We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
THE INFLUENCE OF POPULAR FEELING
What we have just seen from The Critical Review is a reminder of just how important popular feeling was in shaping critical opinion. Ever since Tyndale set out to give the Bible to the ploughboy, there had been an association between the English Bible and the ill-educated: literacy and Bible-reading went hand in hand, as in the stories of William Maldon or of Defoe's Somerset schoolboy (see above, pp. 10 and 214). The kind of simple love and faith such as Bishop Patrick's maid had shown for the singing Psalms (see above, p. 124) were common responses to the Bible. One Josiah Langdale, born in 1673, recalls that ‘I had not time for much schooling … yet I made a little progress in Latin, but soon forgot it; I endeavoured, however, to keep my English, and could read the Bible and delighted therein.’ Such comments have a representative value, as does this recollection of the ‘domestic interiors of the husbandmen or farmers’ in the Lothians in the 1760s: ‘no book was so familiar to them as the Scriptures; they could almost tell the place of any particular passage, where situated in their own family Bible, without referring to either book, chapter or verse; and where any similar one was situated’.
From the 1760s on such intense and widespread feeling and familiarity among the less educated played an important role in the rise of admiration for the KJB among the intelligentsia. In spite of their wider reading and their education in Augustan standards, they were catching up with the people.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
