Henry Crabb Robinson and the Culture of Dissent

 “Henry Crabb Robinson and the Culture of Dissent”

Timothy Whelan

I

The Rev. Thomas Madge, one of Crabb Robinson’s favorite Unitarian preachers, was fond of saying, “Let it never be forgotten that Christianity is not thought, but action; not a system, but a life” (Sadler 2.282). It was an expression often repeated by Robinson. His pursuit of this kind of  “practical” Christianity did not begin in earnest until he had turned forty, but he exhibited an interest in matters of faith, both practical and speculative, from his adolescence onwards.  In fact, the foundations of his liberal Unitarianism were laid in the 1790s, primarily through the Dissenting culture in which he was raised and educated. Though a vocal proponent of William Godwin’s skeptical philosophy in his youth, Robinson nevertheless admits in his Reminiscences that during the last half of the 1790s he possessed “a much greater degree of internal religious sentim.t than I ever thot proper to allow,” mainly, he adds, “because it was hostile to my imagined philos.y” (qtd. in Baker 75). A close reading of his Correspondence, Diary, and Reminiscences reveals how widely his activities, reading habits, and political and religious opinions were influenced by individuals and events directly related to the vibrant Dissenting culture he encountered in Bury St. Edmunds, Colchester, Witham, Norwich, London, Cambridge, and Royston between 1789 and 1805. Whether in his comments on his mother’s “orthodoxy” preserved in the first volume of his Correspondence, in his obituary for his friend Anthony Robinson, written for the Monthly Repository for 1827, or in his translation of Lessing’s “The Testament of St. John,” which appeared in the Christian Reformer in 1846—religion for Crabb Robinson was simply “a consciousness of personal unworthiness … a desire to be united to the Church, and a reliance upon the merits of Christ,” the Christian Church “an association of men for the cultivation of knowledge, the practice of piety, and the promotion of virtue,” and the true Christian the one who practices the moral imperative of Christ, “Love one another.”[1]

Despite these statements, as well as many others scattered throughout his literary remains, most editors and commentators have had little to say about Robinson’s religious opinions or his affiliations with Dissenters. Thomas Sadler, in his Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, which first appeared in three volumes in 1869, is by far the best in this regard. As a personal friend and one of Robinson’s literary executors, Sadler sought “to preserve interesting particulars respecting distinguished men, both in England and on the Continent” (1.vii) found within the massive body of manuscripts which Robinson bequeathed to Dr. Williams’s Library.[2] Given the limited scope of his work, Sadler was forced to leave out a considerable amount of material which, he argued, “could not with propriety be published now, [but] may in time have a public interest and value” (1.viii). A prominent Unitarian minister, Sadler was far more attuned to Robinson’s religious attitudes than most editors and commentators who followed him. In his view, Robinson “was an earnest thinker on the profoundest and most difficult religious subjects” (1.xvi-xvii), his “sympathy” residing “with those who have exercised the fullest liberty of thought.” Throughout his life, Robinson exhibited a liberal, ecumenical spirit; as Sadler rightly concludes, “he was always interested and touched by genuine religious feeling, wherever he found it …” (1.xv-xvi).[3]

Nearly sixty years after Sadler’s volumes appeared, Charles Frederick Harrold, writing in the Sewanee Review, argued that  “there is little of interest to us now in those portions of the Diary devoted to … theological discussion.  We yawn and leave behind us pages of discourse on Unitarianism, the Trinity, the Atonement … We read more about the Test and Corporation Act than about Waterloo” (55-56). That final statement probably says more about Harrold than Crabb Robinson. Harrold acknowledges that Robinson exhibited truly liberal opinions in matters of religion, but those opinions were the result of his escape from what Harrold considers the “narrow dogmatism of his Dissenting parents” (59).  Consequently, Harrold declares, “as a spectator of life, [Crabb Robinson] never fully gave himself to any cause” (59), including, he seems to imply, the cause of religious dissent.

Harrold was writing at a time when scholars were attempting to elevate Crabb Robinson’s reputation by focusing on his intimacy with some of the most important literary figures of his day.  These efforts were led by Edith Morley, who devoted nearly thirty years of her life to editing selections from Robinson’s letters and other manuscripts. She argued in the Introduction to her first book, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, Etc.: Being Selections from the Remains of Henry Crabb Robinson (1922), that everything Robinson preserved did not merit publication: “People of importance in their day,” she notes, “events and discussion which once loomed large, have ceased to be interesting” (xiii). Instead, she argues, “it is as the admirer and missionary of Wordsworth among English men of letters that Crabb Robinson is best remembered …” (xiv). She does note, however, that Robinson was “profoundly interested in religious speculation,” working out for himself “a tolerant creed, as might be expected from so tolerant a man” (xix). However, with the publication in 1927 of her important two-volume work, The Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson with the Wordsworth Circle (1808-1866), she chose as her focus Robinson’s literary, and not his religious, connections. Two years later she published Crabb Robinson in Germany 1800-1805: Extracts from his Correspondence, detailing Robinson’s initial appreciation of the giants of German literature—Kant, Goethe, Wieland, Schlegel, and others—prior to his introduction to Wordsworth and his circle of literary friends.

According to Morley’s The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson (1935), when Crabb Robinson returned from Germany, he found the “old-fashioned dissenting narrowness” of his family and friends in Bury and elsewhere “somewhat of a burden.” As such, she writes, they ceased “to take quite the old place in his life.” “Their names, and many others of less importance,” Morley adds, “are omitted from this biography, because they are of no interest to a modern reader,” even though, she admits, “they recur again and again in the story of Crabb Robinson’s daily doings” (Life 99).[4]  His involvement with the “Wordsworth connection is of interest to us,” she argues, but his generous friendships and “good offices performed for nonentities” (and we must assume by this last statement that she means the majority of Robinson’s Dissenting friends) are dismissed by Morley “as trivial and unimportant” (Life 100). She links Robinson’s appreciation for Wordsworth as the turning point in his literary and intellectual development; the Jacobin novelists of his youth, such as William Godwin and Thomas Holcroft, were now replaced by their political and literary “bettors,” namely the Wordsworth circle (Life 145). As such, Robinson’s life after his introduction to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and the others that will form that circle, is privileged by Morley over his earlier years in Bury, Colchester, and London, when he moved almost exclusively in Dissenting circles.  This literary “canonization” of Crabb Robinson’s life is even more evident in Morley’s final work on Robinson, her three-volume Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (1938), in which all references to “purely theological … works which have no claim to be literary” (v) were excluded.

This literary “canonization” of Robinson continued with John Milton Baker’s Henry Crabb Robinson of Bury, Jena, The Times, and Russell Square, which appeared two years after Morley’s Life. Though filling in many gaps in Morley’s account of Robinson’s life and literary career, Baker followed Morley in emphasizing Robinson the man of letters over Robinson the Dissenter. Baker utilized extensively Robinson’s Pocket Books, especially those kept between 1790 and 1796, which cover his time as an articled clerk in Colchester with Mr. Francis, a Dissenting attorney. Though largely ignored by Morley, these Pocket Books, Baker argues, contribute significantly to our knowledge of Robinson’s literary and social development at that time. Baker, however, fails to note what these Pocket Books also tell us about Robinson’s regular church attendance and his interest in the various Dissenting ministers upon whom he attended, primarily at the local Independent and Baptist congregations in Colchester.[5]

Both Morley and Baker contend that Robinson’s life prior to his arrival in London in April 1796 (to begin work as a clerk in a solicitor’s office) was of little consequence in forming the literary character he would display in later years.  Between 1796 and 1800, Robinson “cut [himself] off from the merry emptiness of provincial life,” Baker writes (75). It was at this time that he began his true apprenticeship as a writer, meeting literary figures and contributing articles and reviews to the Monthly Magazine and the Analytical Review.  This apprenticeship continued during his years in Germany between 1800 and 1805, so that when he returned to England and began his work for the London Times as foreign correspondent and editor of foreign intelligence, he could establish himself as someone worthy of moving into “better” circles. This linking of Crabb Robinson and literature was continued by Derek Hudson in The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: An Abridgement, which appeared in 1967.  Hudson admits that we know Robinson “less for himself than for what he had to say of others,” especially the German Romantics.  “As the advocate of Goethe and Kant, and the purveyor of German transcendentalism,” Hudson argues, “Crabb Robinson has his place in European literary history” (viii). Hudson, like Morley, insisted that “on writers and their works Crabb Robinson is an irreplaceable commentator and witness—on other subjects he is interesting but dispensable” (xvii). In fact, after a brief discussion of Robinson’s family and early days in Bury, Hudson’s volume provides few glimpses thereafter of Robinson’s involvement with Dissenting culture, apparently a “dispensable” subject to Hudson. Individuals appear in his volume solely on the basis of their literary appeal; their religious identities are of no importance.

Since the 1960s, a number of scholars have continued to add to our understanding of Crabb Robinson’s importance within the Wordsworth circle of writers, artists, and critics, as well as his key role in introducing German writers and thought to the English reading public.[6] Unfortunately, this focus upon Robinson’s literary importance has inadvertently diminished his role as a figure within the Dissenting culture of his day. His most important achievements—the passage of the Dissenters’ Chapels Act in 1844, the creation of the Flaxman Gallery and the establishment of University Hall in 1849—provide powerful evidence for the primacy of Dissenting culture in his life.[7] Though he would eventually reject many  of the orthodox doctrines in which he was raised, his years in Bury, Devizes, Wattisfield, Colchester, and London, until the age of twenty-five, indelibly stamped him as a Dissenter. As his Correspondence and Pocket Books reveal, these years were marked by anything but the “merry emptiness” Baker ascribed to them (75).

