This book explores the missionary movement's influence on popular perceptions of empire and race in nineteenth-century England. The foreign missionary endeavor was one of the most influential of the channels through which nineteenth-century Britons encountered the colonies, and because of their ties to organized religion, foreign missionary societies enjoyed more regular access to a popular audience than any other colonial lobby. Focusing on the influential denominational case of English Congregationalism, this study shows how the missionary movement's audience in Britain was inundated with propaganda designed to mobilize financial and political support for missionary operations abroad, propaganda in which the imperial context and colonized targets of missionary operations figured prominently. In her attention to the local social contexts in which missionary propaganda was disseminated, the author departs from the predominantly cultural thrust of recent studies of imperialism's popularization. She shows how Congregationalists made use of the language and institutional space provided by missions in their struggles to negotiate local relations of power. In the process, the missionary project was implicated in some of the most important developments in the social history of nineteenth-century Britain -- the popularization of organized religion and its subsequent decline, the emergence and evolution of a language of class, the gendered making of a middle class, and the strange death of British liberalism.

This book seeks to bring coherence to two of the most studied periods in British history, Caroline non-conformity (pre-1640) and the British revolution (post-1642). It does so by focusing on the pivotal years of 1638–44 where debates around non-conformity within the Church of England morphed into a revolution between Parliament and its king. Parliament, saddled with the responsibility of re-defining England’s church, called its Westminster assembly of divines to debate and define the content and boundaries of that new church. Typically this period has been studied as either an ecclesiastical power struggle between Presbyterians and independents, or as the harbinger of modern religious toleration. This book challenges those assumptions and provides an entirely new framework for understanding one of the most important moments in British history.

Historians of the English congregational hymn, focusing on its literary or theological aspects, have usually found the genre out of step with the rationalist era that produced it. This book takes a more balanced approach to the work of four writers and concludes that only eighteenth-century Britain, with its understanding of public verse, common truth, and the utility of poetry, could have invented the English hymn as we know it. The early hymns sought to inspire, teach, stir, and entertain congregations. The essential purpose shifted slightly in line with each poet's setting and in accord with the poetic thought of his day. For Isaac Watts's Independents, powerful traditional imagery was appropriate. Charles Wesley's enthusiasm proceeded from and served the spirit of the revival. John Newton's prophetic vision particularly suited the impoverished community at Olney. William Cowper's masterful handling of formal conventions and his idiosyncratic personal hymns reflect his poetic, rather than clerical, vocation. Despite such temporal variations, the great poetry by each man displays themes of general Christian relevance, suggesting common experience, showing normative features of the genre, and bearing a complex and intriguing relationship to secular literature.