Abstract
The date: 13 December 1785. The place: North’s Coffee House on King Street, Cheapside. Thirty-seven prominent nonconformists convene to address the concerns raised by the recent closure of the academies at Warrington and Hoxton. Among the delegates are distinguished Dissenting ministers and tutors such as Richard Price, Andrew Kippis, Joseph Towers, and Hugh Worthington; wealthy bankers and merchants such as Thomas Rogers (father of the poet Samuel Rogers) and John and Matthew Towgood; eminent lawyers such as Samuel Heywood and Michael Dodson; as well as an array of prominent reformers and radicals, including William and John Hurford Stone, and Benjamin and William Vaughan. In the subsequent months further meetings are held and they are joined by other prominent men, including Thomas Brand Hollis, J.T. Rutt, Capel Lloft, John Disney, Samuel Rogers, and Joseph Johnson.1 In total nine Members of Parliament are part of the group that found New College, Hackney.2 A further four meetings are held before it is unanimously resolved on 13 January 1786 to establish a new metropolitan Dissenting academy for the education of lay and ministerial students. Progress is swift and within weeks lectures are held in Dr Williams’s Library in Red Cross Street, Cripplegate. The following year magnificent new premises in Hackney are purchased and renovated. On 29 September 1787 twelve young men (eight ministerial and four lay students) are admitted, an order of precedence established, and the laws of the house read aloud and approved by all. New College has been launched.
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Notes
Andrew Kippis, ed., Biographia Britannica: or, the Lives of the Most Eminent Persons Who Have Flourished in Great-Britain and Ireland, 5 vols (London, 1770–93), V, 283.
Ana Acosta, ‘Spaces of Dissent and the Public Sphere in Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Newington Green’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 27 (2003), 1–27 (10).
William Maitland, The History of London from Its Foundation to the Present Time, 2 vols (London, 1772), II, 1366. Also quoted by Acosta, ‘Spaces of Dissent’, 12.
William Robinson, The History and Antiquities of the Parish ofHackney, in the County ofMiddlesex, 2 vols (London, 1842), II, 445.
J.T. Rutt, ed., Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, 2 vols (London, 1831), I, 360–1.
H.W. McLachlan, English Education under the Test Acts (Manchester, 1931 );
J.W. Ashley Smith, The Birth ofModern Education: The Contribution of the Dissenting Academies 1660–1800 (London, 1954 );
Irene Parker, Dis-senting Academies in England (Cambridge, 1914). For more recent accounts of the academies see Wykes, ‘The Emergence of Rational Dissent’, and Isabel Rivers, The Defence of Truth through the Knowledge of Error: Philip Doddridge’s Academy Lectures (London, 2003).
John Doddridge Humphreys, ed., The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, 5 vols (London, 1829–31), IV, 493.
D.O. Thomas, The Honest Mind: The Thought and Work of Richard Price (Oxford, 1977), 99–101;
Mark Philp, ‘Rational Religion and Political Radicalism in the 1790s’, Enlightenment and Dissent, 4 (1985), 37.
Mark Philp, The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I: 1788–1797, ed. Pamela Clemit (Oxford, 2011), xxxv–xxxvii.
Joseph Priestley, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life (London, 1765), 5.
Richard Price, The Evidence for a Future Period of Improvement in the State of Mankind (London, 1787), 44.
John Williams, Memoirs of the Late Reverend Thomas Belsham (London, 1833), 447, 450.
See John McLachlan, ‘The Scott Collection: Letters of T. Lindsey and Others to Russell Scott’, TUHS, 19 (1987), 113–29 (118).
John Kenrick, A Biographical Memoir of the Late Reverend Charles Wellbeloved (London, 1860), 19–21. See Burley, ‘New College, Hackney’, Section 10.2.
Thomas Belsham, A Calm Inquiry into the Scripture Doctrine concerning the Person of Christ (London, 1811), vii.
Thomas Belsham, Elements of the Philosophy of the Mind, and of Moral Philosophy (London, 1801), iii.
Robert Southey, Essays Moral and Political, 2 vols (London, 1832), II, 78–9.
Alan P.F. Sell, Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity 1689–1920 (Cambridge, 2004 ), 52.
Gilbert Wakefield, An Enquiry into the Expediency and Propriety of Social Worship, 2nd edn (London, 1792), iii–iv.
Joseph Priestley, Letters to a Young Man Occasioned by Mr Wakefield’s Essay on Public Worship (London, 1792), iv–v.
John Pope, Observations on the Miraculous Conception… to Which Are Added Remarks on Mr Wakefield’s Opinion concerning Matt. xxvii.5 (London, 1792), 359–60.
Gilbert Wakefield, Short Strictures on the Rev. Doctor Priestley’s Letters to a Young Man, concerning Mr Wakefield’s Treatise on Public Worship (London, 1792), 3–16.
See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000), 318–402
Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 (Cambridge, 1983), i–xxiv.
William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment ( Baltimore, MD, 2008 ), 328–9.
Hannah Barker, ‘Jackson, William (1737?–1795)’, ODNB, online edn (accessed 16 July 2010 ).
Thomas Belsham, Knowledge the Foundation of Virtue: A Sermon Addressed to the Young Persons who Attend the Gravel Pit Meeting, Hackney (London, 1795), 13–15.
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© 2014 Stephen Burley
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Burley, S. (2014). ‘A slaughter-house of Christianity’: New College, Hackney (1786–96). In: Hazlitt the Dissenter. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364432_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137364432_3
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