The influence of popular feeling

The Bible had so long been entrenched in popular culture that it is almost superfluous to recur to the point. Nevertheless, the references to popular feeling in prefaces to and reviews of new translations make a recurrence necessary. Popular feeling was a major factor in the reversal of critical opinion that took place over roughly the span of a generation, 1760–90, but particularly in the 1760s. From the beginning there was an association between the vernacular Bible and the ill-educated: literacy and Bible reading went hand in hand, as in the stories of William Maldon (see volume I, p. 86) or of Defoe's Somerset schoolboy (above, pp. 48–9). The kind of simple love and faith such as Bishop Patrick's maid had shown for the singing Psalms (above, pp. 45–6) 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 are, naturally, infrequent, but they 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’.