The First Evangelical Tract Society

Bibliographic Data

ID8958338
AuthorsIsabel Rivers (0000-0001-6102-9075, Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author)
Year2007
Volume50
Issue1
Pages1-22
Publication date2007-02-13
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Historical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0018246x06005899
OpenAlexW2103931884
LanguageEN
Citations received11

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century

Distribution (mathematics · Media studies · Object (grammar · Political science · Publishing · Reading (process · Social science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Scottish History and National Identity

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