Mark Burden, ed., Dissenting Academies Online: (http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/portal.html)

Dissenting Academies Online is a significant research resource for those interested in the history of religion, thought, and education in Britain between the mid-seventeenth and the late nineteenth centuries. This site is hosted by the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, a joint venture of Dr Williams’s Library in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, London, and Queen Mary University of London. Much of the site’s material relates directly to the collections of Dr Williams’s Library, the main archive of the English Nonconformist denominations, and to the ongoing research of the Dissenting Academies Project led by David Wykes, Director of the Dr Williams’s Library, and Professor Isabel Rivers of Queen Mary, and funded by a series of grants from the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Since 2006 the project has been working towards a multi-volume History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660–1860 (to be published by Cambridge University Press) and this online resource. At present Dissenting Academies Online consists primarily of two searchable databases: a Database and Encyclopedia and a Virtual Library System. The current site is enriched by a number of other ancillary tools and publications, most notably the online version of the Surman Index, a biographical card index of around 32,000 Congregational ministers from c.1650 to 1972, the e-version of the scholarly journal Enlightenment and Dissent, and edited texts on the tutor John Jennings (1687/8–1723) prepared by Tessa Whitehouse, and on New College Hackney in the 1780s prepared by Stephen Burley. Mark Burden’s A Biographical Dictionary of Tutors at the Dissenters’ Private Academies, 1660–1729 (2013) is accessible here as a text, but its ninety-one biographical entries are also accessed through the main database when searching under ‘tutors’. The whole enterprise is a triumph of careful planning and once the volumes of the History are published, we will have a near definitive platform of information and interpretation upon which scholars will draw for decades. So this is a good point in the life of the project to take stock of the evidence gathered on this website.

Dissenting Academies were first established in the aftermath of the restoration of the monarchy and the Church of England in 1660. The creation of a confessional state in which education, ministry, professions, and political office were restricted to conforming members of the Church of England left Protestant Dissenters frozen out of mainstream university education for most of the next two centuries. The academies catered for the educational needs of those who could not swallow the various oaths and tests required of Oxford and Cambridge students and graduates or who could not afford to attend the Protestant universities of the European mainland. Some academies, especially in the late seventeenth century, were one-man operations in which an ejected clergyman or a Nonconformist minister maintained a small group of students in his household. Men like Thomas Cole (1628–97), former Principal of St Mary Hall, Oxford, and ejected minister of Brampton Bryan, whose academy was located at Nettlebed in Oxfordshire during the late 1660s and early 1670s, were maintaining a godly education for a handful of tutees and providing a living for themselves. Even at this time other academies were more substantial operations: Charles Morton’s Academy at Stoke Newington, Richard Frankland’s in York, or John Woodhouse’s in Shropshire, could boast a full university curriculum. By the eighteenth century, when religious toleration had eased the practice of Protestant Nonconformity but done nothing to lift the educational, professional, and political impediments, the Dissenting Academies were evolving in several directions. Several small local institutions continued, but there were also larger academies with national reputations such as those at Northampton, Daventry, Hoxton, and Warrington. Supported by public subscription, trusts or denominational funds, these institutions were staffed by a tutor and a number of assistants. As time passed academies became increasingly associated with one denomination and many became the training colleges of that group’s ministry. The evangelical revival reinforced that trend with the foundation of institutions like the Countess of Huntingdon’s College at Trevecka and the Hackney Theological Academy that concentrated on practical training for the ministry and for overseas missionary work. The Dissenting Academies also gained a reputation for offering a different kind of education than that on offer in the ancient universities and one more in line with the advanced universities of the Netherlands, Scotland, and elsewhere. These were places where modern languages, experimental science, and civil and constitutional history were taught alongside moral philosophy and theology. Much has been made of the Dissenting Academies as the forcing ground for new ideas, curricula, and pedagogies, and of their significance as engines for modernization in fields such as philosophy, theology, science, and literature. The Warrington Academy was perhaps pre-eminent in this regard, but it was also atypical: only 53 of the 397 students who passed through its doors in the three decades after 1757 were intended for the Nonconformist ministry—as the website’s entry says, the Warrington Academy had largely shed its dissenting character. Other academies were travelling in a markedly different direction—the Wesleyan Theological Institution was created in London in 1834 by the Wesleyan Methodists to train their preachers. The original raison d’être of the Academies was undermined by the foundation of University College London in 1826 (originally as the University of London), the creation of provincial English universities, and the reform of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1850s. Some Academies relocated to the capital so that they could avail themselves of the courses taught at University College, others shut their doors, and some soldiered on: today’s Bristol Baptist College is a rare survivor from the heroic age of the eighteenth-century Dissenting Academies.

