Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in England 1720–1800. By Isabel Rivers

Abstract

This book is a phenomenal work of scholarship. Its extraordinary originality and thoroughness reveal the abundant wealth of almost half a century’s research. Isabel Rivers has ‘explored a very large number of books written or edited by over 200 authors’, including many who have fallen from view (p. 4). Her interdisciplinary methodology yields illuminating critical and historical insights. The title alludes to the paradox that, while religious books such as Pilgrim’s Progress advocate ‘rejection of this world for the sake of the next’, their ‘success’ in the eighteenth century ‘depended on a number of worldly factors’ (p. 2). Religious publishing was commercially significant. Joseph Johnson, for example, a major dissenting London bookseller, made £10,000 from publishing Cowper’s poetry. How, then, Rivers asks, ‘did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? How was the journey to the Celestial City aided by passing through Vanity Fair?’ (p. 2). The study is concerned with the production, dissemination, reading and interpretation of religious books, and the factors which influenced their writers’ and editors’ literary decisions. Rivers’s observation about the Methodist writer Hester Ann Rogers exemplifies the book’s priorities: Rogers’s ‘own writings and writings about her had a long publication history, and demonstrate powerfully how different literary kinds – autobiographical and biographical accounts, journal entries, letters, poems, and hymns – could be brought together in one exemplary collection, cheap and compact for easy distribution’ (p. 332). Rivers refers to the interaction between commercial and literary factors, as well as to the ‘exemplary’ religious function of the writings in question. The book is divided into three parts, each of which examines an area of dissenting, Methodist and evangelical literary culture: ‘Books and their Readers’; ‘Sources’; ‘Literary Kinds’.