Not until Clyde Binfield’s chapter on Robinson and the Pattisson family of Witham appeared in his important work, So Down to Prayers: Studies in English Nonconformity 1780-1920 (1977), was the nearly sixty-year dominance literary scholars had enjoyed finally broken.[8] Benfield places the Crabb Robinson of the 1790s firmly within a Dissenting tradition, though clearly a more liberal version than that professed by Robinson’s friend, William Pattisson (1775-1848), and the other members of Pattisson family. Almost two decades later, Benfield’s work with the Pattisson collection was further expanded by Penelope J. Corfield and Chris Evans in Youth and Revolution in the 1790s: Letters of William Pattisson, Thomas Amyot and Henry Crabb Robinson (1996). These letters reveal a group of young provincial men from Witham, Norwich, and Bury, intimately concerned with the political and religious movements of their day.

 For the remainder of this paper, I wish to follow the work of Benfield, Corfield, and Evans by examining Crabb Robinson’s Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence, the latter primarily between the years 1790 and 1805, in order to demonstrate the importance of Dissenting culture in his life, a culture that would continue to find expression in his writings thereafter. In his early Reminiscences, Robinson establishes a nexus of Dissenters, both in the provinces and London, that will play a central role in his life, including such figures as his friend from Witham, William Pattisson; E. K. Fordham and William Nash of Royston; J. T. Rutt and Anthony Robinson of London; and two well-known Baptist ministers, Robert Robinson and Robert Hall, both of whom will acquire considerable prominence in his Reminiscences, though for different reasons. Throughout Sadler’s volumes, Dissenters appear frequently, though they are not always identified as such. Very few of these individuals appear in Morley, except when they have some literary importance; when they do appear, they are rarely identified as Dissenters.[9]  The same holds true for Baker and Hudson. Despite the greater attention given Dissenters in Sadler’s volumes, the span of nearly a century and a half has done much to obscure their memory, especially those not identified as Dissenters. Many of these individuals do not feature largely in the history of the period, but even of those who do, their significance as Dissenters has been largely lost on modern day readers. The limitations of this paper will not allow me to name and discuss all these individuals, but I will focus on three in particular: one who lived in relative obscurity, one who achieved considerable recognition as a lawyer, and, finally, one who became the most famous Baptist preacher of his day.

II

Writing from Bury St. Edmunds in July 1798, Crabb Robinson relates the following news to William Pattisson: “At Royston I was seriously sorry at not seeing Mr Rutt more particularly on account of the assigned Cause—poor Mordecai is a worthy fellow And I hope to hear better News” (Corfield and Evans 156).  This same “poor Mordecai” appears later that year in another letter from Robinson to Pattisson, in which he writes, “I was not at Mr Rutts to day—Mordicai is better he speaks gratefully of your Letter & intends answering it” (Corfield and Evans 166). Several years later, in June 1811, “Mordecai” appears once again, attending, along with Robinson and some other individuals, a dinner party at the home of Charles and Mary Lamb. In this instance we learn that his surname is Andrews (Morley, Books 1.36) and that he later became “Sergeant Andrews” (Sadler 1.216). Later that year, on 18 November, Robinson writes a review of one of Coleridge’s lectures while visiting this same individual (Morley, Books 1.51).  Mordecai Andrews is present when Robinson becomes a member of the Middle Temple in May 1813; the two men breakfast together on 15 June 1815; they travel together to Paris in 1818, accompanied by a Miss Nash; and, in his final appearance, Andrews shares an uneventful coach ride from Bury to London with Robinson in October of 1821 (Sadler 1.217; 1.321; 1.377).

The Mordecai Andrews (1780-1821) mentioned in these scattered scenes is a forgotten figure today, nor was he famous in his own day. He occupies a place in Crabb Robinson’s Diary primarily because he was part of the Dissenting culture Robinson experienced so fully in the 1790s. His mother, Elizabeth Gamiel Rutt (b. 1756), came from a large family of London Calvinistic Dissenters. As a young girl, she attended a female academy in Northampton, the sister school to a male academy run by John Collett Ryland (1723-92), the well-known Baptist minister and educator. A number of Rutts from London, both male and female, attended these schools in the 1760s and 1770s.[10] By 1778, Elizabeth Rutt had returned to London, living near Red Cow Lane in Mile End.[11] Shortly thereafter she married the Rev. Mordecai Andrews II (d. 1799), who had also attended Ryland’s academy in the early 1760s.[12]  Their union resulted in nine children, the eldest of which was Mordecai III, Crabb Robinson’s friend. In his letters to William Pattisson in 1798, Robinson places Andrews in connection with John Towill Rutt (1760-1841), a prominent London Unitarian whose wife was William Pattisson’s first cousin. Pattisson had introduced Robinson to J. T. Rutt in 1796, shortly after Robinson’s arrival in London (Sadler 1.20).[13]  This linking of Mordecai Andrews and Rutt is not surprising given the likelihood that Elizabeth Rutt Andrews was herself a close relation of Rutt.

Among Mordecai Andrews’s siblings, one sister in particular—Eliza Julia Andrews (1792-1861)—pertains to our discussion. Shortly before he and Crabb Robinson, accompanied by a Miss Nash, left for Paris in 1818, his younger sister, like many English men and women in the years immediately following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, emigrated to America. On her way to a new English settlement in Illinois in 1817, she met George Flower (1788-1862), formerly of Hertford, who was emigrating to the same place. Her traveling companions included Morris Birkbeck (the founder of the new settlement) and Flower’s two cousins, Elias Pym Fordham (b.1787) and his sister, Maria, both from Hertfordshire. Before the group reached Illinois, Flower and Miss Andrews were married.[14] The next year, George Flower was joined in Illinois by his father, Richard (1761-1829), a Unitarian and radical reformer from Hertfordshire; his mother, the former Elizabeth Fordham (1764-1846) of Royston; and his four younger siblings. Just as they had been in Hertfordshire, the Flowers and the Fordhams would soon become two of the leading families in the English settlement at Albion, Illinois, as well as important figures in the early history of that state.[15]

Both these Hertfordshire families were known to Crabb Robinson by July 1798, when he made his first reference to Mordecai Andrews in the letter to William Pattisson mentioned previously. Richard Flower, a wealthy farmer and brewer, was the younger brother of Benjamin Flower (1755-1829). Benjamin Flower gained considerable prominence as editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, a radical newspaper founded in 1793 by his younger brother and some of his Cambridge and Hertfordshire friends, most of whom were Dissenters. Benjamin and Richard Flower, like J. T. Rutt, Elizabeth Rutt, and her husband, Mordecai Andrews II, had been raised in Calvinistic Independent congregations in London. By 1790, however, both Flowers had become Unitarians, even though upon his arrival in Cambridge in 1793, Benjamin promptly joined the Particular Baptist congregation at St. Andrew’s Street, where Robert Robinson (1735-90) preached from 1759 to 1790.[16] Between 1766 and 1769, Benjamin Flower attended John Collett Ryland’s academy in Northampton. Though Mordecai Andrews’ father had already preceded him, Flower would certainly have known his mother as well as her brother, Thomas Rutt, both of whom attended the Northampton academies during the latter portion of Flower’s time there. Flower may have known of J. T. Rutt during his youth as a result of his early school, church, or family connections; if not, he would certainly have known of him when they were both members of the London Constitutional Society in the early 1780s.[17] Whatever the case, by the early 1790s Flower had developed a close friendship with J. T. Rutt, publishing several of his poems in the Cambridge Intelligencer.[18][19] Besides Flower’s longtime friendship with the Rutts, he was also connected, as a result of his brother’s marriage, to Elizabeth Fordham’s four brothers—John, Edward King (1750-1847), George (1752-1840) and Elias (1763-1838).  All three lived in Hertfordshire and by the early 1790s had become, like Flower, Crabb Robinson, and J. T. Rutt, political reformers and Unitarians.[20] Elias Pym and Maria Fordham, the two emigrants mentioned previously in connection with the English settlement in Illinois, were the children of Elias Fordham; they were also Richard Flower’s nephew and niece. Their father is of particular note to our discussion, for his wife’s sister, Mary Clapton, would marry Thomas Robinson (1770-1860), Crabb’s older brother and a life-long resident of Bury St. Edmunds, in 1796, forming a connection between Crabb Robinson and this remarkable group of Hertfordshire and Cambridge reformers and Unitarians that would persist the remainder of his life.

Crabb Robinson writes in his Reminiscences that Thomas Robinson’s marriage led to “an entirely new connection” (Sadler 1.20), not only with the Fordhams but also with another Royston family that plays a part in our discussion of Mordecai Andrews. Like E. K. Fordham and his brothers, William Nash (1745-1830) was “liberal in religious opinion and zealous for political reform,” as Robinson would later note in his Reminiscences (Sadler 1.21). Nash’s sole publication, A Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Esq., from a Dissenting Country Attorney: In Defense of his Civil Profession and Religious Dissent, appeared in 1791 and was “one of the hundred-and-one answers to Burke on the French Revolution,” Robinson adds (Sadler 1.185). Originally a Methodist, Nash served for many years as a deacon in the Baptist church at St. Andrew’s Street in Cambridge during the ministries of Robert Robinson and Robert Hall. For the last forty years of his life, however, Nash, like the Fordhams, identified himself as a Unitarian (Ruston 17), even though he continued to worship at St. Andrew’s Street well into the first decade of the nineteenth century. “Robert Robinson was the object of his admiration,” Crabb writes of Nash (Sadler 1.185), and it may well be that Crabb acquired his keen interest in Robert Robinson from conversations with Nash during Crabb’s numerous visits to Royston between 1796 and 1830. On one occasion in November 1812, Crabb Robinson accompanied Nash on a visit to Providence Chapel in Gray’s Inn Lane to hear the famous Antinomian preacher, William Huntington.[21] After the service, Nash was disappointed, wishing he had never gone; he was mystified that two men “so different internally, should be so alike externally.” According to Nash, Huntington was the exact replica of Robert Robinson’s “voice and his manner and his style” (350). Crabb Robinson was thrilled by Nash’s comments. Since he had never heard Robert Robinson preach, he could now understand, through the example of Huntington’s sermon, the kind of power Robinson possessed as a preacher. In 1845, Crabb compiled a tribute to Robert Robinson entitled “Robinsoniana,” which appeared in two installments in the Christian Observer that year. Included in his article was a comparison of the preaching styles of Huntington and Robinson. Robinson’s sermons, still widely read in the 1840s, had become “more impressive and pleasing” to Crabb Robinson ever since that Sunday visit in 1812, for it enabled him, assisted by the memory of William Nash, to “clothe” those sermons “in the yet unforgotten person and manner and tones of William Huntingdon” (352).

