East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

As was to be expected, I was taken to the Old Meeting House at Norwich, where many learned men had preached, and where many men almost as learned listened. The gigantic pews, in which a small family might have lived, filled me with amazement. And equally appalling to me was the respectability of the people, of a very different class from that of our Wrentham chapel. Close by was the Octagon Chapel, where the Unitarians worshipped, equally impressive in its respectability. But what struck me most was the new and fashionable Baptist chapel of St. Mary’s, where the venerable and learned Kinghorn preached – a great Hebrew scholar and the champion of strict communion – against Robert Hall, and other degenerate Baptists, who were ready to admit to the Lord’s Table any Christians, whether properly baptized – that is, by immersion when adults – or merely sprinkled as infants. Up to this day I confound the worthy man with John the Baptist, probably because he looked so lank and long and lean. He was a man of singularly precise habits, so much so that I heard of an old lady who always regulated her cooking by his daily walk, putting the dumplings into the pot to boil when he went, and taking them out when he returned. I could write much about him, but cui bono? who cares about a dead Baptist lion? Not even the Baptists themselves. On going into their library in Castle Street the other day, to look at Kinghorn’s life, I found no one had taken the trouble to cut the pages. In the front gallery of St. Mary’s, Mr. Brewer, the Norwich schoolmaster, had sittings for the boys of his school, including his own sons, who, at King’s College and elsewhere, have done much to illustrate our national history and literature. If I remember aright, one of the congregation was a jolly-looking old gentleman who, as Uncle Jerry, laid the foundation of a mustard manufactory, which has placed one of the present M.P.’s for Norwich at the head of a business of unrivalled extent. When Mr. Kinghorn died, his place was taken by Mr. Brock, better known as Dr. Brock, of Bloomsbury Chapel, London. Under Mr. Brock’s preaching the reputation of St. Mary’s Chapel was increased rather than diminished. As a young man himself at that time, he was peculiarly attractive to the young, and the singing was very different from the rustic psalmody of my native village, in spite of the fact that we had a bass-viol at all times, and on highly-favoured occasions such an array of flutes and clarionets as really astonished the natives and delighted me.

But to return to the Old Meeting. Calamy writes of one of the Norwich ministers, of the name of Cromwell, that ‘he enjoyed but one peaceable day after his settlement, being on the second forced out of his meeting-house, the licenses being called in, and then for nine years together he was never without trouble. Sometimes he was pursued with indictments at sessions, at assizes, and then with citations of the ecclesiastical courts; and at other times feigned letters, rhymes or libels were dropped in the streets or church and fathered upon him, so that he was forced to make his house his prison. At length that was broken open, and he absconded into the houses of his friends, till he contracted his old disease’ a second time. It is said that he was invited on one occasion to dine with Bishop Reynolds, when several young clergy were present. When Mr. Cromwell retired, the Bishop rose and attended him, and then a general laugh ensued. On his return his lordship rebuked his guests for their unmannerly conduct, and told them that Mr. Cromwell had more solid divinity in his little finger than all of them had in their bodies. It must be remembered that, like most of the early Independent ministers, Mr. Cromwell had a University training; and even in my young days the respect shown to a learned ministry kept up not a little of the high standard which had been laid down by the fathers and founders of Dissent. In these more degenerate days it is to be questioned whether as much can be said. The Old Meeting House at Norwich was finished as far back as 1643. The only pastor of the church who was not an author was the Rev. Dr. Scott, who died in 1767. In the Octagon Chapel the preachers had been still more distinguished. One of them was the Rev. Dr. Taylor, author of the famous Hebrew Concordance, which was published in two volumes folio, and was the labour of fourteen years. He left Norwich to become tutor at the newly-erected Academy at Warrington; but his son, Mr. Edward Taylor, the Gresham Professor of Music, was often a visitor at Wrentham, where he had a little property, which he valued, as it gave him a vote. Another of the preachers at the Octagon was the Rev. R. Alderson, who afterwards became Recorder of Norwich. The Mr. Edward Taylor of whom I have just written was baptized by him. One day, being under examination as a witness in court, Alderson questioned him as to his age. ‘Why,’ said Taylor, a little nettled, ‘you ought to know, for you baptized me.’ ‘I baptized you!’ exclaimed Alderson. ‘What do you mean?’ The Recorder never liked to be reminded of his having been a preacher. The Marchioness of Salisbury is of this family. Perhaps, of these Unitarian preachers, one of the most distinguished was Dr. William Enfield, whose ‘Speaker’ was one of the books placed in the hands of ingenuous youth, and whose ‘History of Philosophy’ was one of the works to be studied in their riper years. Norwich, indeed, was full of learned men. Its aged Bishop, Bathurst, was the one voter for Reform, much to the delight of William IV., who said that he was a fine fellow, and deserved to be the helmsman of the Church in the rough sea she would soon have to steer through. His one offence in the eyes of George III. was that he voted against the King – that is, in favour of justice to the Catholics. With such a Bishop a Reformer, no wonder that all Norwich went wild with joy when the battle of Reform was fought and won. Bishop Stanley, who succeeded, was also in his way a great Liberal, and invited Jenny Lind to stay with him at the palace. I often used to see him at Exeter Hall, where his activity as a speaker afforded a remarkable contrast to the quieter style of his more celebrated son.

