Joan L. Richards, Generations of Reason: A Family’s Search for Meaning in Post-Newtonian England New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021. Pp. 456. ISBN 978-0-300-25549-2. $45.00 (hardcover).
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Generations of Reason examines the role of reason in the lives of three generations of an English family of Lockean Christians, tied in a matrilineal line from the Enlightenment to the Victorian era: the Lindseys, the Frends and the De Morgans.Their understanding of reason was rooted in John Locke's philosophy.In contrast to the Continental tradition, it did not oppose scriptural revelation but was based on a linguistic view of reason concerned with clear connections between words and their proper meanings.Joan Richards skilfully weaves together richly contextualized personal stories, exploring these families' commitment to reason and how its nature, power and limits were redefined between generations.The culmination of decades of research, the book delivers a captivating story of knowing and believing stretching from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth.The story starts in the middle with the wedding of Augustus De Morgan and Sophia Elizabeth Frend in the registrar's office in 1837.After an efficient introduction, the book proceeds chronologically in three parts.Part 1, 'Divining reason', takes us back to the eighteenth century.The story of reason began with the friendship between Cambridgeeducated men, archdeacon Francis Blackburne and young parish minister Theophilus Lindsey, and their shared struggles with the Anglican Church's conditions of their ministry.They perceived the Thirty-Nine Articles as discriminatory, man-made doctrine that diverted from biblical Christianity and imposed restrictions on the power of God-given human reason.Focusing on the first couple of the saga, formed through Lindsey's marriage to Blackburne's stepdaughter Hannah Elsworth in 1760, Richards analyses the centrality of the liberal-minded, inclusive and individualist concept of reasoned religion to their lives and occupation.Alongside intriguing insights into their daily routines, the story traces Lindsey's path to anti-Trinitarianism, efforts to accomplish (reason-driven) changes in the Anglican Church, resignation and dissenting experience, leading to his opening of the Unitarian chapel on Essex Street in London in 1774.The spotlight then moves to William Frend, a 'Cambridge-educated fallen Anglican' (p.73) who befriended Lindsey in the late 1780s.Analysing Frend's life in the wider political context (French Revolution, English reaction), Richards illustrates his transformation from a Cambridge mathematics tutor and Anglican minister into 'a ragingly radical Unitarian' (p.57).The chapters reveal the individuals' internal worlds (emotional struggles with conversion), student life and careers within the social hierarchy in Cambridge colleges, memories of William Paley's classes, travel experience and the circumstances of the trials that led to Frend's banishment from Cambridge in 1793.
Author: Lenka Schmalisch
Institution: Durham University
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4416192912
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