley attempts to range History alongside the ‘air pump, the condensing engine, or electrical machine’ and thereby assimilate it to a thing-based, empirical epistemology in contradistinction to the old classical ordering and construction of knowledge. And yet nowhere is it more obvious than here that these instruments are not beyond discourse, objective sources of knowledge, but themselves signifiers within it, totemic objects within a particular narrative principally concerned with a distinct vision of progress. Careful reading of the Essay on Liberal Education reveals that this distinct vision also has a great deal to do with that certain form of nationalism mentioned above, which Priestley presents as ‘thinking, reading, conversing, and writing about the interest of our country’ rather than a militaristic nationalism, but as nevertheless an ‘enthusiastic love for our country’.37 Priestley is quite explicit about the role of this ‘enthusiastic love’ in his curriculum in general and in the historical part in particular: ‘the course of instruction I would introduce, would bring the idea of our country more early into the minds of British youth, and habituate them to a constant and close attention to it.’38
36Given the close association, as has been seen, between the Dissenting Academies on the one hand and on the other, the ordering of knowledge in terms of a janua rerum, it is to say the least paradoxical to recall that the very foundation of nonconformist educational institutions lies upon the call to free prayer, the displacement of liturgy to the benefit of individual spiritual expression. This, after all, is absolutely, precisely and centrally what the Great Ejection following the 1662 Act of Uniformity was all about. Dissenting ministers lost their church or university positions because they refused to use the Anglican Common Prayer Book, attacked by such publications as the 1660 Common Prayer Book Unmasked as the unauthentic, insincere, recitation of empty liturgy, as opposed to the free prayer advocated by, say, Bunyan in his 1663 I Will Pray with the Spirit. Bunyan defined free prayer as ‘a sincere, sensible, affectionate pouring out of the heart or soul to God through Christ’.39 In terms of cultural history, the free prayer movement was a fundamental early vector of individualism and a precursor of literary movements such as the eighteenth-century novel of sentiment or indeed Wordsworth’s Romanticism defining in 1800 ‘all true poetry [as] the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.40 The fact that its centrality within Dissent seems in contradiction to the parallel nonconformist emphasis on the material and the empirical is directly addressed in an excellent article by Lori Branch on free prayer. The paradox is indeed that within Dissenting thought, in free prayer, ‘real religious meaning is verbal, disembodied and transcendent, yet nonetheless available to measurement and scrutiny.’41 ‘In free-prayer spirituality, the worth of the heart [is] seen as both scientific object and object of trade’,42 and the act of free prayer itself is both empirically evidentiary in terms of the subject’s access to grace and salvation, and an anxiety-ridden performance of selfhood.
37With respect to Free Prayer, Branch notes that ‘in [the] search for evidence of the soul, rationally conceived, one only ever finds language.’43 In a way which is more analogous than might initially appear, whatever the palpable scientific discoveries of the long eighteenth century, empiricism remains itself part of a language game which is about the pursuit of legitimacy and the socio-cultural act of engaging with and shaping meaning. There is a certain lucidity in Priestley’s Essay on Liberal Education in this respect, and which explains the slightly unexpected echoing of the older seven liberal arts in a work which one might expect in some ways to be entirely a manifesto for practical education. As we have seen, despite touching on a thing-based, practical-minded revision of curricula, this is almost no longer, in the late eighteenth century and in the context of the inexorable rise to power of a new elite, the exclusive objective of the Essay. ‘The subjects of modern history, policy, arts, manufactures, commerce, &c. are the general topics of all sensible conversation’, wrote Priestley. ‘The topics of sensible conversation are likewise the favourite subjects of all the capital writings of the present age, which are read with equal avidity by gentlemen, merchants, lawyers, physicians, and divines.’ Educational institutions must be reformed, he argued – and they would be, largely removing the raison d’être for the Dissenting Academies themselves – or ‘we must not be surprised to find our schools, academies, and universities deserted, as wholly unfit to qualify men to appear with advantage in the present age.’44
38Power is partly about learning to talk the right talk. At the opening of the Manchester Academy in 1786, Priestley’s fellow Unitarian Thomas Barnes (1747–1810) addressed precisely this theme of the new cultural ‘polish’ of the up-and-coming bourgeois elites. The ‘higher characters of civil society [such as] the Magistrate…, the Statesman,…the Gentleman of independent fortune…have their minds cultivated by Liberal Science, that they shall be men of enlarged understandings, of good acquaintance with Languages, with History, with Arts’, said Barnes. Why, he argued, should the newly empowered socio-economic elites not have access to the same trappings of authority and legitimacy?
