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Strauss's English Propagandists and the Politics of Unitarianism, 1841–1845

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Valerie A. Dodd
Affiliation:
Ms. Dodd is tutor of English in Saint Clare's Hall, Oxford, England.

Extract

In 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson stated boldly that the English “cannot interpret the German mind.” 1Although German higher criticism did not “merely attack the Scriptures” but rather “studied them in a new spirit,” it was to be censured, feared, ignored, or misunderstood in the early decades of the nineteenth century in England.2 Such was not the case in the country which gave birth to the school of which David Friedrich Strauss is perhaps the most notorious and most distinguished representative. Eduard Zeller asserted that, in his own country, Strauss's work “had … a decided effect upon the philosophy and the general culture of our own day.”3

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1981

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References

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46. I would like to thank the Reverend Andrew Hill for giving me this information from his own research.

47. Basil Short, “R.E.B. Maclellan and the Dissenters' Chapels.” I would like to thank the Reverend Short for his permission to use this unpublished lecture and also his lecture “The Radicals: T.C. Colfox, Philip Harwood et al”

48. Quoted in Short, “The Radicals.”

49. Ibid.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid.

52. This information is from Andrew Hill.

53. Quoted in Short, “The Radicals.”

54. This information is in a letter to me from Andrew Hill. He quotes from papers at Saint Mark's Chapel, Edinburgh. Compare Strauss's views as explained by Hodgson, Peter C., ed., The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Philadelphia, 1973), p. xx.Google Scholar

55. This information is from Andrew Hill.

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71. Ibid., pp. 128–129.

72. Ibid., p. 40.

73. Ibid., p. 59; compare The Christian Teacher, n.s. 6(1844): 212.

74. Conway, pp. 83–84. This account is disputed by Hodgson, pp. xlvi-xlix. The lectures are also mentioned by the explorer and scientist Alfred Russel Wallace in My Life, 2 vols. (London, 1905), 1: 227228.Google Scholar

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90. There is, at this point in my discussion, a bibliographical problem. The copy in the Bodleian Library is in four volumes and might be either a bound collection of numbers or a simultaneous reprint in book form from the type of the numbers edition. Crowther, pp. 47–48, suggests two distinct editions: one published in Birmingham and one published by Hetherington. I discuss the dual imprint of the Bodleian copy in the text of this article. However, if Crowther's hypothesis is correct, the publishers may have joined forces at some point for mutual protection. I have been unable to trace any reference to Joseph Taylor's publishing business.

91. See Engels, p. 265.

92. On this topic, see Harrison, Stanley, Poor Man's Guardians (London, 1975);Google ScholarHollis, Patricia, The Pauper Press (Oxford, 1970);Google ScholarWiener, Joel H., The War of the Unstamped (Ithaca, N.Y., 1969).Google Scholar

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97. Ibid., pp. 23–26.

98. On Macerone's colorful career, see Dictionary of National Biography, 1967–1968 ed., s.v. “Macerone, Francis, 1788–1846.”

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103. Chadwick, , The Victorian Church, 1: 532.Google Scholar Hetherington's fear was not an idle one; see below, p. 431. The law of blaspheny still remains on the statute books in England; in the late 1970s a private prosecution was brought against Gay News for publishing a poem which was said to defame the image of Christ.

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108. He is not noted by any of the historians of the working class press cited in n. 92. His name does not figure in any of the Birmingham trade directories and guides for the period.

109. Barker, p. 57.

110. Bellamy and Saville, 1: 167; Barker, p. 4.

111. The Christian Teacher, n.s. 3(1841): 357.

112. Ibid., 353.

113. Mineka, p. 103.

114. The Christian Teacher, n.s. 3(1841): 354.

115. Ibid., p. 355.

116. Barker, p. 59; Conway, p. 23.

117. The account which follows incorporates information from Douglas, J.D., ed., New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1978),Google Scholar hereafter cited as NIDCC, and the section on Universalism by Eddy, Richard in The American Church History Series, 13 vols. (New York, 1894), 10: 251493.Google Scholar

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119. Ibid.

120. NIDCC, s.v. “Universalism.”

121. Chadwick, Owen, The Reformation, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 192194.Google Scholar See also Chadwick, , Secularization, p. 75.Google Scholar When he was in England from 1842–1844, Engels made a study of groups of “Christian Communists” and wrote an essay on them in the winter of 1844–1845. Chadwick comments that these were small, puritanical, and often eccentric groups, whose existence stems from the Anabaptist groups of the Reformation.

122. See both Eddy and Gordon.

123. NIDCC, s.v. “Universalism.”

124. Eddy, p. 414.

125. Ibid., p. 353.

126. NIDCC, s.v. “Ballou, Hosea.”

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133. Ibid., pp. 47–48. George Henry Lewes learned about Spinoza from a watchmaker in the 1830s (Kitchel, Anna T., George Lewes and George Eliot, [New York, 1933], pp. 910).Google Scholar

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144. Ibid., pp. 6–7.

145. The Christian Teacher, n.s. 3 (1841): 226–254.

146. Ibid., pp. [265]-284.

147. Ibid., n.s. 4 (1842): 197–203.

148. Ibid., pp. 354–377.

149. Hallische Jahrbücher 1 (1838). See Harris, p. 288; Hodgson, p. xx.

150. Haight, , George Eliot and John Chapman, pp. 67.Google Scholar

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