Reverberations of Revolution: Sound, Politics and Religious Enthusiasm in the 1790s

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the significance of sound in religion in the context of the British debate about the French Revolution. It analyses loyalist sermons and pamphlets to show that anxieties about plebeian noise exacerbated concerns about religious enthusiasm and its relationship to political radicalism. Accordingly, the acoustic aspects of worship became an issue in conservative propaganda, especially the writings of Anglican clergymen. By contrast, Christian reformers found the sound of enthusiastic religion a source of empowerment. Focusing on prophecies, hymns and sermons, this essay argues that a group of plebeian Dissenters, whose piety shaped their commitment to reform, attributed a revolutionary meaning to the sonic intensity of religious enthusiasm.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound
• radicalism
• politics
• religion
• enthusiasm

I

In early January 1791, the Paddington prophet, Richard Brothers, reported that a ‘very loud and unusual kind of thunder’ resounded throughout London. Brothers often heard thunder not simply as booming sound, but as divine speech, which communicated intelligible information. On this occasion, the thunder was the ‘voice of the angel’ from the eighteenth chapter of Revelation, ‘proclaiming the judgment of God and the fall of Babylon’. In Brothers’s mind, this message constituted the ‘loudest’ sound that had ever been created. It ‘roared through the streets, and made a noise over London like the falling of mountains of stones’.¹ Brothers caused a stir in the mid-1790s by publishing a collection of prophecies predicting the downfall of George III, identifying London as a modern Babylon, and interpreting the war with revolutionary France as a sacrilegious event, which would bring down upon Britain the wrath of God.² In a panic lest these prognostications exacerbate plebeian discontent, the government of William Pitt had the beleaguered prophet incarcerated in an insane asylum. While Brothers became a victim of the Pittite ‘Terror’, his prophetic writings were published in multiple editions, gaining a wide readership. The portrait of a sinful world suffused with apocalyptic noise resonated with the culture of popular religious enthusiasm. So, too, did the association between sound and spiritual illumination. For Brothers, the auditory imagery of the Bible, particularly Revelation, assigned divine power to thunder alongside other acoustic phenomena. Controversially, on another occasion, in 1794, the millenarian prophet predicted that ‘loud thunder’ would soon pronounce God’s judgement on the British parliament, destroying it in an instant.³

The enthusiastic strain of religious Dissent had long been characterised by a sonic orientation, not only hearing divine voices in earthly reverberations, but encompassing cries, shouts, vehement preaching, exuberant singing, and much else.⁴ Plebeian evangelical Dissenters, especially, had a reputation for making noise. Prior to the 1790s, most polite commentators on religion heard such popular enthusiasm as a social nuisance rather than a political problem. This suspicion of the sound of enthusiastic piety regularly featured in hostile responses to Methodism. But if the songs, groans and other acoustic practices of Methodists were derided as vulgar and unruly,⁵ they were rarely denounced as insurrectionary. This situation changed due to the polarisation of British society after the French Revolution.⁶ In sermons and other loyalist tracts, Anglican clergymen depicted noisy enthusiastic worship as an ungodly practice, which fostered rebelliousness as well as indecency and irrationality. For these supporters of the established order in church and state, true piety was marked by ‘godly Quietness’, as Reverend John Riland put it in an attack on the ‘Rights of Man’.⁷ By contrast, many devout members of the popular reform movement associated intense sonic experience with spiritual power. Among radical adherents of enthusiasm, noise was a vehicle of righteous protest and a vital accompaniment to revolution. In prophetic works, the imminent arrival of the millennium was often imagined as an acoustic event, with thunder or trumpet music, say, inaugurating an era of freedom in which cries and curses would yield to shouts and songs reverberating throughout the world.

This essay examines the significance of sound in religion in the context of the British debate about the French Revolution, focussing on popular enthusiastic Dissent and its perception by Anglican clergymen. While a number of scholars have shown that religious enthusiasm became politicised in the 1790s,⁸ there has been no examination of the acoustic effects of this process. Yet impassioned sounds, from crying to shouting, were ubiquitous in political propaganda addressing issues of faith. Even in the work of Jon Mee, who has done so much to enhance our understanding of enthusiastic aspects of popular political culture in Britain in the revolutionary decade,⁹ the sonic orientation of this style of affective piety has evaded analysis. Mee has explored how the infectious quality of enthusiasm became a source of anxiety for opponents of popular radical religion. But his impressive studies fail to notice that this infectiousness, as we shall see, was often assumed to be a consequence of loud, discordant sound.

A major reason why plebeian religious zeal became a source of anxiety for loyalist commentators, I propose, was because its allegedly noisy character came to be perceived as a quality aligned with popular radical activity. Plebeian reform meetings, for instance, were condemned for their ‘sonorous emptiness’,¹⁰ occasions where, according to Arthur Young in 1793, unrestrained invective, jumbled conversation and boisterous singing made sedition seem like madness.¹¹ Such noisy behaviour was associated with the low social status of popular reformers, who were denigrated for a purported failure of sensory management and emotional control.¹² Enthusiasts were reproached by loyalist critics for exhibiting similar conduct. In 1799, the Anglican clergyman, Richard Polwhele, castigated plebeian Methodists for conveying their piety with an abominable noise. Worse still, these enthusiasts cultivated a ‘spirit of levelling’, Polwhele claimed, through laughing, singing, convulsing, groaning and ‘lifting up their voices’ in loud, discordant worship.¹³ The noise of enthusiastic religion was thus feared as a potential stimulus to political radicalism.

In terms of the sound of collective political activity, ‘Church and King’ mobs were also loud assemblies, often blending violence with celebration. Local authorities tolerated or encouraged riots alongside effigy burnings.¹⁴ In 1792, for example, a loyalist devotee from Frome, Somerset, reported with delight that, after the provision of two hogsheads of beer, an ‘effigy of Tom Paine was burnt in the Public Market amidst the Acclamations of a United Multitude’.¹⁵ Participants had mixed motives for joining these assemblies. Some members of the labouring classes harboured anti-radical sentiments,¹⁶ while others simply enjoyed opportunities for unregulated conduct in an atmosphere of licenced noise. In propaganda directed to the poor, however, loyalist writers rarely expressed approval of this kind of disruptive sound. By 1795, moreover, riots were regarded as too volatile to function as reliable weapons in securing popular support for the established order.¹⁷ And by this time, noisy effigy burnings had all but ceased despite their initial ubiquity.

A more palatable acoustic medium for promoting conservative sentiments among not just the labouring classes but the general public was bell-ringing. On days of national celebration, as William Tullett has shown, the sound of church bells had long functioned to stimulate feelings of patriotism and attachments to monarchy, while signalling the dominance of official religion.¹⁸ Such political bell-ringing continued in the 1790s, with loud peals announcing successful British encounters with the fleets of republican France. Reformers, including many Dissenters, resented this use of bells to impart, sonically, a sense of national identity grounded in the alliance between church and state.

