Abstract
The 33 years from the marriage of William and Elizabeth Gaskell in 1832 to her death in 1865 coincided almost exactly with a generation-long crisis in English Unitarianism, a crisis that turned on the validity and relevance of the teachings of Joseph Priestley. In his zeal to extirpate what he saw as ‘the corruptions of Christianity’, Priestley had drawn on an extraordinary range of intellectual weaponry — from natural philosophy to biblical criticism to history — and on an imposing set of forebears — Locke and Newton, the heterodox Anglican Samuel Clarke, Philip Doddridge, Nathaniel Lardner, David Hume (as a caution against improper reasoning from Lockean postulates), and, above all, David Hartley, whose Observations on Man of 1748 gave Priestley the psychological and theological bases for the determinism that set English Unitarians apart from all other Unitarians for two or three generations. That determinism, which Priestley called ‘necessarianism’, along with affirmation of the sole divinity of God the Father, materialism and universal restoration, were the chief doctrines of matured Priestleyanism, as he bequeathed it to his followers. Priestley insisted that no one need follow him in all of them, but James Martineau saw them as so tightly linked that an attack on any one would bring the whole system crashing down.1
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Notes
James Martineau, ‘On the Life, Character, and Works of Dr. Priestley’, in the Monthly Repository for 1833,
reprinted with changes in his Essays, Reviews and Addresses (London, 1890–1) vol. I, pp. 1–42, esp. pp. 13–14.
R. K. Webb, ‘The Unitarian Background’, in Barbara Smith (ed.), ‘Truth, & Liberty, & Religion’: Essays Celebrating Two Hundred Years of Manchester College (Oxford, 1986) pp. 1–30;
and ‘Flying Missionaries: Unitarian Journalists in Victorian England’, in J. M. W. Bean (ed.), The Political Culture of Modern Britain: Essays in Memory of Stephen Koss (London, 1987) pp. 11–31.
J. H. Thorn, Religion, the Church, and the People (London, 1849) p. 28.
On the elder Gaskells, see Thomas Asline Ward to Joseph Hunter, 9 March 1812, Sheffield Public Library. William Gaskell, A Sermon on Occasion of the Death of the Rev. John Gooch Robberds (London, 1854).
Gaskell’s published works are listed in W. E. A. and Ernest Axon, Gaskell Bibliography (Manchester, 1895) pp. 16–20.
Barbara Brill, William Gaskell, 1805–1884 (Manchester, 1984).
Gaskell, The Duties of the Individual to Society: A Sermon on the Death of Sir John Potter, M.P. (Manchester, 1858).
R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London, 1960) pp. 112,144–5;
Edward Tagart, A Tribute to the Memory of William Tilery Channing (London, 1842);
and J. G. Robberds, The Voice of the Dead (London, 1842).
(J. A. V. Chappie and Arthur Pollard (eds), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (Manchester, 1966) pp. 574–5: 20 September 1859).
Enid L. Duthie, The Themes of Elizabeth Gaskell (London, 1980) pp. 150–76;
Monica Correa Fryckstedt, Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Mary Barton’ and ‘Ruth’: A Challenge to Christian England (Uppsala, 1982) pp. 54–86 and passim.
Edgar Wright, Mrs Gaskell: the Basis for Reassessment (London, 1965) pp. 23–50;
Angus Easson, Elizabeth Gaskell (London, 1979) pp. 4–17;
and Valentine Cunningham, Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, 1975) pp. 127–42.
William Gaskell, Address to the Students of Manchester New College, London, delivered… on June 23, 1869 (Manchester, 1869).
W. Arthur Boggs, ‘Reflections of Unitarianism in Mrs Gaskell’s Novels’, unpublished dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 1950) p. x, n. 2.
Mrs Ellis H. Chadwick, Mrs Gaskell, Homes and Haunts (1910) pp. 149, 151.
Harriet Martineau to Fanny Wedgwood, 11 April 1853, in Elizabeth Sanders Arbuckle (ed.), Harriet Martineau’s Letters to Fanny Wedgwood (Stanford, Cal., 1983) p. 125.
reprinted in J. T. Rutt (ed.), The Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley (London, 1831) vol. xxv, pp. 43–52.
G. H. Stanley, A Sermon, delivered at the Opening of the Unitarian Chapel … Sydney, November 6th 1853 (Sydney, 1853).
See Joseph Priestley, section v on atonement in A Familiar Illustration of Certain Passages of Scripture (1791), in Rutt, Works (London, 1817) vol. I, pp. 472–80;
Lant Carpenter, Lectures on the Scripture Doctrine of Atonement, or Reconciliation (London, 1843):
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© 1988 R. K. Webb
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Webb, R.K. (1988). The Gaskells as Unitarians. In: Shattock, J. (eds) Dickens and other Victorians. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19503-9_9
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