Of Nash’s three daughters, one married John George Fordham, E. K. Fordham’s nephew. Two other daughters, however, remained unmarried; it was one of those unmarried daughters of William Nash who accompanied Robinson and Andrews to Paris in 1818.  Though these references to Mordecai Andrews III, scattered among the entries in Robinson’s Correspondence, Diary, and Reminiscences seem relatively insignificant, they reveal much about the intricacy and richness of Robinson’s Dissenting connections, for his early acquaintance with Andrews in 1798 was most likely derived from his friendship with J. T. Rutt, both of which derived from his friendship with William Pattisson (Rutt’s relation by marriage), and was bolstered after 1796 by his relationships with the Fordhams and Nashes of Royston, products of his brother’s marriage to Mary Clapton. The Fordhams and Nashes had connections as well with the Andrews family. These disconnected references to Mordecai Andrews, though of little significance to the larger purposes of Sadler and Morley, nevertheless connect Crabb Robinson with two generations of Independent ministers on the Andrews side; two generations of the Rutts of London, both Independents and Unitarians; two generations of the Fordhams of Hertfordshire, a family whose origins among the Independents had given way to Unitarianism by the 1790s; two generations of the Nashes of Royston, both Baptist and Unitarian; and in a collateral way, the Claptons of Royston and the Flowers of Hertford, the latter by 1818 having settled in Illinois, after which they established, with the help of Elias Pym Fordham, the first Unitarian congregation in that state.

III

Mordecai Andrews was not the only friend Crabb Robinson could claim from within the ranks of the legal profession. On 26 January 1815, he writes in his Diary, “Dined at Mr. Gurney’s. He appeared to advantage surrounded by his family.  The conversation consisted chiefly of legal anecdote” (Sadler 1.246). In 1818 Gurney appears again, this time in the Reminiscences: “In the Spring Term of this year,” Robinson writes, “Gurney the King’s Counsel’s clerk, brought me a bag, for which I presented him with a guinea. This custom is now obsolete, and therefore I mention it.  It was formerly the etiquette of the Bar that none but Serjeants and King’s Counsel could carry a bag in Westminster Hall.  Till some King’s Counsel presented him with one, however large the junior … barrister’s business might be, he was forced to carry his papers in his hand.  It was considered that he who carried a bag was a rising man” (Sadler 1.324). Shortly before receiving his official barrister’s bag, Crabb attended a lecture by Coleridge on Dante and Milton, accompanied by Mrs. Gurney (Sadler 1.311). In 1824, Crabb was nominated for membership in the Athenaeum Club by his Norwich friend, Thomas Amyot, and seconded by his more recent friend within the legal profession, Mr. Gurney (Sadler 1.408).

Gurney never appears in Morley, Baker, or Hudson. Sadler identifies him only as “Baron Gurney” (1.324); Robinson offers no identification whatsoever. Who is this Mr. Gurney? what do these scattered incidents from Crabb Robinson’s life have in common? what to they tell us about his connections with Dissenting culture?  A considerable amount.  Robinson’s legal friend was John, later Sir John, Gurney (1768-1845), eldest son of Joseph Gurney (1744-1815), a well-known shorthand writer for the Old Bailey and Parliament. The Gurneys were Particular Baptists, worshiping together for more than thirty years in the congregation at Maze Pond in Southwark. John Gurney’s younger brother, William Brodie Gurney (1777-1855), was, like his father, a shorthand writer, but more importantly, he was one of the leading Baptist laymen of his day, helping to found the Sunday School Society in 1803 as well as serving for many years as treasurer of the Baptist Missionary Society and the Baptist College at Stepney. During the 1790s, all the Gurneys were ardent political reformers.[22] John Gurney achieved considerable prominence as one of the defense attorneys for several celebrated state trials of the 1790s, including the trials of radical reformers Daniel Isaac Eaton, Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke, and John Thelwall in 1794. These trials occurred while Crabb Robinson was completing his apprenticeship in Colchester, a period when he too was an active supporter of the reform movement (see Sadler 1.9-19). He felt such “an intense interest” in the trial of Thomas Hardy, he later wrote in his Reminiscences, that it produced a “state of agitation that rendered me unfit for business.” When he obtained the London paper announcing the verdict of “Not Guilty,” he writes that he “ran about the town knocking at people’s doors, and screaming out the joyful words” (Sadler 1.14). Though unknown to Crabb Robinson at that time, John Gurney played a significant role in that trial; he would later become a counselor for the King’s Bench before being appointed in 1832 as Baron of the Exchequer.[23]

In 1797, John Gurney’s parents, at that time living in Keene’s Row, Walworth, befriended a young schoolmistress and governess from Bampton, Devon, named Eliza Gould (1770-1810). While living with the Gurneys in the summer of 1799, she met Benjamin Flower, who was serving a six-month sentence in Newgate for libeling the Bishop of Llandaff in one of his editorials in the Cambridge Intelligencer.[24] Miss Gould had corresponded with Flower in the mid-1790s, when she served for a time as a distributor of his newspaper in Devon. Flower had also known of the Gurneys for several years prior to his imprisonment in Newgate. Shortly after John Gurney’s defense of Daniel Isaac Eaton, J. T. Rutt composed a sonnet in honor of Gurney that appeared in the Cambridge Intelligencer on 29 March 1794. Between 1794 and 1796, Flower also published advertisements in his paper for several state trials transcribed by Joseph Gurney and printed and sold by his sister, Martha Gurney.[25] Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould were married in January 1800.  During the ten years of their marriage, they would remain close friends with all the members of the Gurney family, including John and his wife, the former Maria Hawes (1768-1849), whose father, Dr. William Hawes (1736-1808), founded the Humane Society in 1774. By the mid-1820s, John Gurney (who late in life may have become a Unitarian himself) had developed some Royston connections, possibly through his friendships with Crabb Robinson or Benjamin Flower. By that time, Robinson was on familiar terms with all branches of the Fordham family, having moved in their circles since the mid-1790s. On 8 June 1823, he went to hear the celebrated London preacher, Edward Irving, accompanied by a Mrs. J. Fordham (Sadler 1.397). She was the wife of John Fordham of Royston; her husband, along with his brother, E. K. Fordham, and his brother-in-law, Richard Flower, formed the Royston Bank in 1808 (Kingston 225-29). In the late 1820s, control of the bank passed to John Fordham’s son, John Edward Fordham (1799-1881). Shortly before that, in February 1825, the younger Fordham had married John Gurney’s second daughter, Harriet (1800-1874), cementing a relationship between three families—the Fordhams, Flowers, and the Gurneys—all of whom had been known to Crabb Robinson since the 1790s.

IV

 One figure who would have been no stranger to any of the individuals I have discussed so far was the celebrated Baptist minister, Robert Hall. After a brief stay at John Collett Ryland’s academy in Northampton (the same school Benjamin Flower, along with members of the Rutt and Andrews families, had previously attended), Hall entered Bristol Baptist College, eventually completing an A.M. at Aberdeen in 1785. He returned to Bristol as classical tutor in the Baptist College and assistant pastor of the church at Broadmead. Hall left Bristol for Cambridge in July 1791, succeeding Robert Robinson as pastor of the Baptist congregation at St. Andrews Street. During the early to mid-1790s, Hall continued Robinson’s liberal tradition of political activism and freedom of conscience, in which several Unitarians and reformers (such as Crabb Robinson’s friends, William Nash and Benjamin Flower) remained within the congregation. He also wrote two important political pamphlets, Christianity Consistent with a Love of Liberty in 1791 and An Apology for the Freedom of the Press in 1793, both of which supported the principles of the French Revolution and the need for political reform in England. Hall’s liberal views, however, changed in the late 1790s (as did those of many reformers); he became more conservative in his politics and outspoken in his opposition to infidelity, a shift that resulted in his most famous publication, Modern Infidelity Considered with Respect to its Influence on Society (1800).

Hall’s political reversal in the late 1790s resulted in a serious breach between himself and Benjamin Flower, a controversy in which Crabb Robinson and a number of his friends also played a part. Robinson’s introduction to Robert Hall, however, occurred prior to this controversy, most likely in early January 1795, at the funeral of his uncle, the Rev. Habakkuk Crabb (1750-94),[26] Robinson’s uncle who had been pastoring the Independent congregation at Royston since 1790, the same church in which E. K. Fordham, Robinson’s friend, had once worshiped.  Whether Rev. Crabb was instrumental in turning Fordham into a Unitarian is uncertain, but the Independent minister had clearly adopted an Arian position prior to his arrival at Royston, a position which forced a number of members to secede.  Despite his Arianism, his funeral sermon was preached by Samuel Palmer, orthodox minister of the Independent congregation at Mare Street, Hackney, and compiler of the popular work, The Nonconformist’s Memorial (2 vols., 1775-78).  J. T. Rutt composed an elegy in honor of Rev. Crabb, and Robert Hall delivered the graveside oration,[27] a demonstration of the kind of ecumenical Dissenting culture that Crabb Robinson often encountered in the 1790s. A few months after the funeral, Flower published a volume of sermons by Rev. Crabb, who, despite his heterodoxy, was nevertheless highly esteemed by the orthodox Pattissons of Witham, for that April William Pattisson’s mother wrote to Crabb Robinson, asking him to procure a copy of the Sermons for her.[28] Robinson would also have known of Hall through their mutual attendance, on several occasions in the mid-1790s, at the Royston Book Club, a debating society dominated by religious Dissenters and political reformers from Cambridge, Hertfordshire, and even London.[29] 

