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THE FIRST EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 February 2007

ISABEL RIVERS
Affiliation:
School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London

Abstract

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2007 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This article is partly a development of material in my forthcoming book, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: dissenting, methodist, and evangelical literary culture in England, 1720–1800. Some of it has been delivered as seminar papers at the universities of Sheffield, Cambridge, Wittenberg-Halle, Greenwich, and Sussex, and at Dr Williams's Library.