Singing was also important in the battle to inculcate either loyalist or radical sentiments in the labouring classes. During the 1790s, songs articulated political beliefs, consolidated political solidarities and aroused political passions.¹⁹ This emphasis on singing was influenced by its prominent role in French revolutionary politics. In France, the capture of the Bastille inaugurated a golden age of political songs, with ça Ira rapidly emerging as an emblem of revolutionary freedom, while being countered by songs championing the counterrevolutionary cause.²⁰ This culture of French revolutionary singing had a global impact. Another republican anthem, the Marseillaise, provided ideas and expressions of liberty which were adapted to different circumstances by insurrectionaries in Haiti as well as reformers in Britain.²¹ In Paris, sans culottes modelled their meetings on religious services, but substituted revolutionary songs for hymns.²² As we shall see, popular reform societies in London and regional towns like Sheffield adopted a similar practice.

In Britain, moreover, religious ideas and allusions often featured in songs expressive of both radicalism and loyalism. Radical songs were important to the popular reform movement, but they did not circulate as widely, in print or performance, as conservative songs. After the French Revolution, according to Mark Philp, music was more instrumental in generating a popular disposition to loyalism than in promoting the cause of reform.²³ While reformers parodied and resisted ‘God Save the King’,²⁴ this unofficial anthem became pervasive, conflating patriotism with conservatism.²⁵ And yet, in the fraught political environment of the 1790s, the capacity of music to galvanise the passions continued to trouble conservative observers when it applied to the crowd.²⁶

Within loyalist circles, fear of noisy plebeian activity grew during this decade. The animated, emotionally charged sound of reform meetings, especially large outdoor gatherings, terrified the ruling elite because of the association with a new kind of crowd, which was not orchestrated from above in the vein of old-style political riots. Loud radical assemblies were held to be novel manifestations of popular power.

If the elite suspicion of noisy collective behaviour escalated due to the advent of plebeian radicalism, it also compounded the negative perception of popular affective piety. This essay examines loyalist sermons and tracts, chiefly by Anglican clergymen, to show that the capacity of sound to unite the labouring classes and incite their passions exacerbated concerns about religious enthusiasm and its relationship to radical political activity. Accordingly, the acoustic aspects of worship became a notable theme in conservative propaganda, of which the writings of churchmen comprised an important part. Such writings often linked quietness to a distinctively British national identity, though my analysis is limited to Anglicanism and its response to English radicalism rather than the situation in Scotland, Ireland or Wales. Despite the harangues of Anglican clergymen, some Christian reformers in England found the acoustic dimensions of enthusiastic religion a source of empowerment. Focussing on prophecies, hymns and radical sermons, this essay argues that a group of plebeian Dissenters, whose piety shaped their commitment to reform, attributed a revolutionary meaning to the sonic intensity of religious enthusiasm. These writings were published in cheap, often multiple editions, predominantly in London, by booksellers supportive of the sound of popular enthusiastic Dissent, including millenarianism. As the noise of plebeian disaffection was heard as an expression of divine judgement, such publications constituted innovative attempts to demonstrate the radical dictum vox populi, vox dei.

II

Enthusiastic religion relied on sound to transform devotion into a personal, passionate affair,²⁷ perhaps best exemplified by the use of congregational hymns. By the 1790s, congregational singing was a central feature of worship among Dissenters of many different denominations.²⁸ Encapsulating the emotional power of music, hymns were valued for instilling vitality and authenticity in devotion. The evangelical movement, most notably Methodism, was even more influential in making singing fundamental to public worship. John Wesley recognised the capacity of hymns to excite spiritual passions, popularise theological ideas, deepen communal bonds and enliven religious meetings.²⁹ Moreover, for Methodists, singing complemented other acoustic practices such as energetic preaching and spontaneous shouting, which also communicated strong emotions through sound. Wesley tried to police enthusiasm within Methodism by formulating rules about the proper use of these acoustic practices.³⁰ Nevertheless, the movement fertilised a culture of religious zeal, grounded in intense sonic experience, which appealed to the labouring classes, whose rich oral tradition was redirected to affective piety, just as hymns were set to popular tunes.³¹

In the eighteenth century, enthusiastic Dissenters expressed their fervour in songs and exclamations, while their hearts were stirred by both hearing and making all manner of utterances. Among Methodists, too, outdoor worship required loud preaching and created a dramatic atmosphere in which participants not only sung hymns, but regularly interjected with vocal affirmations.³² Although plebeian enthusiasts perceived the sound of such meetings to be pleasing to God, polite commentators dismissed it as ‘hideous Noise’.³³

Drawing on theories of music, accounts of enthusiasm throughout the eighteenth century identified noise as an agent of emotional contagion. Rather than being contagious in its own right, religious zeal was considered to be induced, expressed and transmitted by sounds associated with enthusiastic worship, from rousing hymns to involuntary vocalisations.³⁴ This was a view propounded in several major treatises on enthusiasm in the mid-century.³⁵ The Anglican clergyman, Thomas Green, asserted that just ‘hearing the noise’ of convulsions was enough to trigger similar episodes in nearby auditors.³⁶ To some extent, the wariness of congregational singing within the Anglican Church stemmed from this link between loud worship and volatile emotionalism. While evangelicalism led to hymns of human composition gaining in respectability, they were not legalised until the second decade of the nineteenth century.³⁷

Such a supposition about the infectious nature of enthusiastic sound was bound to become an issue in the debate about the French Revolution. For, in the 1790s, an affinity for extreme acoustic phenomena was held to be not only a hallmark of popular Dissent, but a characteristic of plebeian radicalism. As millenarian believers heard in thunder a divine message about the impending establishment of a Christian republic in Britain, loyalist propaganda sought to discredit popular religious enthusiasm.

During the 1790s, the belief, among loyalist writers, that popular religious enthusiasm stimulated radicalism was associated with a fear that noisy piety incited irreverent and militant behaviour. This view was elaborated by William Hamilton Reid. A man of multiple identities, Reid was initially committed to political reform out of a sense of Christian devotion. After being arrested in early 1798, however, he swapped political allegiances and became a loyalist spy.³⁸ In his attack on popular radical societies, Reid argued that, following the French Revolution, religious enthusiasts constituted ‘one of the leading causes of the dangers arising to the church and government of this kingdom’.³⁹ According to Reid, it was the sonic intensity of enthusiasm, which made it so subversive. Specifically, he claimed that loud preaching and worship facilitated the transmission of extreme collective emotions, including outrage. This problematic development was considered to erode deference in plebeian Dissenting circles. A contemporary observer noted that the labouring classes were attracted to hellfire sermons spoken with ‘vociferation and gesticulation’ in an ‘angry tone’.⁴⁰ As ‘illiterate enthusiasts’, echoed Reid, plebeian preachers mistook ‘volubility’ for ‘eloquence’, spreading rebelliousness among ‘mechanics’ and ‘labourers’ through fiery, anti-authoritarian harangues.⁴¹