Whenever Hall preached in London during the late 1790s, Crabb Robinson was usually present, at times accompanied by his Royston friends.   On 10 November 1796, he writes to his brother Thomas in Bury,

On Sunday I went to Hackney to hear Mr. Hall--The high opinion I had formed of him much exceeded what I shod myself have conceived from the Display of his Talents that Day  I did not find that one flower fell him as a mark of his brilliant genius his Discourses had nothing in them of Novelty nor did he employ any metaphorical or allusive language  Tho’ as an extempore Preacher he discovered unusual Powers of Correct Speaking and Perspicuous Narrative  Had I not known his Name I shod certainly have placed him above the Ordinary Pulpit Standard.… I might in justice to observe that Mr King Fordham (whom I had the Pleasure of seeing him there) declared that he thought him remarkably dull--We are told that “Sometimes the good Homer sleeps.[30] 

During their visits to Royston or Bury, both Robinson and Hall were kept informed of the other’s activities. Whenever Hall saw his Royston friends—the Fordhams, the Nashes, and the Claptons--he heard about Robinson’s growing skepticism. Robinson’s attraction to Godwinism had become more evident to his family and friends after his letter on Godwin appeared in the Intelligencer in August 1795.[31] A few months later he was asked to introduce the following question at a meeting of the Royston Book Club: “Is private affection inconsistent with universal benevolence?” “Not a disputable point,” he writes, “but it was meant to involve the merits of Godwin as a philosopher, and as I had thought, or rather talked much about him, I had an advantage over most of those who were present … Among the speakers were Benjamin Flower, Mr. Rutt, and four or five ministers of the best reputation in the place” (Sadler 1.21), one of whom may have been Robert Hall. Hall had disliked Godwin’s philosophy from the beginning, and he would not have been amused by Robinson’s forceful defense of the question. Even Anthony Robinson, a former student of Hall’s at Bristol Baptist College, attempted to “ungodwinise” Crabb, but, for the moment, as he relates to his brother on 2 November 1797, he was “not yet shaken.”[32]

    The next summer, after visiting his brother in Bury, Crabb Robinson journeyed to Royston to spend a few days with the Nashes, where he learned that Hall had made some disparaging remarks about him to William Nash, even questioning Nash’s judgment and Christian character in allowing Robinson to stay in his home. Outraged by this attack upon his character, Robinson dashed off a letter of protest to Hall on 30 August 1798, inquiring why Hall would warn the Nashes to “honor me with their Friendship” no longer.[33] He already knew some of the particulars of Hall’s comments about him, for on 22 August he had received a letter from William Wedd Nash, Mr. Nash’s son, recounting a portion of what had occurred in his father’s home.   The younger Nash acknowledged that “Mr Hall has never said any thing disrespectful of you before me,” nor could he “repeat with certainty any loose conversation” that may have occurred in his father’s house.   He admits, however, that his father “was very much surprized & shocked that Mr Hall should take such liberties with the character of those with whom he was totally unacquainted & especially as he knew the representation was totally false.”  According to a conversation between Hall and E. K. Fordham, Hall truly believed Robinson had “endeavoured to shake the belief of one of his Congregation in Xtianty.” The younger Nash was convinced that words “to that Effect” had indeed been spoken by Hall to his father, and he advised Robinson to “write about it if you think it of any conseq.e to you.”[34]

In his letter to Hall, Robinson admitted that he did not think the Baptist minister “capable of inventing Calumny but it seems that yo have heedlessly built Opinions on vague Report, drawn unwarrantable Inferences from general Appellations & carelessly trifled with the happiness of others as Objects below your regard.” Admitting Hall’s reputation and prowess, Robinson writes that he cannot “despise” him, but he is certain his views on Godwin (and hence himself) are “confined and partial” and not based upon sound reasoning. After completing the letter to Hall, Robinson confessed to his brother Thomas that he hoped he had written in a “spirit” which his sister-in-law (a great supporter and personal friend of Hall) would approve, though he was “far from satisfied” with the letter’s “style.”[35]  The import, however, he was certain would not be lost on Hall, and “What sort of a Dressing I shall have in return,” he posits somewhat fearfully, “I can guess.”[36]

On 13 October 1798, Hall finally responded, but not in the violent tone Robinson had anticipated.  Hall apologized for his delay, then related what he had heard from his friends about Robinson and his admiration for Godwin.  He notes that Robinson “makes no scruple on all occasions to avow [his] religious skepticism,” even

declaring, I believe at the Royston Book Club, that no man ever understood the nature of virtue so well as Mr. Godwin; from which I have drawn the following inference, either that you disbelieve the being of God and future state, or that admitting them to be true, in your opinion they have no connection with the nature of virtue; the first of which is direct and avowed, the second practical atheism.[37]

Hall admits that he had warned a small circle of individuals, mostly young people, “against forming a close intimacy with a person who by the possession of the most captivating talents was likely to give circulation and effect to the most dangerous errors.” His exchange with William Nash was entirely proper, he asserts, since Nash, an officer in his congregation, had invited Robinson to stay in his home on his next visit to Royston. Hall thought this unwise due to Robinson’s avowal of non-Christian principles. “Principles of irreligion recommended by brilliant and seductive talents,” Hall writes, “appear to me more dangerous in the intercourse of private life than licentious manners.” He was convinced that Robinson had “abandoned the profession of christianity” and adopted a system of beliefs which, he argues, “ought not to be tolerated in the state, much less be permitted to enter the recesses of private life, to pollute the springs of domestic happiness or taint the purity of confidential intercourse.” Though clearly not in agreement with Hall’s assessment of Godwin, Robinson seemed pleased nonetheless with Hall’s letter.[38]

In the next few months Robinson experienced misgivings about having engaged Hall in any kind of debate, especially given Hall’s reputation for severity in dealing with his enemies; nevertheless, he refused to grant Hall the victory. “Since I wrote it,” he tells his brother Thomas, “[Hall] has declared that I have confessed myself a devil.  Look at the letter & see whe.r it be not an unfair construction---Rutt & myself are both of Opinion that the letter has no such acknowledgmt apropos.”[39]   Within a few days, however, while visiting Rutt in London, Robinson had an unexpected meeting with Hall, who was accompanied by Samuel Palmer, the Independent minister who had preached the funeral sermon for Robinson’s uncle, Habakkuk Crabb, in 1795. Robinson writes to his brother on 13 February 1799, “I have had an interview with Hall & leaving you to guess at what passed---And I have no doubt it will procure me a letter at least a week sooner as I know it will throw both you & my sister into the fidgets.” The next week he provides further details of the scene in a letter to William Pattisson: 

Some Evenings since I was at Mr Rutts when Hall came in We bowed respectfully chatted with Indifference And both preserved a total Silence and disregard to our past Correspondence tho the Drollery of the Rencontre was heightened by Mr Palmer who was with him & who seeing me in black in a very quick manner jogged me & said ‘I see you are in black are you one of us’ this was almost too much for my muscles. 

A few days later, he continues to Pattisson, he heard Hall “preach a very beautiful Sermon” (most likely to Palmer’s Independent congregation in Hackney). Though a “highly eloquent” sermon, Robinson nevertheless believed the sermon’s doctrine “injudicious & possibly injurious” to its hearers by associating true religion with “Sentiment”  and religious “Affections” and not “good Actions” (Corfield and Evans 167).

    Later that year, while on an extensive walking tour of Western England and Wales, Robinson had another unexpected encounter with Robert Hall, this time in the home of the Rev. James Phillips, Independent minister in Haverford-West and a close friend of Hall.[40] A brief account of the incident appears in Sadler (1.37-38). Robinson provides more details in two letters, one to J. T. Rutt on 18 September 1799, and the other to Thomas Robinson on 1 October 1799. “After breakfast I immediately waited on Mr Philips,” he tells Rutt.

[Phillips] received me with the greatest civility, and in Mr Hall there was more.  He behaved with unnecessary politeness & showed a kind impressment which I cod  not expect.  This first made me accept an invitation to dine---then to tea & then to accompany them to a supper.  Mr Hall was to depart the next day…. You will imagine the subjects of our conversation Godwin and the New Philosophy---Socinianism---French politics---Taste---Infidelity---Toleration all had their turns.  In all Hall spoke like himself…. His vehemence & rashness of censure wod be intolerable if there were not playfulness of manner wch makes yo think that the wounds he inflicts are without venom---I left him at night with a better opinion of him, certainly not thro’ any complimnt on his part for we scarcely kept our tempers at last and he did not spare me, any more than poor Johns of Bury….[41] 

The “poor Johns of Bury” was the Rev. Evan Johns, who in 1792 succeeded William Lincolne as minister of the Presbyterian meeting at Bury, the same church the Robinsons attended.  Johns, whom Robinson later described as “an old Jacobin and a fierce Calvinist,” resigned in 1800 as a result of a growing Unitarian presence within the congregation. Some of his members left with him and joined the Independent congregation at Whiting Street (Duncan 159).  In August 1799, a few months before his resignation and just prior to Robinson’s tour of Wales, Johns wrote to Robinson, livid over a recent incident between himself and Hall. “ I lately was in Northamptonshire,” he writes,

among my old acquaintance. I thought myself very fortunate in having determined to undertake the journey, because it gave me an opportunity to vindicate myself against the wanton attack of Hall of Cambridge.  He had given such a representation, at a very numerous meeting of Ministers at Bedford, of my want of hospitality towards him as that my friends said that, had I presented myself at their doors immediately afterwards they did not know that they should have asked me into their houses.  They understood that, I had given no Supper to Hall, Phillips, and Owen, but had gone to the Inn and been entertained at their Expence.  Having heard the real fact, you will not think me too forward in any censure when I say that, Hall is a malignant and a calumnious Liar.[42] 

Robinson discusses Johns’ controversy with Hall in more detail, as well as Hall’s cordial relationship with Thomas and Mary Robinson, in the letter to his brother of 1 October 1799. 

