1 - The Primary Sources and the Wider Identity of Rational Dissent

Summary

Ease of access to a considerable number of printed sources, only relatively recently available online, allows the evaluation of this evidence alongside that of a large number of different manuscript sources, extending the scope of analysis significantly. As Jonathan Clark observed, ‘Scholarship has been democratised by technology.’ The website Discovery holds more than 32 million descriptions of records held by the National Archives and 2,500 archives across the country, allowing online identification of sources and their whereabouts. Of these, nine million records are available for download. Although ECCO is not a complete collection of all relevant primary sources, because of its very size it may be taken as indicative of trends. Access to relevant primary sources on this scale has allowed this book to focus on consideration of a wider range of questions about the nature of Rational Dissent and more accurate and effective examination of hypotheses. It has enabled extensive statistical analysis of lists of subscribers to Rational Dissenting publications and organisations. In turn, this has created the opportunity for a measure of quantification of a number of aspects of Rational Dissenting identity, including its appeal. Moreover, and very importantly, analysis of sources on ECCO reinforces the conclusions which this study draws from manuscript sources, published books, pamphlets, tracts, and newspapers.

It is widely recognised that analysis of online databases presents some difficulties of which the researcher needs to be aware. Research into the methodology of Gale, responsible for the construction of the ECCO database, establishes that all texts have been rekeyed. Search facilities do not rely on optical character recognition, which can prove unreliable where the text of sources is faint or worn. Although the reader sees a scanned image of the original text, the search facility searches the rekeyed version. Accuracy of results was further assisted by the ‘fuzzy’ search facility, which additionally allowed for identification of associated search terms. In response to specialist advice from the University of Kent Statistics Desk on analysis of sources on ECCO, this book adopts two statistical lines of approach. Firstly, in order to set the perceived importance of Rational Dissent in its historical context, the percentage number of documents featuring perceptions of Arians, Socinians, and Unitarians in the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s were compared with the percentage number in each of the three preceding decades.