The Dissenting Academies are of undoubted importance in the evolution of British education and society: they have been seen as part of the innovative infrastructure of bourgeois, capitalist, commercial, and industrial eighteenth-century Britain and are often contrasted with the archaic hidebound universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Although a more nuanced historical picture has recently emerged of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century universities, the evidence of this website also suggests that the Academies were far from pulling in one direction. In fact the website reveals just how elastic the category of ‘Dissenting Academies’ became over two centuries. We will have to await the volumes of the published History for the full interpretation, but the welter of detail available on this site suggests that few generalizations will stand.

This site documents over two hundred academies—Congregational, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Baptist, Methodist, and non-denominational—that operated at some stage in the period from 1660 to the late nineteenth century, over 700 of the individuals who taught in these institutions, and over 11,000 students who were educated there. The majority of the students intended to become Dissenting ministers and many served in turn as tutors—so there are entries on a succession of eminent divines such as Isaac Watts, Thomas Secker, Thomas Belsham, William Vint, or Phillip Doddridge. There are entries on those like Thomas Malthus and Joseph Priestley, whose calling was clerical but whose reputation rests on other achievements, and on a host of notable scientists, industrialists, lawyers, and public figures who spent time in a Dissenting Academy.

Inevitably the information varies with the surviving evidence—and the format of the database makes this very plain. Entries on individual tutors contain tabs for ‘career’, ‘background’, ‘archival sources’, and ‘references’ (and sometimes for ‘finances’), and can be sparse, but when the information is linked to entries in Burden’s Biographical Dictionary, or to a specially created ‘biographical article’, a rich account is available to the reader—on a par with comparable entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Entries for students are even more variable in length and substance. Some are short because little seems to be known or achieved—see Jabez Stanley, born c.1833 in Bath only to die as a student at Western College, Plymouth, in 1852—or because a reference to the Oxford DNB will suffice, as is the case with Philip Doddridge or Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Entries for academies themselves are more complex than might at first appear: some are known by the name of the principal tutor, others have several locations—Horton Academy (1806–59) is also known as Horton College and Bradford Academy, but the ‘academy history’ tab reveals a full, and in this case illustrated, account of its convoluted history, and the other tabs on ‘tutors’, ‘students’, and ‘archival sources’ round out the picture. However the entry for Doddridge’s academy at Northampton between 1729 and 1751 lists 7 tutors, 205 students, and 99 archival sources, provides notes of locations and funding bodies, supplies links to contemporary maps on ‘The Vision of Britain’ website, but does not offer a potted history of the academy. Yet the entry for its successor, the Daventry Academy, does contain an excellent ‘academy history’ by David Wykes. The simple search facility is for people, academies, and archives; one can browse by students, tutors, archives, and academies; and the advanced search facility includes fields for countries of birth and death, degrees earned, honorary degrees, funding body, parents’ careers, and several others. A search for students at Baptist Bristol College whose parents were clergy and who died in Wales elicited the life of David Job, born c.1746 of a father who served as assistant pastor of Pen-y-fai Baptist church, near Bridgend. David trained in Bristol at the cost of the Particular Baptist Fund and spent many years as Unitarian Baptist minister at Frome and Taunton before dying in Swansea in c.1812. Other searches allow one to establish, for instance, that only two tutors (one of whom was Doddridge) actually taught shorthand. ‘Resources’ also handily groups together the ‘academy histories’ and ‘tutor biographies’ that appear under the appropriate person or place names.