Accidentally looking into the life of Bishop Bathurst, I find printed in the Appendix some interesting conversations at Earlham, where Joseph John Gurney lived. On one occasion, when Dr. Chalmers was staying there, Joseph John Gurney writes: ‘W. Y. breakfasted with us, and with his usual strong sense and talent called forth the energies of Chalmers’ mind. They conversed on the subject of special Providence, and of the unseen yet unceasing superintendence of the Creator of all the events which occur in this lower world. Said W. Y.: “Mr. Barbauld, the husband of the authoress, was once a resident in my house. He was a man of low opinions in religion, and denied the agency of an unseen spirit on the mind of man.” I remarked that when the mind was determined to a certain right action by a combination of circumstances productive of the adequate motives, and meeting from various quarters precisely at the right point for the purpose in view, this was in itself a sufficient evidence of an especial Providence, and might be regarded as the instrumentality through which the Holy Spirit acts. Mr. Barbauld admitted the justice of this argument.’ Again I read: ‘W. Y. supported the doctrine that nature is governed through the means of general laws – laws which broadly and obviously mark the wisdom and benevolence of God.’ One extract more: ‘W. Y. expressed his admiration of the masterly manner in which Dr. Chalmers, in his “Bridgewater Treatise,” has fixed on the atheist a moral obligation to inquire into the truth of religion; but, said he, might not the disciples of Irving, by the same rule, oblige us to an inquiry into the supposed evidences of their favourite doctrine that Christ is about to appear and to reign personally on earth? Might not even the Mahometan suppose in the Christian a similar necessity as it relates to the pretensions of the false prophet?’ If Joseph Gurney sent for W. Y. to converse with Dr. Chalmers as a genial spirit, surely the name of one so honourable and of one so friendly both to my father and myself should not be omitted. W. Y. loved a joke. He was very stout, and wore tight black knee breeches with shoes and silk stockings. I remember how he made me laugh one day as he described what happened to his knee-breeches as he stooped to tie up his shoes ere attending a place of worship. To cut a long story short, I may add W. Youngman did not go to church that day. Originally I think he was a dyer.

