ounded by Robert Aspland in 1806, The Monthly Repository of Theology and General Literature deliberately recalls the title of a periodical edited by the founding father of Unitarianism, John Priestley’s Theological Repository. In the face of this ancestry and Aspland’s association with Benthamite thought, The Monthly Repository blended Unitarian and Utilitarian thought to a remarkable degree and “always endeavored to rally Unitarians to an awareness of their own strength and to encourage them to accept authority, even when it was that of Dr. Priestley himself, only after questioning” (Mineka 1944 101).
Three pages from the second volume of The Monthly Repository: Left: The Title-page. Middle: The First Page of an Article. Right: A Letter from Priestlery. [Click on images to enlarge them.]
The shared core beliefs in anti-authoritarianism, freedom of thought, and rationality surface already in the journal’s structure: With letters and correspondence as its chief elements, The Monthly Repository offered a forum for debate in which readers, contributors and editor(s) met on an equal footing. Other genres included biographies, obituaries (also on women), “Biblical Criticism”, “Poetry”, “Reviews” and “Miscellaneous Communications”, albeit their titles are misleading: sometimes the biography reads like an obituary and vice versa. This is because these pieces do not offer a genuine historical record but narratives of significant figures – exemplary life stores to illustrate that the seemingly abstract Unitarian ideals can indeed be lived out. Yet Aspland did not have solely the moral uplift of his readers in his mind. A contribution marked as “obituary” also offered certain legal advantages: Since such document could hardly be prosecuted for sedition, an obituary about the Duke of Richmond offered Aspland the opportunity to publish a thinly veiled indictment of the conservative Pitt years.
In 1828, Fox became co-editor of The Monthly Repository and its sole owner in 1831. He published his first independently edited volume in January 1832. Fox’s editorial envisioned England “in a state of transition” which will culminate in meaningful reforms of church, law and education into truly democratic institutions. The articles cover working class politics (Charles’s Knight’s “The Working-Man’s Companion. Rights of Industry, Capital, and Labour”), continental thought (John James Taylor, “Herder’s Thoughts on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind”), economics (Harriet Martineau’s “On the Duty of Studying Political Economy”), education (John Relly Beard, “Sunday School Education”) and aesthetics (John Johns, “Connection between Poetry and Religion”). Later issues display a similarly impressive scope and affirm Mineka’s observation that “under Fox, the Repository broke away from its moorings in the Unitarian controversy to sail the wider seas of political and social reform” (Mineka 1944 vii).
Related Material
- Introduction
- Philosophical foundations of Unitarianism – John Locke, Moral Sense, and David Hartley
- Unitarianism’s social vision
- “Loose the female mind” – Unitarianism and feminism
- The Unitarian Radicals
- Unitarianism and Utilitarianism
- The Philosophic Radicals
- Nineteenth-Century Periodicals (homepage)
Bibliography
Mineka, Francis Edward. The Dissidence of Dissent. The Monthly Repository, 1806-1838. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944.
Last modified 24 September 2020