So the database is useful, pragmatic, and easily navigated: there is a variation in the level of detail but one can generally see why this is the case. It sits well with related databases such as the ODNB or the Clergy of the Church of England Database. Other than some images and links to reproductions of maps, there is currently little attempt to present information or searches in visual terms, no GIS, nor moving images or sound files. So it is an overstatement to suggest that the site ‘set[s] a new standard in historical digital humanities resources’—but it does have one further impressive feature: the Virtual Library System is a union catalogue of the holdings of some leading Baptist, Congregational, and Presbyterian academy libraries over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thanks to some quite straightforward but painstaking work, we can now see what these libraries contained and how they were used.

The Virtual Library System brings together different categories of evidence. It uses the manuscript shelf lists or catalogues of libraries to establish which books were available and when. Thus we can know that William Ames's puritan classic Conscience with the Power and Cases thereof (1639) was listed among the Bristol Baptist Edmund Terrill's books in 1722 and appears in the 1835 shelf list of Bristol Baptist Academy, but whether this is the same copy is unknown. It is striking to see ‘Sermons & Tracts’, a miscellaneous collection of pamphlets from the mid-seventeenth century as listed as on the shelves of the Homerton Academy Library in 1824: there is a lesson here about the life of books as physical objects. And where physical copies survive to the present, as in the case of Northern Congregational College whose 2500 books were deposited in the John Rylands Library, University of Manchester, in 1975–6, much more can be established about provenance and ownership. In 1843 John Clunie (1748–1858), minister of the New Windsor Chapel, Salford, donated 770 books to Lancashire Independent College which were then passed down to Northern Congregational College. Other books in this collection had a more complex history: the copy of William Fleetwood's Two Sermons (1718) was part of a bound collection of 18 sermons owned by John Brooke of York, purchased from Brooke by William Whitaker (1695–1776), who bequeathed his books to the Old Meeting, Scarborough, where he served as minister from 1726 to 1773, and they were transferred from there to Yorkshire United Independent College and then to Northern College. The Virtual Library System is distinct from the Database and Encyclopedia, so searchers will need to refer to both—this is, for example, the only way to ascertain that the generous John Clunie had been educated at Hoxton Academy and received degrees from Glasgow University.

The third category of material is the loan registers of the libraries of four major institutions, Northern Congregational College, Manchester College, Bristol Baptist Academy, and Homerton Academy. Over 30,000 individual borrowings from these libraries have been used to create circulation histories, albeit only for short time-spans in some cases and mainly concentrated in the mid-nineteenth century, which provide an exciting glimpse of the reading preferences of students and tutors. Edinburgh Review was by far the most popular loan at Bristol and Homerton (although this may be a factor of its multi-volume status as a periodical), while the 1793 translation of J.D. Michaelis’s Introduction to the New Testament was the runaway success at Manchester. The usual eye-catching juxtapositions occur on the lists of popular loans: at Bristol in the 1850s Jean Calvin on the Psalms and Jeremy Taylor’s works appear side-by-side, but they are not always being borrowed by the same individual or for the same length of time. This is a considerate website: scanned images of the original entries in the loan register are viewable; another nice touch is the ‘shelf browser’ that shows and links to the titles that were shelved in that library adjacent to the book under consideration. The Virtual Library System is an intriguing way of manipulating dull shelf-lists and loan registers so as to pose and answer exciting questions: the underlying data remains fairly small scale, but this shows what could be done with larger datasets.

Dissenting Academies Online has a huge amount to recommend it to those interested in the history of education outside the universities. It is clearly introduced and supported, and functioned well on PC and quite well on i-pad; it will be a truly indispensable tool and one that will mesh with other developing online resources. The broader interpretative work will appear later in print, but it will stand in part on the shoulders of these databases.

History and Classics

Swansea University, UK