Harriet Martineau, as all the world knows, was born at Norwich. In her somewhat ill-natured autobiography she writes: ‘Norwich, which has now no social claims to superiority at all, was in my childhood a rival of Lichfield itself, in the time of the Sewards, for literary pretensions and the vulgarity of pedantry. William Taylor was then at his best, when there was something like fulfilment of his early promise, when his exemplary filial duty was a fine spectacle to the whole city, and before the vice which destroyed him had coarsened his morale and destroyed his intellect. During the war it was a great distinction to know anything of German literature, and in Mr. Taylor’s case it proved a ruinous distinction. He was completely spoiled by the flatteries of shallow men, pedantic women, and conceited lads.’ Yet this man was the friend of Southey and opened up a new world to the English intellect, and perhaps in days to come will have a more enduring reputation than Harriet Martineau herself. The lady does not err on the side of good nature in her criticism. All she can say of Dr. Sayers is: ‘I always heard of him as a genuine scholar, and I have no doubt he was superior to his neighbours in modesty and manners. Dr. Enfield, a feeble and superficial man of letters, was gone also from the literary supper-table before my time. There was Sir James Smith, the botanist, made much of and really not pedantic and vulgar like the rest, but weak and irritable. There was Dr. Alderson, Mrs. Opie’s father, solemn and sententious and eccentric in manner, but not an able man in any way;’ and thus the leading lights of Norwich are contemptuously dismissed. ‘The great days of the Gurneys were not come yet. The remarkable family from which issued Mrs. Fry and Priscilla and Joseph John Gurney were then a set of dashing young people, dressed in gay riding habits and scarlet boots, as Mrs. Fry told us afterwards, and riding about the country to balls and gaieties of all sorts. Accomplished and charming young ladies they were; and we children used to overhear some whispered gossip about the effects of their charms on heart-stricken young men; but their final characteristics were not yet apparent.’

It is to a Norwich man that we owe the publication of Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates. Luke Hansard, to whom they owe their name, was born in Norwich, 1725, was trained as a printer, went to London with but a guinea in his pocket, was employed by Hughes, the printer of the House of Commons, succeeded to the business and became widely known for his despatch and accuracy in printing Parliamentary papers and debates. He died in 1828, but the business was continued by his family, and to refer to Hansard became the invariable custom when an M.P. was to be condemned out of his own mouth – as Hansard was supposed never to err. Recently Hansard has been carried on by a company, but the old name still remains.

Dr. Stoughton has in vain, in a number of the Congregationalist, attempted to record the memory of a man well known and much honoured in his day – the Rev. John Alexander, of Norwich. The portrait is a failure. It gives us no idea of the man with his rosy face, his curly black hair, his merry, twinkling eye, his joyous laugh, when mirth befitted the occasion, or his tender sympathy where pain and sorrow and distress had to be endured. Mr. Alexander’s jubilee was celebrated in St. Andrew’s Hall in 1867, when the Mayor and a crowd of citizens did him honour, and a sum of money for the purchase of an annuity was presented, thus obviating the necessity of doing to him as on one occasion he in his humorous way suggested should be done with old ministers when past work – that they should be shot. In 1817 Mr. Alexander had come to Norwich to preach in the old Whitfield Tabernacle in place of Mr. Hooper, one of the tutors at Hoxton Academy. When I went to Norwich he had built a fine chapel in Prince’s Street, and amongst the hearers was Mr. Tillet, then in a lawyer’s office, a young man famous for his speeches at the Mechanics’ Institute and in connection with a literary venture, the Norwich Magazine, not destined to set the Thames on fire; latterly an M.P. for Norwich and proprietor and editor, I believe, of one of the most popular of East Anglian journals, the Norfolk News. It was in Prince’s Street Chapel I first learned to realize how influential was the Nonconformist public, of which I frankly admit in our little village, with Churchmen all round, I had but a limited idea. It seemed to me that we were rather a puny folk, but at Norwich, with its chapels and pastors and people, I saw another sight. There was the Rev. John Alexander, with an overflowing audience on the Sunday and an active vitality all the week, now dining at the palace with the Bishop or breakfasting at Earlham with the Gurneys, now meeting on terms of equality the literati of the place (at that time Mrs. Opie was still living near the castle, and Mr. Wilkins was writing his life of the far-famed Norwich doctor, the learned and ingenious author of the ‘Religio Medici’), now visiting the afflicted and the destitute, now carrying consolation to the home of the mourner. John Alexander was a man to whom East Anglian Nonconformity owes much. In the old city there was a good deal of young intelligence, and a good deal of it amongst the Noncons. Dr. Sexton was one of the Old Meeting House congregation, as was Lucy Brightwell, a lady not unknown to the present generation of readers. To a certain extent a Noncon. is bound to be more or less intelligent. He finds a great State Establishment of religion wherever he goes. It enjoys the favour of the Court. It is patronized by the aristocracy. It enlists among its supporters all who wish to rise in the world or to make a figure in society. By means of the endowed schools of the land, it offers to the young, even of the humblest birth, a chance of winning a prize. Conform, it says, and you may be rich and respectable. It was said of a late Bishop of Winchester that he would forgive a man anything so long as he were but a good Churchman, and even now one meets in society with people who regard a Dissenter as little better than a heathen or a publican. A man who can thus voluntarily place himself at a disadvantage, to a certain extent, must have exercised his intellect and be ready to give a reason for the faith that is in him. Naturally, men are of the religion of the country in which they are born – Roman Catholics in Italy, Mahometans in Turkey, Buddhists in the East. It requires more power and strength of mind and decision of character to dissent from the Church of the State than to support it. ‘How was it,’ asked Dr. Storrar, Chairman of the Convocation of the University of London, the other day, ‘that the lads educated at Mill Hill Grammar School had done so well at Cambridge and Oxford?’ The reply, said the Doctor, was – I don’t give his words, merely the idea – to be found in the fact that a couple of centuries ago there were men of strong intellect and tender consciences who refused to renounce their opinions at the command of a despotic power. They had been succeeded by their sons with the same quickness of intellect and conscience. Generations one after another had come and gone, and the children of these old Nonconformists thus came to the school with an hereditary intelligence, destined to win in the gladiatorship of the school, the college, or the world.