And the man of trade? – why shall he be doomed to ignorance and insipidity? Why are books to be his aversion, and knowledge his poison? Will a taste for letters, beyond what may merely qualify him for the round of mercantile drudgery, disqualify him for business, for success and pleasure in it? A severer, a more unjust libel upon commerce could not possibly be uttered. You, Gentlemen, know it to be false. You, who are many of you alone competent to determine this question, have declared in favour of mental cultivation. You know, from your own experience, that to a certain point, a point far beyond the common standard, this cultivation will not interfere with any end or object of commercial industry; that, on the contrary, it will highly improve and finish the mercantile character. You with this improvement for your children, in full assurance, that it will assist their judgment and exalt their views; that it will be a preservative from the low and debasing pleasures, to which, for want of it, they will be exposed; that will add weight and interest to their characters and counsels.45
Conclusion
39A few concluding remarks can be made after this brief examination of the journey of the ‘things not words’ attitude in the curricular considerations of eighteenth-century Dissenting Academies. One is that the opposition never disappears completely and, indeed, as has been noted, arguably reappears in the nineteenth century, that of utilitarianism pitted against, say, the Oxford Movement and Newman. But it is not completely recognisable either, by the end of the century, compared to the initial neat dichotomy of Ramist-Baconian epistemological and educational ideas on the one hand, and Platonic-Classical curricula on the other. A second observation is that in education as elsewhere, the discourse of the experimental method is not neutral, despite the cloak of scientific objectivity. The curriculum of the ‘thing’ has its own agenda, a nationalistic one, for example, and the ‘progress’ constantly touted is not an unproblematic concept. It seems curmudgeonly to pick out the ‘darker’ elements of bourgeois ideology hidden away in the thinking of a father of modern education such as Joseph Priestley, given for example what a precursor his Academy and others were – especially those of Unitarian inclination – in terms of encouraging open debate and the emancipation of the young individual. But this is simply part of the ambiguities of liberalism or liberal humanism, as it emerged in the eighteenth century and on-going into the nineteenth and up to our own period, both emancipatory and entwined in the problems of the capitalist economy.
40Thirdly and finally, although Priestley continues to couch the curricular importance of History, for example, in terms that are of Ramist-Baconian extraction to the point of borrowing the imagery of the scientific laboratory, the very recognisable spread of disciplines that emerges from his educational thinking, familiar to the modern reader, does not draw exclusively on what we would now call hard science or on practicality. This is perhaps partly because purely materialistic thinking simply runs into a dead end: the how cannot explain the why that is intellectually necessary for the new generation of leaders that Priestley proposes to train. Or (and the two explanations are not mutually incompatible), it is a question of creating new, high-value cultural currency, of ‘improving and finishing the mercantile character’, as Barnes put it; of adding ‘weight and interest to the characters and counsels’ of the future elite. And this is a matter for words, not things. Verba, non res.
Notes de bas de page
1 Irene Parker, Dissenting Academies in England: their Rise and Progress and their Place among the Educational Systems of the Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 28.
2 ‘Meo igitur judicio sic esset adornanda janua rerum ut omnium disciplinarum termini rigidissimâ methodo dispositi pueris proponantur, ijsque infinita eos inter se jungendi monstretur via, ut proprio Marte promant axiomata.’ My underlining. Letter from Johann Bisterfeld to Samuel Hartlib, 24 July 1647. Available on the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust website, The Hartlib Papers, at https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?docname=7E_107&docset=main. My thanks to L. Benéteau for help with Hartlibian Latin.
