“The Lispings of a Babe”? Anne Dutton’s Publishing History and Literary Legacy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite her prolific publication history, Anne Dutton (1692–1765) has received little in-depth scholarly attention. Working with a select coterie of dissenting printers and booksellers in London from her home in Great Gransden, Huntingdonshire, Dutton published in nearly every genre popular with eighteenth-century women writers: diary, autobiography, hymns, poems, letters, formal religious discourse and polemical treatises. Her writings reveal a powerful voice that allowed Dutton to enter areas of pastoral ministry unknown to any other eighteenth-century Baptist woman. Her vivid and accessible prose made her one of the most popular religious writers during the Evangelical Revival of the late 1730s and early 1740s. Dutton exhibited a mature brand of authorial power as a woman writer across three decades and more than sixty volumes of printed letters and religious treatises on topics that few women of her day dared to approach, cleverly redefining the limits of public and private spheres for women writers in her two defences of the right of women to publish. Dutton’s writings laid the groundwork upon which dissenting women like Maria de Fleury and Mary Hays would build in the latter decades of the eighteenth century.