Let me now give an anecdote of Dr. Bathurst, the Lord Bishop of Norwich, too good to be lost. It is told by Sir Charles Leman, who described him in 1839 as gradually converting his enemies into friends by his uniform straightforwardness and enlarged Christian principle. One of his clergy, who had been writing most abusively in newspapers, had on one occasion some favour to solicit, which he did with natural hesitation. The Bishop promised all in his power and in the kindest manner, and when the clergyman was about to leave the room he suddenly turned with, ‘My lord, I must say, however, I much regret the part I have taken against you; I see I was quite in the wrong, and I beg your forgiveness.’ This was readily accorded. ‘But how was it,’ the clergyman continued, ‘you did not turn your back on me? I quite expected it.’ ‘Why, you forget that I profess myself a Christian,’ was the reply.

Of a later Bishop – Stanley – whom I can well remember, a dark, energetic little man, making a speech at Exeter Hall, we hear a little in Caroline Fox’s memories of old friends. In 1848 she writes: ‘Dined very pleasantly at the palace; the Bishop was all animation and good humour, but too unsettled to leave any memorable impression. I like Mrs. Stanley much – a shrewd, sensible, observing woman. She told me much about her Bishop, how very trying his position was on first settling at Norwich; for his predecessor was an amiable, indolent old man, who let things take their course, and a very bad course too, all which the present man has to correct as way opens, and continually sacrifice popularity to a sense of right.’

The following anecdote of Miss Fox and her friends calling at a cottage in the neighbourhood of Norwich is too good to be lost. ‘A young woman,’ she writes, ‘told us that her father was nearly converted, and that a little more teaching would complete the business,’ adding, ‘He quite believes that he is lost, which is, of course, a great consolation to the old man.’ That story is racy of the soil. It is in that way the East Anglian peasantry who have any religion at all talk; they have no hope of a man who does not feel that he is lost. Well, there are many ways to heaven, and that must comfort some of us who still believe that man was made in the image of his Maker, a little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour, and not destined to an eternity of misery for the sins of a day.