The Unitarian Radicals

hree factors moved the many Unitarians toward political radicalism: growing disillusion among Unitarian women about the narrowness of their denomination’s outlook, the many Unitarians who returned from studies in Germany, and the changed political landscape all left their mark on Unitarianism. To begin with, growing public recognition and the Unitarians’ eventual representation in Parliament had the effect that by the 1830s this group was no longer an alien element in British society. The end of external struggles led Unitarians to a critical reexamination of their core beliefs.

Their contact with German culture and scholarship prompted them to reflect on their religious foundations: German philologists had demonstrated that the Bible, the unique source of authority to Unitarians, was in fact the product of numerous authors of different times. In their search for new religious authority, Unitarians increasingly turned to German idealism. This philosophical sharply sharp opposed the Lockean empiricism that Unitarians had hitherto so valued. What made German idealism so appealing to them was its conception of human reason: Rather than believing, like Locke and the Empiricists, that the human mind was a passive tabula rasa in need of external material, the German idealists, like the Coleridgeans later, believed that the human mind constituted the outside world — not the other way round. This idea also led to a new understanding of God and religion, which the Unitarians considered integral to humanity. Finally yet importantly, Unitarians, who increasingly became interested in radical politics, came into a contact with left-winged ideologies like Owenism and French communitarianism.

The man behind the Unitarian Radicals was William Johnson Fox (1786-1864). Of humble and Calvinist origins, this dedicated autodidact read mathematics, Latin. and philosophy before and after his working hours as a clerk at a local bank. At the age of twenty, he decided to become a minister and enrolled at Homerton Academy in Hackney, London. The usual course lasted six years. Probably due to his early independent learning, Fox completed his studies in three. Yet his commitment could not hide the fact that he lacked the physical prerequisites of a preacher: Five feet tall, heavy-built with a small voice, little suggested that Fox would become one of the best and most popular speakers first in the Unitarian community and eventually in national politics.

During his first appointment as a Calvinist preacher in Hampshire in 1809, Fox began to doubt his religion. By 1812, “he was an avowed Unitarian” (Mineka 177) and became minister of a small Unitarian congregation in Chichester. His growing reputation as an orator brought about his invitation to London to take over the pastorate of the Parliament Court Chapel. In the years to follow, Fox distinguished himself as a brilliant speaker who moreover did not shy away from exposing bigotry among his own congregation in sermons like “The Duties of Christians towards Deists” of October 1819 (Mineka, 181). February 1824 saw the opening of South Place Chapel, built by Fox’s congregation for their new minister. Fox encouraged the group’s occupation with, and incorporation of, the new of ideas of German idealism, romanticism, and left-winged politics. His broad-mindedness is mirrored in John Stuart Mill’s observation that Fox entertained “a religion of spirit, not of dogma” (Mineka 209).

Fox’s progressiveness increasingly alienated him from the wider denomination, yet according to Francis Edward Mineka’s classic study on the radical Unitarians and their journal The Monthly Repository, the ultimate break “was to arise more immediately from his personal conduct than from differences of opinion on religion and politics” (Mineka, Dissidence, 182). The first confrontation centered on the publication of a paper “On the Condition of Women in England” by William Bridges Adams in The Monthly Repository (1833), by then edited solely by Fox. Adams’s unflattering representation of marriage as a means to disenfranchise women and his claim that marriage ought to be “capable of being dissolved like any other contract” (Adams 228) was more than Unitarian traditionalists were willing to bear. Lant Carpenter demanded that Fox distance himself from the radical ideas expressed by Adams. Fox was apparently unwilling to do so, for he and his former ally Carpenter forever parted ways (Gleadle 34).