Passing thro’ Haverford West I was looking into a window and to my astonishment, saw---whom now can you guess---of all men living none other than Hall.  I delayed calling on Mr. Philips till after breakfast when I was received by him with great attention & by Hall with marked respect indeed it was a kind of eagerness which Mr H. showed for my company that induced me to accept an invitation first to dinner then to tea & afterward to spend the evening with them at the house of a friend.  I scarcely need say on what subjects we chatted.  Among these, their visit to Johns.  You may inform Mr. Johns of what passed.  Mr. Phillips being there I thought it right to read Mr. Johns Postscript which I did, omitting the last sentence.  Hall in the most solemn manner declared that he never asserted that he did not sup at Mr. Johns and confessed that if he had said so it would have been a lye…. [Hall] also complained of subsequent inattentions from the Bury dissenters he says that my sister & Mr. Buck are the only persons whom he would chuse to call upon. I intimated that my sister was surprised he had not called upon her when he passed thro’ the town; he said that he expected to return by Bury & on that account deferred his visit.  He had before expressed himself of my sister in language that gave me the greatest pleasure  we all are gratified by the compliments of men of talent  And he spoke with more than usual seriousness & earnestness when he remarked that she was the most extraordinary instance he had ever known of  a woman of superior talents preserving universal respect--Abilities being so rare in women & when found so seldom accompanied by amiable qualities.  On the whole I like Hall much better than I expected and yet I assure you it was not that he bribed my judgement by personal civility.  There was a friendliness of reception--which showed that he felt no bitterness but in our disputes on Godwin he did not spare either my opinions or myself and he was very far from flattering me. As I said before I enjoyed the day very much.[43] 

    It may well have been Hall’s confrontation with Robinson, both in their exchange of letters in 1798 and in their conversations of 1799, that finally led Hall to publish his views on Godwin and infidelity in his famous sermon Modern Infidelity.   In this sermon, Hall sought to show "the total incompatibility of sceptical principles with the existence of society" (Morris 92), chastising those individuals who, like Robinson, had been taken in by infidelity and who were now miserable because their earlier religion maintained some slight grasp upon them. A critique of Modern Infidelity appeared in Benjamin Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer shortly after the sermon’s publication early in 1800. Many thought it was the work of John Taylor of Norwich, but it actually came from the pen of none other than Crabb Robinson. The letter, signed “Vigilance,” appeared on 5 April, two days after Robinson embarked from Yarmouth for Germany, and it would be his boldest statement yet in demonstrating his allegiance to the principles of political and religious liberalism to which he had aligned himself ever since his days at his uncle Habakkuk Crabb’s school in Wattisfield in late 1789. These were the same principles that Hall had espoused so eloquently and forcefully in his political pamphlets of 1791 and 1793.[44] By 1800, however, Hall’s position had changed considerably, enough so that reformers like Crabb Robinson and his friends Benjamin Flower, J. T. Rutt, and Anthony Robinson, who were still holding to those principles, believed that Hall had now become a political “apostate.” Crabb Robinson believed the sermon reflected Hall’s “literary excellence” as a gifted scholar and orator, but not his political heritage as a radical Baptist Dissenter. He believed that Hall had not been “candid and just” in his portrayal of the “character of atheism and scepticism,” for to Robinson those who continued to prosecute the war with France were far more guilty of violating human and divine law than were the skeptics he knew.  In fact, by 1800 the war with France, always supported by the church and its emissaries, both Protestant and Catholic, was now, as Hall’s sermon and its ensuing popularity revealed, fashionably accepted by large numbers of Dissenters as well.  Robinson notes in dismay that “Religious zeal has been pressed into the service from the pulpit; and from the professor’s chair, the bench of justice and the senator’s seat, one monotonous strain of alarm and terror has resounded,” leaving in its wake “a domestic inquisition” of France “unexampled” in English history.  Those “friends of Liberty” who once supported France and fiercely opposed the corruptions of a state church, such as Hall had done in the early 1790s, had either turned “apostate” in relation to the French revolution, or “been calumniated and terrified into silence.” Robinson is amazed that the once radical reformer Hall had now become “the humble follower” of Bishop Horsley and Richard Ramsden,[45] completing what Robinson terms a “triumvirate” of apostates that included Benjamin Flower’s brother-in-law, the Rev. John Clayton, Independent minister of the Weigh-house, London, and Hall’s former  “adversary,” his “brother baptist,” the Rev. John Martin of Keppel Street.[46] To Robinson, not even Hall’s early political triumphs could “save him from reproach,” nor could his former political allies “when they find in his Sermon an elaborate attempt to prove that ferocity, is one of the effects of Atheism (in itself a very disputable position) by shewing that from its prevalence have arisen the cruelties which have recently disgraced the French nation.” In his earlier political pamphlets, Hall had defended freedom of speech and thought for English radicals (like Joseph Priestley and Richard Price) as well as the French infidels involved in the Revolution of 1789.  What had then seemed most essential to Hall concerning the relation of Christians to the state--the right to freedom of conscience--appeared now, in the face of growing infidelity, a political liability requiring intervention from pulpit and Parliament.  Robinson’s purpose in his letter was not to justify skepticism or infidelity but to expose the illiberality of Hall’s new political position. Though Hall may have over-reacted to Robinson’s brand of Godwinism in 1800, Robinson astutely perceived Hall’s political shift from radical reformer to the spokesman of established orthodoxy, and his criticism must have stung Hall deeply. In his letter to the Cambridge Intelligencer, Crabb Robinson became the first to call public notice to this political shift in one English Dissenters of the 1790s.[47]

During Crabb Robinson’s years in Germany, Thomas Robinson continued to inform his brother about Hall’s activities and his ongoing notoriety.  In a letter dated 2 September 1800, Thomas writes:

Hall continues in high fame.  The Bishop of London invited him to a dinner which he attended, and which he is making a merit of.  Or he says (which may be true) that he removed some unjust prejudices, which the Bishop had conceived against the Dissenters.  Ben. Flower still keeps goading him in his Paper. But I think, he quite as much disgraces himself as injures Hall.  Your friend Anthony R. [Robinson] has likewise entered the list against this famed divine; and I think has attacked him with considerable ability…. To Mr. K. [Edward King] Fordham, Hall contrasted the personalities of this pamphlet with the respectful style of Vigilance.  Mr F. informed him you were the author of the last mentioned letter---And now a super plum for your vanity---At this information, he expressed a good deal of surprise, and said, in point of style it was one of the most elegant or eloquent (I forget which epithet) production he had ever read---though he would not allow it contained much argument.[48]  

On 28 February 1804, a few months after the publication of Hall’s sermon, Sentiments Proper to the Present Crisis, Thomas writes once again to his brother, who by this time had tempered much of his earlier position on Godwin and the war with France:

I must not omit to mention among the literary productions which I have just seen, another violent Phillipic of Hall’s--against Modern Philosophy, in a sermon which he preached on the Fast Day.  This appears to me, by far the most striking and eloquent of all the sermons he has published.  You perhaps would discover in it too close a resemblance to the style of Burke.  He is as usual very acrimonious, and would formerly have been very offensively so to you---particularly pointed against utility being the foundation of virtue…. In one part of his declamation, there is a resemblance to the language used by you in your first letter on the Kantian philosophy … I suspect that if Vigilance had been what he was & where he was, he could not have refrained from entering the lists with his famed antagonist.  For the latter is certainly quite as open to animadversion as before.  And Ben. Flower I perceive by an advertisement meditates an attack.  Hall is however much too high an object for him to aim at.  Hall I am told is studying Kanteanism--and it is said is very much pleased with its doctrines---He does not perceive however in Godwinism anything congenial---as he still betrays for the authour the most priestley hatred---and talks in a very solemn tone of his “unholy speculation.[49] 

Thomas continued to inform his brother about the languishing state of the Royston Book Club, the shock of Robert Hall’s initial mental breakdown and recovery in late 1804 and early 1805, and Hall’s continued interest in the affairs of Crabb Robinson and his study of Kantian philosophy. Thomas writes on 21 May 1805:

Hall I am told expressed great satisfaction to hear the nature of your studies.  I can easily conceive that he should think that Kantianism in any of its forms is preferable to french philosophy or frigid Socinianism.  I am happy to say how I am speaking of Hall, that he is perfectly recovered.  Many lately saw him at Royston.  He was quite friendly and seemed desirous to know about you.  He did not speak of his indisposition before here, but I understand he is not particularly reserved at other times.  He has mentioned one very serious circumstance respecting it.  That during the time such was the vivacity of his ideas that he could have written folio volumes---and that since recovery he could recollect enough for a quarto.[50] 

On 16 July 1805, two months before Crabb Robinson’s return from Germany, Thomas writes again:

I mentioned in my last that Hall of Cambridge was recovered.  He has since been at Bury, and spent one evening at my house.  He was in most excellent spirits, and made us laugh very heartily.   There was a mixture of more friendliness in his manner to us than I expected.  And I really believe that the man has not a bad heart notwithstanding the unmeasured terms of censure in which he sometimes speaks of persons---There does not appear to be any abatement in the fervour of his imagination.  I heard him preach twice in which he discovered a very lively fancy and delivered his sentiments in highly polished language although perfectly extemporary.  He seemed to have conceived a more favourable idea of the state of your opinions---but I suspect that he would not think very highly of them if he saw [them] in all their aspects.[51] 

Except for a few instances in Sadler, the relationship between Robinson and Hall has gone unnoticed by editors and commentators on both men. Within the first four volumes of the Crabb Robinson Correspondence, substantial portions of sixteen letters deal with Robert Hall, yet he is never mentioned in any of Morley’s volumes. Sadler published the letter exchange between Robinson and Hall in 1798 as well as a brief mention of Robinson’s account of his accidental meeting with Hall in late 1799 (1.27-34; 43-44), but no other portion of the Hall material found in the letters of Crabb Robinson to his brother Thomas between 1796 and 1805 appears in Sadler.[52] John Milton Baker devotes considerable attention to Robinson’s association with Godwinism and makes much use of his correspondence with his brother, yet Baker omits all references to Hall, who is similarly absent from Derek Hudson’s volume.