Some loyalist propaganda denigrated the leaders of the popular reform movement for adopting the techniques of enthusiastic field preachers, including extemporaneity, loudness and prophetic rhetoric. As one Anglican clergyman noted of the foremost popular reform association, the London Corresponding Society (LCS), its members used rhetoric ‘tinctured with methodistical quaintness’.⁴² Another loyalist critic argued that the typical radical orator from the LCS resembled ‘some itinerant field-brawler’ dealing out his ‘ideas of Government, much in the same manner as a methodistical enthusiast does his conceptions of the Scripture’.⁴³ For Reid, the raucous speech-making of radical leaders helped attract to the cause ‘Mystics, Muggletonians, Millenarians, and a variety of eccentric characters of different denominations’.⁴⁴ Like enthusiastic preaching, he opined, the oratory of popular reformers commanded ‘large auditories’ of ‘working people’, whose alleged lack of judgement rendered them susceptible to the communication of zeal, especially ‘extemporaneous’ harangues against authority.⁴⁵ Underlying this view was the assumption that loud, impassioned speech appealed to the labouring classes because they preferred sound to sense, emotions to reflections. While radical plebeian Dissenters rejected this denigration of their intellectual ability, as we shall see, they nevertheless endorsed expressions of noise in both religion and politics.

III

As the noise of popular religious enthusiasm came to be heard during the 1790s as a source of revolutionary energy, loyalist writings focussed on the importance of quietness in Christian worship, especially among the labouring classes. This valorisation of quiet devotion was a key theme in sermons and tracts by Anglican clergymen, whose publications crucially contributed to loyalism.⁴⁶ Quietness had a social and acoustic connotation, indicating both obedience and subdued sound. There was a strong link between orderly behaviour and regulated acoustic experience. In a sermon on the danger of equality, published in 1794, the parson, James Hurdis, typified loyalism by representing quiet conduct as a Christian duty involving sparing, disciplined speech as well as an uncomplaining, restrained demeanour. Quoting from the bible, he reminded readers that the ‘effect of righteousness is quietness and assurance for ever’.⁴⁷ For Hurdis, as for many Anglican loyalist critics, piety was a quiet activity conducive to both reverence and deference.⁴⁸ Conversely, a belief in equality led the labouring classes to indulge in ‘idleness, intemperance and loose conversation’, reviling their rulers, disobeying God and forsaking their obligations.⁴⁹ In a good society, plebeian members needed to regulate their passions and subdue their voices through subordination, work and orderly devotion.

This emphasis on quietness was not inconsistent with the growing acceptance of singing within the Anglican Church, for suitable hymns were opposed to the wayward songs of enthusiasts. Influenced by evangelicalism, many clergymen sought to enliven parochial worship through congregational singing. In 1792, Reverend Thomas Haweis condemned contemporary ‘public worship’ for being ‘too commonly silent’, advocating ‘sacred songs’ as a means of vitalising Christianity and reaching the ‘common people’.⁵⁰ Similarly, Edward Miller remarked that ‘dissenters’ had long recognised the ‘efficacy of music’, with people being drawn to the ‘tabernacles of Methodists by their attractive harmony’.⁵¹ And yet Haweis, Miller and most Anglican supporters of congregational singing differentiated acceptable hymns from the ‘gay popular airs’ of Dissenters,⁵² the unscriptural ‘extravagancies’ of ‘sectarists’,⁵³ or the tunes, which accompanied the ‘flights of modern enthusiasts’.⁵⁴ Aware of the power of music to stimulate potentially uncontrollable emotions, singing had to be regulated by being restricted to psalms, or performed midweek rather than on Sunday. There were also directions about not singing too loudly, being considerate of others, and remaining attentive,⁵⁵ all of which made it possible for hymns to be heard as compatible with quiet piety.

Likewise, in relation to preaching, some Anglican clergymen attempted to invigorate worship, while ensuring that affective piety involved moderate acoustic experience unfavourable to enthusiastic fervour. In an essay on Christian eloquence, published in 1796, Reverend John Gardiner argued that preaching should combine the ‘elucidation of principles’ with a display of ‘warm’ ‘emotions’, as exemplified by ‘ardent exclamations’.⁵⁶ But such emotions had to be kept within the bounds of reason and delicacy. And because loud sounds were thought to inflame the passions, a Christian minister had to speak with decorum in a measured if not uniform volume. By contrast, alleged Gardiner, ‘Enthusiasts’ conveyed turbulent emotions in noisy outbursts, including ‘violent denunciations’, ‘intemperate outcries’ and ‘affected whinings’.⁵⁷

A minister who was concerned about the sound of both religious worship and plebeian political activity was William Jones, curate of Nayland and proponent of High Church Toryism. Jones was especially interested in music and, in 1786, wrote a sermon on its use in religion. Unlike other High Church clergymen, he promoted the evangelical practice of congregational singing, recognising its capacity to glorify God and unite people in religious devotion by triggering ‘sympathetic feeling’.⁵⁸ Differing from evangelicalism, however, Jones disapproved of new hymns set to secular tunes.⁵⁹ Rejecting such ‘wild airs’, he claimed that only traditional metrical psalms, as directed by a minister, were ‘proper’ in church.⁶⁰ This insistence on a rigid distinction between sacred and secular music was one means by which Jones sought to regulate singing, encouraging devotion without inducing enthusiasm. Precisely because of the powerful effect of the ‘multiplication of voices’, communal singing was only appropriate, even in worship, under strict conditions in controlled environments.⁶¹

In several sermons, published during the 1790s, Jones expressed dismay at the ubiquity of subversive plebeian voices and responded by representing quietness as integral to a godly society. On Martyrdom Day in 1796, he complained that current events had converted the senses into inlets of wickedness. Jones worried that ‘sounds’, in particular, promoted depravity and insubordination by inflaming the passions and misleading the judgement.⁶² ‘Piety, goodness and virtue, are quiet and obscure’, he declared: ‘they pass through life without noise or figure’, whereas ‘enthusiastic, impetuous’ behaviour resulted in ‘religion and liberty’ being ‘hooted at … with disgrace’.⁶³ Jones was an active contributor to the loyalist movement, and in 1792 he published the first of a series of cheap tracts to combat plebeian radicalism.⁶⁴ These tracts juxtaposed the carnage and chaos of republican France with the peace and prosperity secured by the British constitution. In One Pennyworth of Truth, from Thomas Bull to his Brother John, the French Revolution was depicted as a godless affair, in which the murder of priests and imprisonment of nobles was accompanied by the singing of ‘ça Ira’, as the mob mixed joy with atrocity.⁶⁵ Loud sounds, Jones implied, were dangerous in a crowd, because they incited ‘wild passions’, which then provoked bodily reactions, potentially leading to violence.⁶⁶ Moreover, Jones claimed that, in Britain, the ‘cantings’ of Civil War sectaries of the seventeenth century were being revived by a new breed of levellers.⁶⁷ And yet, infidelity was as ‘noisy’ as religious enthusiasm unlike the ‘quietness’ of true Christianity, as realised in the established church.⁶⁸ For Jones, as for other Anglican clergymen, quiet conduct was a precondition of piety no less than obedience, and it ensured devotion to God as well as loyalty to the King.

