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.