Morley writes that in the letters of Thomas and Crabb Robinson, the two brothers “tell each other the most minute occurrences of their daily lives.  We learn whom they see, what they do, what books they read, what they hear as gossip, what they think, and what they feel” (Crabb Robinson in Germany 4). Morley describes Thomas Robinson as “a very lovable person” who

writes an excellent letter, and is by no means uninterested in intellectual pursuits or incapable of expressing sensible criticisms on books as well as upon affairs.  It is from his letters to his brother in Germany that we hear of the rick-burnings resultant on the introduction of machinery; of the condition of England in the bad days of the Napoleonic ascendancy, the heavy taxes, shortage of provisions, ‘chicken-food’ instead of good bread, and the like … But he is quite ready to discuss poetry as well as prose, and it is certain that the tanner’s house in Bury was inhabited and frequented by well-read and intelligent people. (Life 94-95) 

Apparently, Morley did not deem Robert Hall among those “well-read and intelligent people” who “frequented” Thomas Robinson’s home in Bury, though Thomas and Crabb Robinson clearly did. To Morley, the letters of Thomas Robinson are valuable when they comment on politics and literature; when they talk about happenings within the Dissenting culture of Bury, Cambridge, Royston, Norwich, and London, they are not so interesting. Sadler argues that the letters between the two brothers are “so complete” that, had all of them been preserved, they would “have furnished a full record of the two lives, not only with regard to incidents, but also thought and feeling” (qtd. in Morley, Life 97). Much of that “thought and feeling” centered, as I have demonstrated in my selections from their letters, upon their interactions within the culture of Dissent.

V

It would take a book-length study to explore fully Crabb Robinson’s evolving religious opinions and his persistent involvement with Dissenting culture between 1790 and his death in 1867, something beyond the scope of this paper. Before I close, however, I want you to travel with me to Stratford-upon-Avon, where, in the summer of 1863, less than four years before his death, Crabb Robinson paid a visit to a family whose past history ties together many of the individuals I have discussed in this paper. On 10 July 1863, Robinson was met at the Stratford train station by a Mr. and Mrs. Flower, his hosts during his stay in Stratford.  Of Mrs. Flower he writes in his Diary, “She is a very interesting woman, and has personal dignity and ease in her manners.  She is quite au fait in the topics of conversation she chooses to touch, and is well read in English literature” (Sadler 2.381). Robinson was taken to their home called “The Hill,” where, he adds, Mr. Flower “enjoys the otium cum dignitate, though he is of too active a nature ever to be unemployed. He has been a very useful public character. I am attracted by his frankness; he is by nature communicative and benevolent. As a politician he is a good Whig” (2.381).  The Flowers showed Robinson “more of the Shakespeare Memorabilia than I cared to see,” he notes, but he left Stratford on the 16th of July “with feelings of gratitude towards my hospitable friend,” Mr. Flower, with whom he shared “many interesting topics of conversation” (2.381).  Those “topics of conversation” were not recorded in his Diary, but we can guess what some of them might have included, given Robinson’s previous history and knowledge of Mr. Flower’s family.  This distinguished gentleman of Stratford is not identified, either by Crabb Robinson or Thomas Sadler, who included the account in the final volume of his edition of Robinson’s Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence.

    Robinson’s Stratford friend was Edward Fordham Flower, youngest son of Richard Flower. He was born at his father’s estate near Hertford in 1805.  When he was thirteen, he emigrated, along with his father and the rest of his family, to Illinois, where he would remain until 1824.  He returned to England that year with £2000 and settled in Stratford, where he established what would become a very successful brewery.  At the time of Crabb Robinson’s visit, E. F. Flower had just retired from his business and would begin a brief career in Parliament as a Whig Liberal for Coventry. His wife, whom Robinson seemed to admire, was the former Selina Greaves of Barford.  His eldest son, Charles Edward Flower, was instrumental in founding the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford; his second son, Sir William Henry Flower, became Hunterian professor of comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons and president of the Zoological Society of London; his youngest son, Edgar Flower, became chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. 

    An illustrious family indeed, but I cannot help but think that the “topics of conversation” that passed between Robinson and Edward Fordham Flower had more to do with those members of his family that had preceded him than those who would follow him.  It was his father, along with his uncle Edward King Fordham, their friend, William Nash, and other like-minded liberal Whigs in Hertfordshire and Cambridgeshire, who established the Cambridge Intelligencer in 1793. Benjamin Flower, the paper’s only editor, was also E. F. Flower’s uncle. Not only would Crabb Robinson publish two important letters in that paper in 1795 and 1800, but, through his brother’s marriage to Mary Clapton of Royston, he became intimately involved with the Dissenting politics of that region during the 1790s and early 1800s. From these friendships derived Robinson’s life-long appreciation for two Baptist ministers who played a major role in shaping Dissenting politics in the last quarter of the eighteenth century during their pastorates at St. Andrew’s Street in Cambridge, Robert Robinson and Robert Hall, both of whom knew E. F. Flower’s uncles as well as William Nash. Through his friend, J. T. Rutt, who began publishing poems in the Intelligencer from its inception, Crabb Robinson came to know Mordecai Andrews, whose sister, Eliza Julia, married E. F. Flower’s older brother, George, on her journey to Illinois in 1817. Though she never returned to England, she was not unaware of her younger brother-in-law’s success in Stratford.  In 1856, seven years before Robinson’s visit to Stratford, E. F. Flower’s son, Charles, along with his wife, Sarah, traveled to Illinois to visit George and Eliza Andrews Flower in Mt. Vernon, Indiana, where they were living at the time. Mrs. Flower had previously corresponded regularly in the 1830s with one of her nephews, John Rutt Andrews (b. 1805), who, like her, had emigrated to America sometime in the early 1830s. His two younger brothers, Charles (b. 1813) and George Rutt (b. 1817), emigrated shortly thereafter, joining their older brother in New York. For a part of that same decade, the two younger brothers would live with Eliza Flower in Albion.[53] Though her opportunities to see her relations in England, whether the Andrews, Rutts, Flowers, or Fordhams, were severely curtailed by her emigration to America, she was certainly not unknown to her brother-in-law in Stratford, whom she would have known intimately during his six years of residence in Albion between 1818 and 1824. Crabb Robinson would no doubt have been proud to learn from his host that Richard and George Flower had been two of the primary leaders in the effort to abolish slavery in the state of Illinois in 1824, a movement Robinson had supported since the 1790s.

    Though his visit to Stratford-upon-Avon, as recorded in his Diary, makes no mention of E. F. Flower’s connections with this rich group of Dissenters from Hertford, Royston, and Cambridge, those connections could not have been lost on Crabb Robinson and may have been, even more than his interest in Shakespeare, the primary reason for his excursion that summer in 1863.   As such, it is a fitting reminder of Crabb Robinson’s vibrant seventy-year connection with a Dissenting culture that stretched from Norfolk, Bury, Cambridge, Royston, London, and even Stratford-upon-Avon across the Atlantic to the prairies of Illinois--a culture that shaped his early identity and, despite his developing stature as a man of letters, gave meaning and purpose to his life thereafter. Of the accounts of his movements within the literary culture of his day, much has been recovered from his writings and can be found in the works of Morley, Baker, Hudson, and others; of the narrative of his life and friendships within the Dissenting culture of his day, of which the incidents and individuals discussed in this paper comprise but a small portion, much remains unwritten and unknown. Not until that narrative has been fully recovered and told will we have a complete picture of the life of Crabb Robinson and his importance to English history.

A version of this paper was delivered at a Lecture sponsored by the Seminar in Dissenting Studies, Dr. Williams’s Library, London, 14 June 2006. 

Notes

[1]See Crabb Robinson Correspondence, Dr. Williams’s Library, London, vol. 1 (1725-99), letter 10; Monthly Repository (1827), p. 293; and Christian Reformer (1846), p. 221.

[2]These manuscripts comprise thirty-five volumes of his Diary, which he kept from 1811 to 1867; four volumes of his Reminiscences, covering the years 1775 to 1843; thirty-two volumes of Correspondence; twenty-eight volumes of his tours; his Pocket Books, begun in 1790; and numerous bundles of miscellaneous writings and notebooks.

[3]Two other nineteenth-century writers on Robinson, Walter Bagehot and Augustus de Morgan, each provide only one brief anecdote in their essays concerning Robinson’s relation to the Dissenting culture of his day.

[4]This kind of exclusionary approach appears in Morley’s sole comment about Robinson’s parents, in which she offers only a terse generic description of them as “comfortable, middle-class, stout Dissenters on both sides” (1). Sadler offers far more specific details in his discussion of Robinson’s Dissenting background (1.1-8).

[5]See Baker 46-58. Among the Dissenting ministers Robinson identifies in his Pocket Books during his time in Colchester are a Mr. Hopkins, possibly a General Baptist; Rees Harris, a Unitarian, pastor at that time at the Independent chapel in Helen’s Lane; Abraham Booth, pastor of the Particular Baptist congregation at Goodman’s Fields, London; and John Wesley, the Methodist leader.  He also mentions reading John Newton, Joseph Priestley, William Winterbotham, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Anna Laetitia Barbauld. 

[6]See Reed, Philips, Behler, Wellens, and Maertz.

[7]Sadler attends to these events more fully than Morley, Baker, or Hudson, yet even in his two-volume edition of 1872, he devotes only the first thirty-eight pages of volume one to Robinson’s formative years within the Dissenting culture of Bury, Colchester, and London prior to 1800. Morley, in volume one of Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, covers his life prior to 1803 in less than seven pages; in The Life and Times of Henry Crabb Robinson, she devotes only ten pages to his life from 1775 to 1799. 