In 1794, the Lincolnshire minister, William Hett, fretted about the dangerous synthesis of radicalism and popular Dissent, which was responsible for the sounds of rebellion, including subversive singing, reverberating throughout the nation. Hett was a member of the loyalist Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. He was alarmed at the way in which, among artisans, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man was being assimilated into an antinomian version of religious enthusiasm, with its prioritisation of spirit over law. Specifically, ideas of free grace were harmonising with concepts of democratic governance and social egalitarianism. In Hett’s opinion, plebeian enthusiasts were receptive to Painite republicanism because of their affinity for noise. Hett caricatured noisy, enthusiastic worship as a riotous, anarchic performance characterised by extreme emotions such as anger and elation.⁶⁹ The noise of religious enthusiasm, he suggested, was a sign of self-abandonment, which devotees wrongly heard as an enactment of freedom. Impassioned voices, then, were aligned with antinomian beliefs as well as radical sentiments. Like other loyalist critics,⁷⁰ Hett contended that antinomianism was rowdy because it privileged faith over works, devaluing industriousness and sanctioning disaffection. Contrariwise, true Christianity did ‘not consist in faith only’, he noted, ‘but in works also; not in … violent words and zealous expressions, but in the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit’.⁷¹

IV

While loyalist Anglican commentators during the 1790s worried about the relationship between enthusiasm and radicalism, many reformers also heard the noise of religious zeal as incompatible with progressive political activity. This rejection of clamorous piety was typical of the polite culture of rational Dissent, with its emphasis on deliberation and reflection. Despite being dismissed by Edmund Burke as ‘loud and troublesome’ agitators,⁷² liberal Dissenters often stressed the rationality and civility of their religion by distinguishing it from the noisy enthusiasm of the labouring classes.⁷³

At a lower social level, there was also disagreement about the proper relationship between noise, religion and political activity. The LCS prohibited the discussion of religious issues, partly to ensure the rational basis of debate and partly to prevent conflict between members. Nevertheless, some members continued to express their religious beliefs in both conversation and print.⁷⁴ Furthermore, the LCS became fractured around 1794 as many members were recruited to deism, causing a division between supporters and critics of religion. Representing the atheistic wing of the movement, Francis Place depicted the prayers and hymns of Methodism as ‘absurd’ practices, which were akin to jests and drinking songs.⁷⁵ For Place, such acoustic practices were notable for their triviality, irrationality and mollifying function. Likewise, the radical deistic campaigner, Daniel Isaac Eaton, differentiated the ‘still small voice of reason’ from the ‘tumultuous clamours of enthusiasm’.⁷⁶ For Eaton, political activity was a secular affair, advanced by moderate, rational discussion rather than intense, spiritual communication.

By contrast, religious members of the popular reform movement often interpreted current events through the auditory imagery of the bible, hearing noise as a source of spiritual power facilitating political transformation. This was evidenced in February 1794, when over 1000 reformers assembled at an outdoor meeting in Sheffield. Here they performed a mock religious service, beginning with a communal prayer, followed by a lecture-cum-sermon, and concluding with a millenarian hymn. The event was organised by the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information (SSCI) to coincide with the day appointed for a national fast. But far from supporting British success in the war against France, the Sheffield reformers prayed and sang to affirm the unjust, impious character of both the war and contemporary society. In popular radical culture, the fast day was regarded as a despicable event, which revealed the egregious alliance between church and state.⁷⁷ For participants in the Sheffield meeting, however, it provided an occasion for resistance. Deploying the collective acoustic practices of religious worship, the Sheffield reformers protested against the despotism and depravity of the Pitt government, aided by the established church. Replete with biblical imagery,⁷⁸ the millenarian hymn prophesied about God’s impending overthrow of Britain’s tyrannical rulers. Significantly, too, it depicted vocal expression as a bearer of spiritual meaning. A common motif in radical prophetic writings, as we shall see, this notion of God residing in the sound of his believers was reinforced by the act of singing itself. Mixing outrage and optimism, the hymn beseeched God to hear the cries and complaints of an oppressed people and then invoked the power of divine speech to restore liberty, recover truth and eradicate discord. Accordingly, the singers implored their Creator: ‘Speak––––and the World shall smile in PEACE!’⁷⁹ In this way, the reformers were performing the role of believers at an outdoor religious meeting, while their final hymn, ‘sung in full chorus by the whole assembly’,⁸⁰ generated a pious, political noise, which enacted the radical dictum, vox populi, vox dei.

The writer of this hymn was James Montgomery, the Christian poet who, from 1792, played an important role in the provincial reform movement centred on Sheffield.⁸¹ Brought up in a Moravian community, Montgomery retained throughout his life an evangelical disposition. But he moved freely between Moravian, Methodist, Baptist and Anglican circles, even attending Unitarian meeting houses. The influence of Methodism perhaps contributed to his hymn using the same biblical imagery, from Exodus, that John Wesley recommended in music to be sung during a time of persecution.⁸² There were Methodists on the committee of the SSCI, some of whom joined the radical evangelical splinter group, the New Connexion.⁸³ While devout reformers at the meeting undoubtedly enjoyed the Christian radicalism of Montgomery’s hymn, secular reformers probably also appreciated its anti-clericalism, its anti-war rhetoric and its revolutionary optimism.

When he moved to Sheffield, Montgomery began attending Methodist chapels and other places of worship, admittedly on a casual basis.⁸⁴ This exposure to Methodism must have reinforced his appreciation of the role of sound in Christian worship. Within evangelical Dissent, singing fostered fervent piety and enacted spiritual freedom. Any suppression of singing was therefore liable to be regarded as an attack on liberty as well as religion. In 1795, Montgomery himself was prosecuted for publishing a seditious song about the fall of the Bastille. The passage of the Gagging Acts at the end of the same year witnessed the climax of a sustained assault on freedom of speech. Indeed, by 1798, Montgomery suggested that talking had been reduced to whispering, as the ‘still small voice’ won out over ‘coarse, rugged and consequently vulgar articulation’.⁸⁵ The hushed tone of genteel conversation might be deemed harmless, but the clamour of the labouring classes, whether vociferous speech or exuberant singing, was heard as a potential agent of insurrection. In this context, the hymn sung at the SSCI meeting must have been highly relevant to plebeian Dissenters, because it imbued the voice of the people with a sacred meaning.