3 Letter from Comenius to Bisterfeld, 18 November 1644, available at The Hartlib Papers, at https://www.dhi.ac.uk/hartlib/view?docset=additional&docname=1C_33_079T.
4 Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, 29.
5 Republic, book 7 section 529d, trans. Paul Shorey (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).
6 Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, 45.
7 Rosemary O’Day, Education and Society 1500–1800: the Social Foundations of Education in Early Modern Britain (London: Longman, 1982), 212, 267; Nicholas Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–62.
8 Hans, New Trends in Education, 54.
9 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 267–289.
10 Henry Sacheverell, The Perils of False Brethren, both in Church, and State: Set Forth in a Sermon Preach’d Before the Right Honourable the Lord-Mayor, Alderman, and Citizens of London, at the Cathedral-Church of St. Paul, On the Fifth of November, 1709 (London: H. Hills, 1710), 17, 19, 15.
11 Isaac Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: the Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,’ Journal of British Studies 25, no 1 (January 1986): 13.
12 Gregory Claeys, ‘Virtuous Commerce and Free Theology: Political Economy and the Dissenting Academies 1750-1800,’ History of Political Thought 20, no 1 (spring 1999): 144; J.W. Ashley-Smith, The Birth of Modern Education: the Contribution of the Dissenting Academies, 1660–1800 (London: Independent Press: 1954), 194; John Towill Rutt, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, LL.D, F.R.S, &c., 2 vol. (London: R. Hunter, 1831–1832), vol. I, 21.
13 Hans, New Trends in Education, 39–40, 98.
14 Watts, The Dissenters: from the Reformation to the French Revolution, 354, 360, 364.
15 Watts, The Dissenters: from the Reformation to the French Revolution, 374–376.
16 See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 28–58.
17 See Kenneth Morgan, ‘Bristol West India Merchants in the Eighteenth Century,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, vol. III (1993), 195.
18 Daniel Defoe, More Short Ways with Dissenters (Gale Ecco Print Editions, 2010), 7–8.
19 Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, 137–143.
20 Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, 8.
21 Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, 68.
22 Parker, Dissenting Academies in England, 59; Herbert McLachlan, English Education Under the Test Acts: Being the History of the Nonconformist Academies, 1662–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), 62, 100–101.
23 John Milton, Of Education, in Milton’s Tractate on Education: a Reprint from the Edition of 1673, ed. Oscar Browning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 4. Commonly known as his ‘Tractate on Education’, this treatise had been completed by 1639 but was not published until 1673.
24 Milton, Of Education, 6.
25 Milton, Of Education, 4–5.
26 Joseph Priestley, ‘An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life’ [1764], in Lectures on History and General Policy, vol. I. [1793] (London: Forgotten Books, 2015), 19.
27 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 23.
28 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1993), 52.
29 Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For? (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2012), 40–41.
30 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 32.
31 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 29–33.
32 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 19.
33 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 20–21.
34 Kramnick, ‘Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: the Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,’ 10–11.
35 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 46.
36 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 51–52, his italics.
37 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 35.
38 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 34–35.
39 John Bunyan, I will Pray with the Spirit, and I will Pray with the Understanding also: Or, a Discourse Touching Prayer, From I Cor. 14.15, 2nd ed. (London, 1663), 4–5.
40 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads [1800] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 157.
41 Lori Branch, ‘The Rejection of Liturgy, the Rise of Free Prayer, and Modern Religious Subjectivity,’ Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660–1700 29, no 1 (Spring 2005): 12.
42 Branch, ‘The Rejection of Liturgy, the Rise of Free Prayer, and Modern Religious Subjectivity:’ 15.
43 Branch, ‘The Rejection of Liturgy, the Rise of Free Prayer, and Modern Religious Subjectivity:’ 19.
44 Priestley, ‘Essay on a Course of Liberal Education,’ 24.
45 Thomas Barnes, A Discourse Delivered at the Commencement of the Manchester Academy (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1786), 23–24.
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