A Good Dissenter Speaking Well: William Enfield’s Educational and Elocutionary Philosophies in Religious Context

Abstract

Eighteenth-century British dissenting minister and rector of Warrington Academy William Enfield, author of the enormously successful elocutionary manual, The Speaker, although often ignored entirely or dismissed as trite and uninteresting in many histories of rhetoric, in fact wrote his elocutionary manual as part of a comprehensive educational system grounded in moral theology and faculty psychology. This article places Enfield’s elocutionary work within religious and pedagogical context through analysis of his writings on religion and education and his pamphlets debating Joseph Priestley over the nature of dissent.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of this material was presented orally as “Gentlemen and Dissenters: The Enfield–Priestley Debate on Dissenting Education,” Rhetoric Society of America, Seattle, Oregon, May 2008. I would like to thank Mike and Betty Goss for endowing the professorship which made possible research for the article. Special thanks are owed to my indefatigable research assistant, Rhonda Lippert-Bortz.

Notes

1. See, for example, Medhurst (2010) and Sproule (2012) for recent histories of public speaking.

2. See Howell (1971, 145–151) for taxonomy of British rhetoric and elocution. For a summary of earlier studies on elocution, see Sproule (2012, 594n5). Abott (2010) discusses Enfield briefly as an examplar of literary nationalism. Fritz incorrectly identifies Enfield’s Speaker as an “American book based directly on Sheridan’s theories” (1930, 82). Guthrie condemns elocution as consisting of “factitious elaborations” (1948, 17). For facsimile reprints of elocutionary texs, see Poster (2003a).

3. Giles Wilkeson Gray invokes a revealing analogy: “Few young women appreciate being referred to as hussies; nor would many of us be willing to admit that we are teachers of elocution. Yet both of these words … were once perfectly respectable” (1960, 1). Parrish mentions an association of elocution with “simpering adolescents and affected females” (1957, 1). Feminization of elocution and its association with secondary education contributed to its declining prestige.

4. The major source for Enfield’s biography is Aikin’s Memoirs, prefaced to Enfield’s posthumous Sermons on Practical Subjects (1798). Anne Holt (1938) discusses Enfield’s early career and failings as an academic disciplinarian. See Enfield (1770a, 5–6) for criticism of Priestley’s expression of a “degree of precipitation … and vehemence of temper” and advocacy of “discretion” and a generally milder tone.

5. For a more extensive list of Enfield’s work, see References.

6. See, e.g., Enfield (1770a, 8–29).

7. See Olender (1992) for discussion of the social, theological, and philosophical motives underlying the nineteenth-century quest to recover a prelapsarian or Adamic language.

8. See Sher (1985) for a seminal discussion of the Scottish “moderate literati.” For studies of individual late-eighteenth-century Scottish rhetoricians, see Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran (2005), McKenna (2006), and Walzer (2003).

9. For discussion of the dissenting academies and the transformation of the rhetorical curriculum, see Miller (1997).

10. Enfield’s translation was based on the revised six-volume 1767 edition of Brucker’s work. Like Brucker’s original, it was well received, appearing in two editions in Enfield’s lifetime and five distinct nineteenth-century editions (1791, 1792, 1819, 1837, 1840).

11. Michael Maynard (1995) traces the history of the controversy concerning the text of the Comma Johanneum in A History of the Debate Over 1 John 5:7–8.

12. See Evans (1941 and 1943) and Poster (2009) for discussion of the eighteenth-century reception of Socrates.

13. For Aristotle’s Rhetoric in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, see Poster (2001 and 2003b).

14. For a modern facsimile reprint, see Poster (2003a).

15. For attacks on and defenses of elocution in modern scholarship, see notes 1, 2, and 3 in this article. For a discussion of the contemporary reaction to Enfield and how study of Enfield can illuminate our reading of Jane Austen, see Weedom (1988).

16. Daggy (1932) and Hargis (1961) supply extended summaries of The Speaker.

17. See Sher (1985) and McLean (2010) for similar debates in Scotland, especially the controversy over the minister John Home’s play Douglas.

18. Harrington (2010) discusses Sheridan and Walker in the context of faculty psychology, but not Enfield. Mohrmann (1966) places the elocutionary movement in the context of Scottish common sense philosophy but does not focus specifically on Enfield.

19. See Enfield (1818) for theories of taste and Enfield (1809) for Enfield’s actual fine arts pedagogy. A classic literary portrait of how training in drawing could enhance appreciation of landscape can be found in the Tilneys’ conversations with Catherine Morland on various nature walks; see Alexander (1999) for analysis.

20. For recent works which locate rhetorical theories of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in religious context, see especially as Ellison (2010), Hirst (2013), McKerrow (1979; 1981), and Whitburn (2007).