The Sheffield fast-day lecture became well known within the popular reform movement, indicating the appeal of its religious rhetoric. A couple of weeks after the demonstration, a copy of the lecture was received by the secretary of the LCS, Thomas Hardy, who read it aloud at a division meeting. Upon hearing the lecture, including the hymn, members responded with ‘great applause’.⁸⁶ The report on the meeting did not stipulate whether the hymn was actually sung. But singing was a frequent activity within the LCS,⁸⁷ alongside reading and debating. Although some reformers associated singing with incivility,⁸⁸ others regarded it as a valuable medium of political communication. As a result, the Sheffield fast-day hymn was probably sung by some members, especially since it was available as a handbill. Either way, the prophetic Christian radicalism of the hymn proved attractive to reformers. Appended to the lecture, the hymn was re-printed by the LCS in a cheap publication, which went through six editions in a year. It was not surprising, too, that Hardy first advertised the lecture. For he was a committed Presbyterian with a radical millenarian outlook.⁸⁹ Hardy saw the French Revolution, as Montgomery did in his hymn, as a prophetic event, orchestrated by God to establish a new era of democracy, justice and enlightenment. Despite the attempt by the LCS to avoid discussion of religious matters, the millenarianism of the lecture clearly resonated with many members. Later editions even included a letter from Hardy, commending the pamphlet to all supporters of ‘CIVIL and RELIGIOUS LIBERTY’.⁹⁰

In addition, the LCS bookseller, John Smith, published an appendix to the Sheffield lecture, explaining its prophetic, sonic significance. Presented as a poem, this appendix brimmed with auditory biblical imagery, as it represented contemporary political conditions revealing underlying spiritual forces. Like other prophetic writings, it utilised a radicalised patriotism in which the revolution in France promised to extend freedom in Britain by abolishing Catholicism and replacing an equally idolatrous, corrupt Anglicanism with true religion, as expressed by joyful, authentic, pious sound. Assimilating Revelation to this revolutionary adaptation of anti-Catholic nationalism, the anonymous poet claimed that the outbreak of war was announced by the ‘noise’ of ‘trumpets’, with satanic, British armies battling against the new French Republic. Whereas Britain was advancing the cause of Catholicism, designated as anti-Christ, France was ‘performing the work of the Lamb’ in promoting ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’. Moreover, upon the destruction of ‘Monarchy’ and ‘Popery’, the sound of ‘Hallelujah’ would resound throughout the earth. And in a brilliant repudiation of the loyalist assertion that noisy worship constituted a form of idleness, the primary activity in this future age of divine justice would be ‘singing praise’ to God rather than undertaking vexing toil for tyrants.⁹¹

V

Devout plebeian reformers affirmed the Christian basis of their politics by reworking the principle vox populi, vox dei. In pamphlets, poems and prophecies, the popular will was communicated by an intense, divine noise, which announced the immanent transformation of the established order. As one Christian activist claimed, ‘The voice of an enlightened PEOPLE shall … go forth as claps of thunder, and will sound from shore to shore, and the trembling tyrants shall soon disappear for ever’.⁹² This declaration was part of a statement by the United Friends of Religious and Civil Liberty, a group which had seceded from the LCS in 1795. The rift resulted from a tension within the LCS between religious and secular members due to the growing influence of deism and atheism.⁹³ Indeed, also in 1795, the Christian division leader, John Bone, seceded to found the London Reforming Society. A report produced by this new society abounded in acoustic imagery. According to the report, the ‘voice of individuals’ was not sufficient to combat the enemies of reform, for only the ‘general clamour’, the ‘thunder of … plundered countrymen’, was capable of awakening their ‘guilty fears’.⁹⁴ In popular millenarian religion, thunder was heard as the supreme sound of divine judgement,⁹⁵ a manifestation of the power of God, who acted with fury to restore liberty and end injustice. As the author of the Sheffield fast-day lecture proclaimed, the ‘Thunder of Almighty Vengeance’ was provoked by the ‘cries of widows and orphans’ to ‘purge the World of Tyrants’.⁹⁶ By representing the combined voice of the people as a stimulus to the sublime noise of thunder, these religious reformers were claiming that collective radical speech activated the wrath of God, facilitating his destruction of tyranny.

With their evocation of apocalyptic noise, radical prophetic writings were often published in cheap editions to appeal to plebeian enthusiasts. In addition, they tended to be printed by booksellers with radical millenarian sympathies. Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee, for instance, was an LCS bookseller, with deep connections to Methodism and other forms of popular Dissent. In line with his religious beliefs, he printed numerous prophetic tracts as well as songs. One of these prophecies was published with George Riebau, a bookseller who not only belonged to the LCS, but who followed the prophet, Richard Brothers.⁹⁷ Another bookseller with connections to plebeian enthusiastic circles was Thomas Spence. A leading, but idiosyncratic, figure in the LCS, Spence cultivated a unique synthesis of religious enthusiasm, rational republicanism and agrarian communitarianism.⁹⁸ He also published and wrote several works of radical millenarianism. In one collection of prophecies, published but not written by Spence, enthusiastic piety was represented as a multi-sensory experience, involving smell as well as sound. The injustice and iniquity of the Pitt government, best exemplified by the fast day, was registered as a ‘stink’ in the ‘nostrils’ of God, while the ‘cry’ of the ‘multitude’, starving in the midst of plenty, ‘entered into the ears of the Lord’, prompting him to ‘blow’ away their ‘cruel’, despotic rulers.⁹⁹ If this prophetic account recognised that religious belief involved the co-operation of the senses, special emphasis was placed on sound. It was the role of true believers, ‘thine elect’, to ‘lift up their voice like a trumpet’ and to exclaim, ‘with rapture’, that God was bringing an end to the reign of ‘Anti-christian’ government, the enemy of piety and liberty.¹⁰⁰ Predictably, these prophecies were written by another follower of Richard Brothers, who also attributed a sacred meaning to acoustic experience.

If the sound of thunder actualised the voice of God in prophetic works by Brothers, among others, the trumpet, too, became associated with the Last Judgement in radical writings. In the culture of popular religious enthusiasm, trumpets evoked the immanent restoration of liberty. Demonstrating the capacity of noise to release divine power, the bible claimed that trumpets had brought down the walls of Jericho, enabling the Israelites to reclaim their land and realise their freedom. Likewise, in Leviticus, a trumpet announced the arrival of the year of Jubilee, when, every half-century, slaves were freed and property was redistributed to renew equality in Israel. An ancient Hebrew concept, Jubilee had always been associated with music,¹⁰¹ and its biblical usage had informed Christian radicalism since the mid-seventeenth century.¹⁰² It was not surprising, then, that trumpets featured in popular Dissent, especially in radical millenarian writings.

Famously, Thomas Spence represented his plan for a redistribution of land in England as the fulfilment of the Jubilee.¹⁰³ And he championed this revolutionary Jubilee in a song, which was to be sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King’:

HARK! how the Trumpet’s sound

Proclaims the Land around

The Jubilee!

Tells all the poor oppress’d,

No more they shall be cess’d,

Nor Landlords more molest

Their Property.

