The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence
The archive:
This is the correspondence between James Wodrow (1730-1810) and Samuel Kenrick (1728-1811). They began corresponding soon after leaving university and continued to correspond until James Wodrow’s death in 1810. From the mid 1770s the correspondence is fairly complete. There are just over 280 letters in all. It seems that either soon after JW’s death his family returned his correspondence to SK, or the letters were returned to the Kenrick family at a later date by JW’s surviving daughter, Margaret. It remained in the Kenrick family until 1888 when Mary, SK’s great-great-niece, and her husband deposited the letters in Dr. Williams’s Library.
The correspondents:
James Wodrow (1730-1810) was the ninth son of the Scottish clergyman and historian, Robert Wodrow (1679-1734) minister of Eastwood. In 1741 he entered Glasgow University at the age of eleven as a student of divinity. He was admitted to the degree of Master of Arts in 1750. After a spell as University Librarian (1750-55) he was inducted in September 1757 into the Parish of Dunlop, Presbytery of Irvine, having been licensed as a preacher by the Presbytery of Ayr on 28 Feb 1753. He married Louisa Hamilton (d.1793), the daughter of an Edinburgh bookseller, on 30 April 1759 and in October of that year he transferred to the parish of Stevenston in the same Presbytery where he settled for life. The Wodrows had six children, but none of their four sons survived to adulthood. His daughter Helen died aged 32 (1795) and only Margaret (1767-1845) lived into old age. James was a significant figure amongst the moderate clergy in the west of Scotland, and although he eschewed the limelight, he had a considerable reputation for learning. In 1786 he was awarded a Doctorate of Divinity by his alma mater, yet he published only two of his sermons, The Measures of Divine Providence towards Men and Nations (1794), and then at the request of his congregation. He left at his death manuscript lectures on the New Testament and many sermons. On the other hand, James published two volumes of sermons by William Leechman in 1789, together with a valuable memoir of his life and teaching. He made a special journey to London to arrange its publication where he met and received assistance from Dr. Richard Price. James also compiled the account of his parish of Stevenston for Sir John Sinclair's great statistical survey of Scotland. Late in life he assisted the Earl of Buchan in collecting the Anecdotes of Printing and Academical Literature at Glasgow during the Last Century (1808). In gratitude, the earl addressed the preface to him in which he mentioned James’s lifelong friend and older contemporary at Glasgow University, ‘the learned and worthy’ Samuel Kenrick.
Samuel Kenrick (1728-1811) was the third of the six sons of Rev. John Kenrick (d.1745) of Wynne Hall, Ruabon, near Wrexham. The family would form something of a dynasty in Presbyterian and subsequently Unitarian Dissent. Samuel was sent to Glasgow University in 1743 with the intention of studying for the ministry, and on the sudden death of his father in 1745 was awarded a Dr. Williams’s Exhibition for the completion of his studies. He was admitted to the degree of MA in 1747. Samuel’s mother was Scottish – the daughter of Rev. Archibald Hamilton, minister of Corstorphine near Edinburgh, although her mother, Sarah Wynne, was from an old Denbighshire family.
While at university Samuel came to the conclusion he was not fitted for the ministry, even though his own faith was never in question. After he graduated he was for quite a long period tutor to the two children of James Milliken of Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire. This ended when both died tragically in consequence of taking the grand tour – the elder, James Milliken, died in Venice in 1763, while on a wide ranging tour which began in 1760, during which he visited Voltaire and Rousseau; the younger, Alexander, died at Portsmouth on his return following a tour of Germany and France in 1764. Samuel then settled down in Bewdley, Worcestershire, as a partner with a younger brother in a tobacconist, snuff making and banking business. It was the banking business (developed in association with Messrs Coutts of the Strand) which endured: in one of his letters Samuel mused that when they began their bank it was probably the only one between Bristol and Manchester, but by the end of the century there were a hundred or so banks.
Significance:
In 1841 Rev. George Kenrick, the youngest son of Rev. Timothy Kenrick, published two letters from the correspondence concerning Robert Raikes, founder of the Sunday School movement, and in doing so noted that that the correspondence ‘related, in a great degree, to topics connected with the cause of civil and religious liberty, to which the writers were as ardently attached as they were to each other.’ The friends favoured reform in church and state, although their attitudes were shaped by their different temperaments and circumstances. Samuel was more radical and optimistic than his friend, who broadly favoured moderate change such as the repeal of the Test Act as it applied to Scotland and the reform of burgh representation, distrusting both religious enthusiasm and radical fervour. James was none the less prepared to assist in the publication of ideas deemed heretical, as in the case of William McGill's The Death of Christ (1786). When this led to the threat of heresy proceedings against McGill he helped to broker a solution which enabled McGill to retain his living in return for modest concessions to Calvinistic orthodoxy. For his part Samuel witnessed the hostility to rational dissenters, most notably at the time of the Birmingham Riots of 1791, and he subsequently was a witness in the legal proceedings for compensation. The friends’ interests and concerns were not confined to Britain. Theirs was a turbulent age and their concern with liberty led them to explore in depth and with considerable candour their views on the epochal events of the time. The friends rarely agreed completely with each other and there are many long letters discussing their differences – especially on the American Revolution.
Besides providing valuable insight into how two highly educated individuals viewed the major happenings of the time, the letters are also a cornucopia of useful information. They were anxious to inform each other in detail about their lives and events around them, though even they were intimidated by the task of such detailed communication – James suggesting at one point that the time lapse between letters was ‘the bugbear of the length of our letters’. In their epistles there is information on the militia, the different legal systems of Scotland and England and Wales, on manufacturing and the latest technological information. In one of his later letters James notes that he has seen the first steam-driven carriage. There are observations on the canal system, on the development of Edinburgh Newtown, on the rising English cities of Manchester and Birmingham (which is regarded as inferior to Manchester). They discuss charity and poor relief at a time when the system of poor relief in England was breaking down. The friends’ remarks on comparative differences were informed by their own interpretation of the varying circumstances – political, social, economic, religious – of their situations and those of others. There is for example a fascinating discussion of the differences between London and Paris.
The edition:
A fully edited and searchable version of the Wodrow-Kenrick correspondence will be published on the Dr Williams’s Centre website. It will contribute notably to our understanding of Scottish Enlightenment and English dissenting culture in the late eighteenth century, and more broadly to our knowledge of the age in which the correspondents lived.
The editors:
Anthony Page is lecturer in European History at the University of Tasmania, Launceston, and is author of John Jebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism (2003). Reviews editor for the journal Enlightenment and Dissent, he is currently researching various aspects of Unitarianism and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain.
Correspondence to: Anthony Page, School of History and Classics, Box 1340, University of Tasmania, Launceston, TAS 7250, Australia. Email: Anthony.Page@utas.edu.au
Martin Fitzpatrick was formerly Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate at the Department of History and Welsh history, Aberystwyth University. He is co-founder and co-editor of the journal Enlightenment and Dissent. Email: mhf@aber.ac.uk