[8]Christopher J. Wright’s article in TUHS also broke with the literary tradition, recreating some moments from HCR’s school days at Devizes and Wattisfield between 1786 and 1790, first under the care of his uncle, the Presbyterian minister and Unitarian, John Ludd Fenner, and for the final six months of his education at the school of his other uncle, Habakkuk Crabb, an Arian who briefly pastored the Independent meeting at Wattisfield in 1789-90, the home church of the Crabbs.  Benfield adds considerably to our understanding of the intricate nature of the Dissenting culture in which Crabb Robinson was born and raised in “Six Letters.”

[9]For instance, in Sadler’s discussion of Robinson’s life prior to 1800, no less than thirty-eight Dissenters, including nine ministers, are named and commented upon, by far the overwhelming majority of the personages who appear in those pages.  Some of these individuals are identified, either by Robinson or Sadler, as Dissenters; others are not. In Morley’s brief summary of this period of Crabb’s life (Life 1-10), only Crabb’s parents and the Colchester attorney, Mr. Francis, are identified as Dissenters.

[10]See Whelan, “John Ryland at School.” During her time as a student at Northampton, Elizabeth Rutt joined Ryland’s Baptist congregation on 12 May 1771 (see College Lane Church Book, Northamptonshire Record Office, CSBC 48, f.139). Her religious experience was recorded by John Ryland, Jr., and can be found in his MS. “An Account of the Rise and Progress of the Two Society’s at Mr Rylands and at Mrs Trinders Boarding School in Northampton, drawn up by John Ryland Jun.r,” Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, shelfmark F.P.C. C49.(B.).

[11]See J. C. Ryland’s MS. subscription lists, dated 20 July 1778, for his book, Contemplations, at Bristol Baptist College library, shelfmark G97a.Ah.33. 

[12]During Elizabeth Rutt’s time at Northampton, two other Andrews, most likely younger siblings to Mordecai II, attended the academies there; a Miss Andrews in 1768 and a William Andrews in 1771.  As a student, J. C. Ryland remarked about Mordecai Andrews II that he was “sensible, plausible, now worthy.”  He would pastor the Independent congregation at Coggeshall, Essex, from 1775 to 1797. See “The Rev. John Collett Ryland’s Scholars” 23, 28; Whelan, “John Ryland at School” 109; 116 n.74, 76.

[13]Crabb writes of Rutt in his Reminiscences: “He was the son of an affluent drug-grinder, and might possibly have himself died rich if he had not been a man of too much literary taste, public spirit, and religious zeal to be able to devote his best energies to business.  He was brought up an orthodox Dissenter, and married into a family of like sentiments.  His wife was an elder sister of Mrs. Thomas Isaac, daughter of Mr. Pattisson of Maldon, and first cousin of my friend William Pattisson.  I was therefore doubly introduced to him.  I had the good fortune to please him, and he became my chief friend. He had become a Unitarian, and was a leading member of the Gravel-Pit congregation, Hackney, of which Belsham was the pastor. Mr. Rutt was the friend and biographer of Gilbert Wakefield and of Priestley. He was proud of having been, with Lord Grey, an original member of the Society of the Friends of the People.  The eldest daughter of his large family is the widow of the late Sir T. N. Talfourd” (Sadler 1.20).

[14]George Flower was legally married at the time to his cousin, Jane Dawson, though the two had separated in 1815. They were not legally divorced, however, until 1836.  This “bigamous” union in America between George and Eliza Andrews created a rift between herself and members of her family in England.  See Walker and Burkhardt, pp. 34-35.

[15]For more on the Flowers and Fordhams in Illinois, see Richard Flower, Letters from Lexington and the Illinois, containing a brief account of the English settlement in the latter Territory, and a refutation of the misrepresentation of Mr. Cobbett (London, 1819), and Letters from the Illinois, 1820, 1821.  Containing an account of the English settlement at Albion and its vicinity, and a refutation of various misrepresentations, those more particularly of Mr. Cobbett (London, 1822); George Flower, The English settlement in Edwards County, founded in 1817 and 1818, by Morris Birkbeck and George Flower  (Chicago:  Fergus Print Co, 1882); Elias Pym Fordham, Personal Narrative of Travels in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky; and of a Residence in the Illinois Territory: 1817-1818, ed. Frederic Austin Ogg (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906); and Walker and Burkhardt.

[16]Robert Robinson was also greatly admired by Crabb Robinson, who inserted six letters by the famous minister into the first volume of his Correspondence (see Whelan, “Six Letters”).  Aside from these letters, Crabb Robinson also contributed an article on Robert Robinson, titled “Robinsoniana,” to the Christian Reformer (1845), pp. 89-92; 347-52.

[17] See “Lists of the members,” in Tracts published and distributed gratis by the Society for Constitutional Information, with a design to convey to the minds of the people a knowledge of their rights; principally those of representation.  Volume the first (London:  W. Richardson, 1783).

[18]Flower also published Rutt’s The Sympathy of Priests: Addressed to Thomas Fysche Palmer, Port-Jackson. To which are added, Odes, written in 1792 (Cambridge, 1795).

[19]In June 1793, shortly before the first issue of the Intelligencer, Crabb notes in his Pocket Book that he purchased a “a book on the French constitution,” most likely Flower’s The French Constitution: With Remarks on Some of its Principal Articles (London: G. G. J. and J. Robinson, 1792). Crabb Robinson was also aware of Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer from its commencement in 1793.  He would eventually publish two essays in the controversial paper, one on Godwin (1 August 1795) and the other on Robert Hall (5 April 1800). For a complete discussion and transcription of Robinson’s two letters to the Intelligencer, see Whelan, “Henry Crabb Robinson and Godwinism.”

[20]In the early 1780s, however, E. K. Fordham’s Trinitarian beliefs were clearly evident in his poem, “Pray without Ceasing,” which appeared in the Gospel Magazine 8 (February 1781), p. 78. Alfred Kingston describes E. K. Fordham as “a courageous reformer in an age when reformers were misunderstood and suspected.  For the right of the people to civil and religious liberty, for Parliamentary reforms, and freedom of speech, he was a courageous champion on many a public platform at Cambridge, Hertford, Bedford, and other centres” (226).  For more on the Fordhams, see Kingston 173-74, 225-29.

[21]In “Robinsoniana,” Crabb cannot remember the date that he and Nash heard Huntington preach, but the incident is recorded in the Diary as occurring on 22 November 1812 (Sadler 1.209-10).

[22]Joseph’s sister, Martha Gurney (1733-1816), was also a bookseller (first at 14 Bell-yard and later at 128 Holborn Hill), a member at Maze Pond, and, like her brother, an active political reformer. Between 1789 and 1802, she printed or sold thirty-three political pamphlets, including fourteen anti-slave trade pamphlets. Of these pamphlets, the most significant was William Fox’s An address to the people of Great Britain on the propriety of refraining from the use of West India sugar and rum (1791), which went through 26 editions in less than a year, with a printing run estimated at 250,000 copies, making it one of the most widely distributed pamphlets in England in the eighteenth century. Joseph Gurney was also a devoted abolitionist; in 1795 he became a member of the “Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes unlawfully held in Bondage, and for Improving the Condition of the African Race.” Martha also collaborated with her brother in transcribing and printing twenty-five editions of state trials and other court proceedings between 1781 and 1813, including the trials of George, Lord Gordon (1781), Thomas Paine (1793), Thomas Hardy (1794-95), Horne Tooke (1795), William Stone (1796), Arthur O’Connor and John Binns (1798), Edward Despard (1803), and Henry Dundas, Lord Melville (1806).  For more on the Gurneys, see Salter.

[23]Gurney would also serve as vice-chairman of the Protestant Dissenting Deputies from 1805 to 1816 (Manning 481).

[24]A few weeks after Eliza Gould’s initial visit to Flower in Newgate, Crabb Robinson visited him as well (Sadler, Diary 1.32).

[25]See Cambridge Intelligencer 19 July 1794; 20 December 1794; 13 February 1796; and 21 May 1796). In 1802, Martha Gurney was one of the London booksellers for Flower’s pamphlet, Reflections on the preliminaries of peace between Great Britain and the French Republic.

[26]In his Pocket Account Book for 25 December 1794, he writes: ”My much respected and valuable friend and Relation The Revd Habakkuk Crabb of Royston Dissenting Minister Youngest Bror of my late Mother died this Day--.” Crabb’s Pocket Account Book for 1795 begins with this entry for 1 January: “mourning Buckles 2s.6d.”  Before his arrival at Royston, Rev. Crabb pastored Independent congregations at Stowmarket, Cirencester, Wattissfield (where Crabb Robinson briefly attended his school in 1789-90) between 1772 and 1790. 

[27]Palmer’s sermon was titled The Friend of Jesus. A sermon preached at Royston, January 4, 1795, on the much-lamented death of the Rev. Habakkuk Crabb, who died December 25, 1794, aged forty-five (London, 1795).  Attached to the sermon was Robert Hall’s Funeral Oration, as well as “An Elegy on the late Rev. H. Crabb, of Royston, by J. T. R” [John Towill Rutt]. In many ways, the choice of participants at Habakkuk Crabb’s funeral—an Independent, a Baptist, and a Unitarian--reflects the kind of ecumenical spirit that marked the Dissenting culture in which Crabb Robinson moved in the 1790s, a ecumenicity he would retain for the remainder of his life. Among the London booksellers of Palmer’s sermon was Thomas Knott, a Baptist, and John Conder, an Independent.

[28]HCR to Thomas Robinson, 24 April 1795, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 52. The full title of the volume was Sermons, on practical subjects: by the late Rev. Habakkuk Crabb, of Royston.  To which is added, A discourse of the celebrated Massillon, translated from the French.  To the whole are prefixed, Brief memoirs of the author, by the Rev. Hugh Worthington, jun.  (Cambridge: B. Flower, 1796).