Reprinted many times in the 1790s, this ‘Jubilee Hymn’, Spence noted, was ‘to be Sung at the End of Oppression, or the Commencement of the political Milennium’, when God abolished lords and landlords. In this context, the trumpet communicated the divine appointment of a new, equitable society, triggering revolutionary hope in the poor while radicalising Old Testament notions of retribution, justice and the power of sound, as stressed in popular Dissent. In 1795, another religious reformer, the Congregational minister, James Bennett, mounted a theological defence of popular sovereignty, Sacred Politics, by drawing similarly on the close relationship between trumpets and liberty. By inculcating in the heart a hatred of slavery and love of liberty, Bennett asserted, the ‘Gospel’ blew the ‘trumpet of Jubilee through the earth’, breaking the ‘fetters of darkness’.¹⁰⁴ Inevitably, this Jubilee would lead to a return to primitive Christianity, ending the rule of monarchs and bishops, as apocalyptic noise gave way to democratic speech.

Little wonder that Bennett was criticised by one Anglican clergyman for making the Gospel blow the ‘trumpet’ of ‘civil war’.¹⁰⁵ For this supporter of church and state, the problem with Sacred Politics was that its perception of piety resembled noisy demagoguery as opposed to quiet reverence, contradicting the example of Jesus. In stark contrast to the acoustic intensity of religious enthusiasm, Jesus submitted to his fate in ‘silence’, displaying ‘meek resignation’, with no ‘fierce passions’ in his heart.¹⁰⁶ It was surely to contest this valorisation of silence that proponents of radical Christianity like Spence and Montgomery expressed their millenarianism in song.

For Spence, singing was a vital medium of both religious worship and political education, an activity which braided together piety and protest, while legitimising the mobilisation of strong passions.¹⁰⁷ It was also an egalitarian practice, enabling the principle, vox populi, vox dei, to be actualised in performance. This principle was implicit in many of Spence’s writings, especially those with a prophetic idiom. A case in point was The Rights of Infants, published in 1796 just after the passage of the Gagging Acts. ‘Hear me! ye Oppressors!’ pronounced Spence in a prophetic voice, before depicting the ‘groans of the cottage’ as enunciations of the misery of the people as well as the displeasure of God. Moving from disaffected to joyful noise, Spence then prophesied that, upon the restoration of liberty and the elimination of poverty, the ‘whole earth’ would break ‘forth into singing at the new creation’.¹⁰⁸ Although Spence’s pamphlet was an idiosyncratic contribution to radical propaganda, it was typical of the way in which religious reformers attributed a revolutionary meaning to the sound of popular piety.

In an eschatological interpretation of the events of the 1790s, as predicted by the prophet Micah, William Dukes claimed that the ‘voice of the Lord’ was crying out to the nation in order to ‘sound an alarm’ to rulers regarding their mistreatment of the people.¹⁰⁹ Published in 1795, amidst the controversy about Brothers, Dukes’s pamphlet capitalised on the taste for political prophecy among plebeian readers.¹¹⁰ For causing the ‘groans’ of the poor, the privileged classes, foretold Dukes, would face swift punishment, including death. But those few despotic rulers, who survived this destruction, would be marked by God with a ‘hissing,’ by which they would forever ‘hear the reproach of my people’.¹¹¹ In this context, ‘hissing’ obviously meant that the oppressors of the poor would be subjected to permanent scorn. But hissing was a long-established mode of crowd protest, and the labouring classes regarded the production of this menacing noise as something like a right, a means of expressing and protecting their liberty.¹¹² In addition, it was a practice that became radicalised after the French Revolution. Most notably, commentators reported that hissing was a conspicuous feature of the mass demonstration, which culminated in the attack on the King’s coach in 1795. By prophesying that the few surviving rulers of Britain would be marked by this kind of hissing, Dukes authorised radical crowd action, while imbuing it with a spiritual sanction. As the sound of popular disaffection echoed that of divine judgement, this was another intriguing revision of the principle vox populi, vox dei, aimed at a plebeian audience. According to Dukes, the prophet Micah communicated the divine will with the ‘sound of a trumpet’.¹¹³ ‘Hear all ye people’, proclaimed the prophet in a loud voice, God was not an ‘unconcerned spectator’ of the poor, but an active agent in the redress of their sufferings.¹¹⁴ And the presence of this interventionist, sympathetic and angry God was signified, above all, by sound: by crying, hissing and other forms of noisy expression, which functioned as a revolutionary force transferring power to the people.

Prophecies like this must have confirmed the conviction of loyalist commentators that there was something conducive to political radicalism in the sonic orientation of popular religious enthusiasm. By contrast, among plebeian reformers, whose religious zeal shaped their radicalism, the French Revolution was represented as a sacred, sonic occurrence, which reverberated on earth as in heaven. Not only did it prompt the curses of God to reign down on tyrants in response to the cries of the poor, but, as Spence prophesied, at the divine defeat of despotism, the people would break out into song.

As this essay has demonstrated, the fear in the 1790s that enthusiastic Dissent prompted insurrectionary behaviour in the labouring classes was frequently attributed to its noisiness. And yet scholars have mostly neglected the role of sound in radical Dissenting culture and its perception within Anglican conservatism. Moreover, while excellent work on political singing has recently been supplemented by studies of political toasting and even the acoustic aspects of political trials,¹¹⁵ the function of auditory imagery and experience more broadly in the debate about the French Revolution has received minimal attention. The conflict between loyalism and radicalism, however, shaped, and was shaped by, different ideas of acceptable sonic behaviour in religious gatherings, political meetings and many other circumstances. Additionally, sound was regarded as an important medium for triggering, expressing and transmitting feelings. For this reason, a focus on the use and valuation of sound provides an alternative way of considering the place of the emotions in both religion and politics during this tumultuous decade. Religious enthusiasm, for instance, was held to be contagious as a result of its noise. And in the 1790s, a similar kind of noise was also identified, by loyalist commentators, as a hallmark of plebeian radicalism, which thus came to be portrayed as an infectious phenomenon lacking in rationality.

Another advantage of considering the revolutionary decade in acoustic terms is that sound highlights the performative aspects of the popular reform movement,¹¹⁶ along with the complex connections between radical activity, language and imagery. In relation to enthusiastic Dissent, biblical auditory imagery reinforced, and was reinforced by, the often loud oral communication of radical songs and prophetic writings. If Anglican conservativism regarded noisy worship as a dangerous auxiliary of insurrectionary conduct, devout plebeian reformers clearly interpreted such piety as an enactment of political as well as religious freedom.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council under the following grants: Discovery Project ‘Policing Noise: The Sounds of Civility in British Discourse, 1700-1850’ [DP130102788] and Discovery Project ‘The Emotional Register of Liberal Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century’ [DP190100984].

Notes on contributors

Peter Denney

Peter Denney is Associate Professor of History at Griffith University. His research focuses on the history and literature of Britain in the long eighteenth century, paying particular attention to landscape, poverty, sound, the senses, popular culture and political radicalism. He has co-edited Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700-1850 (2019), Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (2019), and Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives (2021). His current projects include an edited collection on liberalism and the emotions in the long nineteenth century, and a monograph on landscape and soundscape in Britain from Defoe to Cobbett.

Notes

1. Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times: Book the First (London, 1794), 60.

2. See Deborah Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 99–42; Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 179–96; John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 504–47; J.F.C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1979), 57–85; Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 179–207.

3. Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times: Book the Second (London, 1794), 29–30.

4. For sound in religious enthusiasm, see Leigh Eric Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 57–71; Phyllis Mack, “The Senses in Religion: Listening to God in the Eighteenth Century,” in A Cultural History of the Senses in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Anne C. Vila (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 85–107.

5. Peter Denney, “The Sound of the Spirit: Auditory Enthusiasm and the Attack on Methodism in the Eighteenth Century,” in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850, ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison and Karen Crawley (London: Routledge, 2019), 127–33.

6. See Chris Evans, Debating the Revolution: Britain in the 1790s (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006), 77–78.

7. John Riland, The Rights of God, 2nd ed. (Birmingham, 1792), 5, 11.

8. See, for example, Iain McCalman, “Newgate in Revolution: Radical Enthusiasm and Romantic Counter-Culture,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22, no. 1 (1998): 95–110; Peter Denney, ‘Popular Radicalism, Religious Parody and the Mock Sermon in the 1790s’, History Workshop Journal 74, no.1 (2012): 51–78.

9. See, especially, Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–109; Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20–74.

10. Patrick Kennedy, A Short Defence of the Present Men and Present Measures (London, 1797), 13.

11. Arthur Young, The Example of France a Warning to Britain, 3rd ed. (Bury St Edmunds, 1793), 179.

12. Peter Denney, “The Emotions, the Senses and Popular Radical Print Culture in the 1790s: The Case of The Moral and Political Magazine,” in Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals, ed. Jock Macleod, William Christie and Peter Denney (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 59.

13. Richard Polwhele, A Letter to the Reverend Robert Hawker (London, 1799), 81, 84.

14. On riots, see Alan Booth, “Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North-West of England, 1790–1800,” Social History 8 (1983): 299–305; on effigy burnings, see Frank O’Gorman, “The Paine Burnings of 1792–1793,” Past and Present 193 (2006): 133–46.

15. Thomas Horner to John Reeves, 15 December 1792, Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, British Library, Add. MS 16922, f.122.

16. H. T. Dickinson, “Popular Loyalism in the 1790s,” in The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 530–31.

17. Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2006), 317–18.

18. William Tullett, “Political Engines: The Emotional Politics of Bells in Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of British Studies 59, no. 3 (2020), 567–68.

19. See Michael T. Davis, ““An Evening of Pleasure Rather Than Business”: Songs, Subversion and Radical Sub-Culture in the 1790s,” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 12, no. 2 (2005): 115–26; Kate Horgan, The Politics of Songs in Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1723–1795 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014): 115–28.

20. Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1789–1799 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 42–60.

21. On Haiti, see Sujaya Dhanvantari, “French Revolutionary Song in the Haitian Revolution, 1789–1804,” in African Diasporas in the New and Old Worlds, ed. Geneviève Fabre and Klaus Benesch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 101–19; on Britain, see Kate Bowan and Paul A. Pickering, Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in the Anglophone World, 1790–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 41–45.

22. Peter McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 237.

23. Mark Philp, Radical Conduct: Politics, Sociability and Equality in London, 1789–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 225–27.

24. Oskar Cox Jensen, Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 38–39; Roy Palmer, The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (1988; London: Pimlico, 1996), 257–59.

25. Marilyn Morris, The British Monarchy and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 142–44, 154–58; James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 83–85.

26. Oskar Cox Jensen, “Music to Some Consequences: Reaction, Reform, Race,” Journal of British Studies 60, no.2 (2021): 376–79.

27. Mack, “Senses in Religion,” 94–97.

28. Nicholas Temperley, “The Music of Dissent,” in Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales, ed. Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 210.

29. David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 70–73; Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 41–42; Brett C. McInelly, Textual Warfare and the Making of Methodism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 137–43.

30. Denney, “Sound of the Spirit,” 133.

31. See Nicholas Temperley, “John Wesley, Music, and the People Called Methodists,” in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Nicholas Temperley and Stephen Banfield (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 14–15.

32. Carys Brown, “Sound Faith: Religion and the Aural Environment of Towns in Northern England, c. 1740–1850,” Cultural and Social History 18, no. 4 (2021): 427.

33. Anon, The Enthusiast; or Methodism Display’d (Portsmouth, 1752), 6.

34. Denney, “Sound of the Spirit,” 129–30.

35. See, for example, Theophilus Evans, The History of Modern Enthusiasm (London, 1757), 119; George Lavington, The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists Compared, 2 vols. (London, 1754), 2: 196.

36. Thomas Green, A Dissertation on Enthusiasm (London, 1755), 36.

37. Nicholas Temperley, “Anglicanism and Music,” in The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Establishment and Empire, ed. Jeremy Gregory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 356–61; Bryan D. Spinks, Liturgy in the Age of Reason: Worship and Sacraments in England and Scotland, 1662–1800 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008), 162–69; Thomas K. McCart, The Matter and Manner of Praise: The Controversial Evolution of Hymnody in the Church of England (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 40–60.

38. Jon Mee, Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 4–5, 152–53.

39. William Hamilton Reid, The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in this Metropolis (London, 1800), 41–42, 46–47.

40. Frederick Augustus Wendeborn, A View of England Towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1791), 2: 320–21.

41. Reid, Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies, 41–42.

42. William Hawkins, Regal Rights Consistent with National Liberties (Oxford, 1795), 28.

43. Anon, The Decline and Fall, Death, Dissection, and Funeral Procession of his Most Contemptible Lowness the London Corresponding Society (London, 1796), 4.

44. Reid, Rise and Dissolution of Infidel Societies, 19.

45. Reid, Rise and Dissolution of Infidel Societies, 14.

46. Robert Hole, “English Sermons and Tracts as Media of Debate on the French Revolution 1789–99,” in The French Revolution and British Popular Politics, ed. Mark Philp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19–37.

47. James Hurdis, Equality: A Sermon (London, 1794), 63.

48. In addition to Hurdis, see Robert Nares, Man’s Best Right; A Solemn Appeal in the Name of Religion (London, 1793), 17–23; William Paley, Reasons for Contentment (Carlisle, 1792), 6, 20–22; Bishop Watson, A Sermon Preached before the Stewards of the Westminster Dispensary (London, 1793), 13.

49. Hurdis, Equality, 57.

50. Thomas Haweis, Carmina Christo; or, Hymns to the Saviour (Bath, 1792), preface.

51. Edward Miller, Thoughts on the Present Performance of Psalmody in the Established Church of England (London, 1791), 10–11.

52. Anon, “Plan Pointed out for General Places of Worship,” Gentleman’s Magazine 70, no. 2 (1800): 928.

53. William Vincent, Considerations on Parochial Music, 2nd ed. (London, 1790), 37.

54. Miller, Thoughts on the Present Performance of Psalmody, 34.

55. Vincent, Considerations on Parochial Music, 16.

56. John Gardiner, Brief Reflections on the Eloquence of the Pulpit (Taunton, 1796), 39–40. On Gardiner, see Howard D. Weinbrot, Literature, Religion, and the Evolution of Culture, 1660–1780 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 206–207.