[29]Robinson writes in his Reminiscences: “There had been established at Royston a book club, and twice a year the members of it were invited to a tea-party at the largest room the little town supplied, and a regular debate was held. In former times this debate had been honoured by the participation of no less a man than Robert Hall.  My friend J. T. Rutt and Benjamin Flower, the ultra-liberal proprietor and editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer, had also taken part” (Sadler 1.21).  His uncle Crabb was, like nearly all of Robinson’s friends in the 1790s, an avid reformer. As early as the summer of 1790, he attended a meeting of the Book Club, chaired by E. K. Fordham, in which the question concerned the recent application to Parliament for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (Habakkuk Crabb to Jemima Robinson, 27 August 1790, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 34).  He attends the Book Club again in November 1791, the question being, “Whether the national Assembly of France had a right to seize the church property,” which the majority in attendance granted they did (Habakkuk Crabb to Thomas Robinson, 9 November 1791, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 38). Crabb Robinson would open the question for debate at a meeting of the Club in December 1796, the question deriving from his Godwinism at the time, “Has man any Duties beyond those of Beneficence” (HCR to Thomas Robinson, 16 December 1796, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1., letter 85).  Robinson attended debating societies in London during this time as well, and it was in debates at the Conversation Society and the Crispin Street Meetings that he grew to know and appreciate Anthony Robinson, of whom Crabb writes to his brother Thomas on 9 June 1797: “Anthony Robinson is a Giant who crushes his opponents but I love him he is an amiable man.  And you will probably be pleased to hear that he speaks of our late Uncle Crabb with great kindness & esteem” (Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol.1, letter 96). The Book Club would decline after 1798, largely due to the change in the political climate in England, in which reformers were placed on the defensive, many reversing earlier positions, especially on the French Revolution.

[30]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 80.

[31]Robinson writes about his Godwin’s Political Justice in his Reminiscences: I entered fully into its spirit, it left all others behind in my admiration, and I was willing even to become a martyr for it; for it soon became a reproach to be a follower of Godwin, on account of his supposed atheism.  I never became an atheist, but I could not feel aversion or contempt towards G. on account of any of his views… His idea of justice I then adopted and still retain … And I thought myself qualified to be his defender, for which purpose I wrote a paper which was printed in Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer (Sadler 1.18).

[32]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 99.

[33]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 116.

[34]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 114.

[35]On the back page HCR wrote much later, “Copy Ltr to Hall very bad Kept only on acct of the answer.”  He writes in his Reminscences, “My letter [to Hall] I have also preserved.  It is as ill as his is well written” (Sadler 1.25).

[36]2 September 1798, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 117.

[37]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 118.

[38]Shortly thereafter Robinson wrote to William Pattison, informing him that he has just “received a Letter from Hall---just what I expected, personally respectful, a Retraction of some Assertions on further Information, an Acknowledgmt that his Asperity was not to be justified but on the whole a Vindication of his Conduct as justified by general Report” (Corfield and Evans 163).

[39]4 February 1799, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 106.

[40]Not long after Hall’s visit to Haverford-West in 1799, Phillips would remove to London, beginning a long and influential ministry at the Independent congregation at Clapham. Hall and Phillips would correspond regularly with each other for the next twenty years.

[41]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 132.

[42]28 August 1799, Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, no. 127. In his old age, Robinson added a note to Johns’s letter: “Evan Johns was an Independent minister, a character so remarkable that I do not like to destroy the single memorial of him, tho’ no one may care to read it. He was an old Jacobin and a fierce Calvinist.” He says Johns later went to America where he made himself “ridiculous” by his insolent attitude toward the American ministers.

[43]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 1, letter 134.

[44]In the Apology Hall contended that the grounds for war with France were specious at best, led by a corrupt Parliament and Pitt administration which were depleting nation of its wealth and morale. “Under the torpid touch of despotism,” he exclaims, “the patriotic spirit has shrunk into a narrow compass . . . Is not the kingdom peopled with spies and informers? Are not inquisitorial tribunals erected in every corner of the land?”   If war will maintain the "national honour, and the faith of treaties" (105), then Hall will support it.  "But if the re-establishment of the ancient government of France be any part of the object; if it be a war with freedom, a confederacy of Kings against the rights of man; it will be the last humiliation and disgrace that can be inflicted on Great Britain" (105-06).

[45]Samuel Horsley (1733-1806), in A Review of the Case of the Protestant Dissenters with reference to the Corporation and Test Acts  (1790) and A Sermon Preached before the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, on Wednesday, January 30, 1793 (1793), reiterated the doctrine of unlimited submission to the King and his Church, and in so doing greatly angered Dissenting ministers throughout England.  The latter sermon so provoked Robert Hall that he delayed the publication of his Apology so that in his Preface he could attack the Bishop in language so daring [“when we reflect on the qualities which distinguish this prelate, that venom that hisses, and that meanness that creeps, the malice that attends him to the sanctuary and pollutes the altar, we feel a similar perplexity with that which springs from the origin of evil”(xvi)] that the youthful Crabb Robinson apparently thought sufficient to secure Hall’s position as a leading spokesman for radical reform forever, which explains his despair in 1800 over Hall’s Modern Infidelity.   The Rev. Richard Ramsden (1761-1831), a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, in his sermons The Origins and Ends of Government (January 1800), Reflections on War and the Final Cessation of All Hostility (March 1800), and The Alliance betwen the Church and the State (November 1800), followed Horsley’s advocacy of submission to the government and support of the war with France, with anyone opposed to such a position being nothing less than a “vile Jacobin.”

[46]Hall’s Christianity Consistent with a Love of Freedom (1791) was a response to a sermon by the Calvinist Dissenting minister John Clayton (1754-1843), Benjamin Flower’s brother-in-law and pastor of the Independent congregation meeting at the Weigh-House in London.  In The Duty of Christians to Magistrates (24 July 1791), Clayton chastised his fellow Dissenting ministers, such as Joseph Priestley and Robert Hall, for being disloyal both to the King and their vocation by engaging in political disputes with the government.  John Martin (1741-1820), another London Baptist minister, irritated Dissenters in 1791 with A Review of Some Things Pertaining to Civil Government, in which he argued, much like Clayton, that “every private man is bound, by divine authority, to submit peaceably to the civil power of that country in which he resides or lives, in all cases where his submission would leave him in the enjoyment of a good conscience” (28).  Martin was severely censured by many of his dissenting brethren for his conduct, "political subserviency," and catering to the good graces of the Established church by being appointed (after appealing directly to the Archibishop of Canterbury and Mr. Pitt) almoner of the Regium Donum in 1795, at which the other dissenting ministers withdrew and left Martin with the entire sum to dispense with as he so chose (about £1500 a year) (Morris 68).  In reference to this, Robert Hall noted that "Judas had no acquaintance with the chief priests, till he went to transact business with them" (68).   Later, in 1798 Martin would provoke even more wrath among Dissenters when, after defending the Test and Corporation Acts, he boasted that many Dissenters would be willing to join with the French should they land in England.

[47]After Robinson’s letter was attacked by a Hall supporter in the Intelligencer on 17 May 1800, Thomas Robinson responded himself (signing the letter “T.R.”) on 21 June.  Though Hall had long been, and would continue to be, a revered friend of the family, Thomas joined his brother in chastising Hall for his apostasy to the Dissenting cause and his poor logic. Obviously familiar with Hall’s previous political works, he writes of his expectation of similar sentiments in the Sermon:  “but instead of those generous principles, and liberal opinions, which heretofore shed a transcendant lustre on his character, I was most deeply concerned to find them diametrically opposite to every idea I had formed; and alas! instead of a mirror to exhibit with additional clearness and strength, his former principles, he has encircled himself in a cloud that will dim, if not totally obliterate the splendour of his past efforts in the sacred cause of civil and religious liberty.” Thomas then chides Hall for failing to uphold the most basic principles of non-conformity he had so boldly championed in the early 1790s: “It plainly appears to me, that Mr. Hall is infected with the contagion which is so peculiarly the diagnostic of the times,--considering the absence of the mere externals of christianity as the absence of all piety, and the abolishing the interference and support of human authority as annihilating all religion.  Enlightened and capacious minds have ever considered the alliance between christianity and temporal power as the most formidable hindrance to the success of pure religion, and have looked forward with rapture to the period when it will be divested of all civil impediment, and be left to make its way in the earth, (unshackeled and unsupported) by its own intrinsic excellence: such, has heretofore been the opinion of Mr. Hall, but he now descends from the heights of philosophical grandeur, to invite establishments to an union as allies to extirpate Infidelity:--those very establishments which he has repeatedly asserted to be not only hostile to christianity, but the fountain from whence Infidelity receives its principal supplies--where prayers are morality, and kneeling religion.”

[48]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 2, letter 5.

[49]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 3, letter 4.

[50]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 4, letter 12. See also Thomas Robinson to Crabb Robinson, 29 March 1805, in which Thomas writes: “The Book Club continues but is a languid state--Mr. Rutt told me there was a little life at Christmas when some young unfledged orators of the second generation made trial of their opinions.  This perhaps might serve to amuse in the absence of the Halls, the Harts, the Flowers & the Robinsons, these giants of the forum.  I am happy to tell you that Hall is recovered, and is returned to Cambridge and will shortly, if he has not already done it, enter upon his public duties.  The Congregation during his affliction raised a handsome subscription (I believe not less than £2000) which is vested for his benefit.  A liberality which reflects honour on both parties” (Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 4, letter 8).

[51]Crabb Robinson Correspondence, vol. 4, letter 17.

[52]The only other discussion of Crabb Robinson that mentions his knowledge of or relationship to Robert Hall occurs in Oliphant (3.318-19), which essentially summarizes the material from volume one of Sadler.  Sadler, however, does include several more references by Robinson to Hall in his later years—see 1.173, 375, 404-05; 2.153, 161.

[53]See Janet R. Walker and Richard W. Burkhardt, Eliza Julia Flower [Muncie: Ball State UP, 1991), pp. 132-33.  Walker and Burkhardt include complete transcriptions of twelve letters from Eliza Andrews Flower to her nephew, John Rutt Andrews, written between 1833 and 1837. 

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