57. Gardiner, Brief Reflections, 41.

58. William Jones, The Nature and Excellence of Music (London, 1787), 7.

59. For Jones on church music, see McCart, Matter and Manner of Praise, 63–65; Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1: 224, 227–28.

60. Jones, Nature and Excellence of Music, 17–18.

61. Jones, Nature and Excellence of Music, 20.

62. William Jones, The Natures, Uses, Dangers, Sufferings, and Preservatives, of the Human Imagination (London, 1796), 15.

63. Jones, Natures, Uses, Dangers, Sufferings, and Preservatives, 14.

64. See Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, The Anti-Jacobins: The Early Contributors to the Anti-Jacobin Review (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 110–12; Hole, “English Sermons and Tracts,” 25–29; Kevin Gilmartin, “Counter-Revolutionary Culture,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution in the 1790s, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 135–37.

65. William Jones, One Pennyworth of Truth, from Thomas Bull to his Brother John (London, 1792).

66. William Jones, Popular Commotions considered as Signs of the Approaching End of the World (London, 1789), 5.

67. William Jones, Popular Commotions, 13.

68. William Jones, The Difficulties and the Resources of the Christian Ministry in the Present Times (Bury St Edmunds, 1791), 11.

69. William Hett, Occasional Poems (London, 1794), 13.

70. See Sarah Trimmer, A Review of the Policy, Doctrines and Morals of the Methodists (London, 1791), 28–29, 54.

71. William Hett, Miscellanies (London, 1794), 40.

72. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1986), 181.

73. Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, 15.

74. Mee, Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s, 28.

75. Mary Thale, ed., The Autobiography of Francis Place, 1771–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 93.

76. Daniel Isaac Eaton, ed., Politics for the People, 2 vols. (London, 1794–95), 1 (part 2, no. 4): 14.

77. See Denney, “Popular Radicalism,” 69–71; Emma Macleod, A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France, 1792–1802 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 136–37, 144–45.

78. See Horgan, Politics of Songs, 129–70.

79. Anon, Fast Day as Observed at Sheffield (London, 1794), 11.

80. Anon, Fast Day as Observed at Sheffield, 2.

81. See Kenneth R. Johnston, Unusual Suspects: Pitt’s Reign of Alarm and the Lost Generation of the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 64–75.

82. Horgan, Politics of Songs, 145–46.

83. John Baxter, “The Great Yorkshire Revival, 1792–96: A Study of Mass Revival among the Methodists,” in A Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain, ed. Michael Hill (London: SCM Press, 1974), 65–67.

84. John Holland and James Everett, eds., Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery, 7 vols. (London: Longman, 1854–56), 1: 134–35.

85. James Montgomery, The Whisperer; or, Tales and Speculations (London, 1798), 14, 23.

86. Mary Thale, ed., Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 123.

87. See Mee, Print, Publicity and Popular Radicalism, 82–83; Davis, “An Evening of Pleasure Rather Than Business,” 119–20.

88. On civility in the popular reform movement, see Michael T. Davis, “The Mob Club? The London Corresponding Society and the Politics of Civility in the 1790s,” in Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform, ed. Michael T. Davis and Paul A. Pickering (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 21–40.

89. See Mee, Print, Publicity and Popular Radicalism, 61–73.

90. Anon, Fast Day as Observed at Sheffield, 5th ed. (London, 1794), 12.

91. Anon, Key to the Prophecies, A Poem, Intended as an Appendix to a Serious Lecture, Delivered at Sheffield on the Fast Day (London, 1794), 4, 6, 8.

92. Anon, The United Friends of Religious and Civil Liberty (London, 1795), 2.

93. See Mee, Print, Publicity and Popular Radicalism, 106–107; Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 368–69, 483–85.

94. Anon, Report of the Committee to the London Reforming Society (London, 1795), 22.

95. Schmidt, Hearing Things, 61.

96. Anon, Fast Day as Observed at Sheffield, 7, 10.

97. For a relevant millenarian passage, see Anon, To Englishmen Who Praise Liberty, and Despise Tyranny: The Visit of the Angel Gabriel, to Britannia (London, 1795), 4.

98. See Jon Mee, “Thomas Spence and the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1795,” in Thomas Spence: The Poor Man’s Revolutionary, ed. Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong (London: Breviary Stuff, 2014), 53–63.

99. Anon, Real and Extraordinary Dreams and Visions (London, 1795), 17, 21.

100. Anon, Real and Extraordinary Dreams and Visions, 23.

101. Peter Linebaugh, “Jubilating; Or, How the Atlantic Working Class Used the Biblical Jubilee against Capitalism, with Some Success,” Radical History Review 50 (1991): 144.

102. Malcolm Chase, “From Millennium to Anniversary: The Concept of Jubilee in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 134–35.

103. Thomas Spence, ed., Pigs’ Meat, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (London, 1795), 1: 88–89. On the role of the Jubilee in Spence, see Thomas R. Knox, “Thomas Spence: The Trumpet of Jubilee,” Past and Present 76 (1977): 80–81; P. M. Ashraf, The Life and Times of Thomas Spence (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Frank Graham, 1983), 133; Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 56–57; Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (1988; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 63–65.

104. James Bennett, Sacred Politics, 2nd ed. (London, 1795), 27.

105. Melvill Horne, Three Letters to a Lover of Truth: or, An Answer to Sacred Politics (London, 1795), 57.

106. Horne, Three Letters, 45–46.

107. See Michael T. Davis, ““Meet and Sing, and Your Chains Will Drop Off Like Burnt Thread”: The Political Songs of Thomas Spence,” in Thomas Spence: The Poor Man’s Revolutionary, ed. Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong (London: Breviary Stuff, 2014), 113–23.

108. Thomas Spence, The Rights of Infants (1797), in The Political Works of Thomas Spence, ed. H. T. Dickinson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1982), 50.

109. William Dukes, Religious Politics; or, The Present Times Foretold, by the Prophet Micah (London, 1795), 97.

110. Andrew Crome, Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 198.

111. Dukes, Religious Politics, 97.

112. Gillian Russell, “Hissing the King: The Politics of Vocal Expression in 1790s Britain,” in Sound, Space and Civility in the British World, 1700–1850, ed. Peter Denney, Bruce Buchan, David Ellison and Karen Crawley (London: Routledge, 2019), 148–55.

113. Dukes, Religious Politics, 12.

114. Dukes, Religious Politics, 15.

115. On toasting, see Rémy Duthille, “Political Toasting in the Age of Revolutions: Britain, American and France, 1765–1800,” in Liberty, Property and Popular Politics: England and Scotland, 1688–1815, ed. Gordon Pentland and Michael T. Davis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp.79–80; on political trials, see Michael T. Davis, “The Noise and Emotions of Political Trials in Britain during the 1790s,” in Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793–1848, ed. Michael T. Davis, Emma Macleod and Gordon Pentland (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 137–62.

116. See James Epstein and David Karr, British Jacobin Politics, Desires, and Aftermaths: Seditious Hearts (New York: Routledge, 2021), 19–53.