The second occurrence created tensions even among the South Park circle itself and added to the lasting detachment between them and the rest of the Unitarians. Beginning in 1823, Fox had grown increasingly close with the radical editor and publisher Benjamin Flower, who had moved to London with his two daughters Sarah and Eliza in 1820. Fox became a mentor to both girls and later, on the death of their father in 1829, their trustee as well. His association with Eliza would lead to a marital crisis by 1832, news of which eventually reached his congregation. Some members asked to either “set his house in order” or resign from office (Mineka 1944 193). Fox justified his conduct with his feminist views and referred to his recent articles from The Monthly Repository on women’s rights and the right to divorce. Forty-six members left his parish (Mineka 1944 195). The majority, however, supported him. Nevertheless, Fox was formally expelled in the spring of 1835. In the same year, he separated from his wife (née Eliza Florance) and went to live with his former ward, Eliza Flower.

This episode might sound like the typical behavior of a middle-aged man in love with a much younger woman, yet Fox’s feminism seems genuine. He was among the first to challenge the legal status of women, notably their (lack of) property rights and the franchise. In one of his numerous articles on the Woman Question, Fox would term women’s disenfranchisement “A Political and Social Anomaly.” He was equally dismissive of the education usually granted to women. In preparing women for nothing but marriage, it fails precisely in this respect: “[A]s long as women have nothing in the world to look to but marriage, they cannot become qualified, in the best manner, for a married life. […] In training a dependent, [man] has lost a companion” (641).

Their dedication to feminism would remain the most distinctive trait of the radical Unitarians – so much so that outsiders and critics considered Fox and his circle the epitome of immorality. Thomas Carlyle remarked in a letter to Dr. John Carlyle of 28 October 1834 that “[m]ost of these people are very indignant at marriage and the like; and frequently indeed are obliged to divorce their wives, or be divorced” (quoted Hayek 82). Yet public opposition did little to diminish the appeal Fox’s circle had on the progressive minds of the day, among them John Bowring, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edward Bulwer Lytton, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Harriet Taylor (Frazee; Mineka 1944, Rossi).

Beginning in the 1830s, Fox’s group of literati and their fight for women’s rights were increasingly joined by lawyers. The solicitor William Henry Ashurst (1792-1855), who had already made a name for himself by the founding of several radical publications, would play a crucial role in advancing the feminist cause. Unlike many of earlier Unitarians, Ashurst lived his ideals not only in his professional but also in his private life. One of his four daughters confided to one of her many correspondents that “we are allowed, and have been accustomed to, more freedom of intercourse, than many other Parents [sic!] allow their children” (quoted Gleadle 40). All of Ashurst’s children married leading Unitarian lawyers and businessmen and thereby greatly increased the group’s political network (Hammond and Hammond, Patterson; both sources quoted in Gleadle 40).

Apart from women’s rights, the Unitarian Radicals were also dedicated to amend the social problems brought about by industrialization. They drew on Owenite ideas on cooperation in both their approaches to the housing problem and the management practices of factories – as in their promotion of associated housing schemes (with common rooms and shared heat and water supplies to lower the costs of living) and schools, libraries, and leisure activities for employees. The Unitarian Radicals planned to soften the effects of unbridled capitalism and cater to the needs of employees who in their view should benefit especially from industrialization. Although deeply inspired by socialist thought, Unitarian Radicals differed from Socialists in their long-term goals and social vision. They aimed at reforming rather than abolishing capitalism – and as in their feminist campaign had an eye on social acceptance and popular support. Unitarian Radicals were hence highly selective of socialist ideas, which they moreover adjusted to their religious, moral, and economic views. For instance, they rejected the idea of community of property because it threatened individualism and was “opposed to the principles of emulation and accumulation” (sources quoted in Gleadle 50). Similarly, Unitarian Radicals designed significantly smaller associative housing units than Socialists and Owenites envisaged because they wanted to preserve the nuclear family.

Yet the consideration of mainstream opinion was only one strategy. Another one was the gradual launching of Unitarian thought via different publications. Radical Unitarian writers like Dickens and Mary Leman Grimstone called into question social expectations on women by creating highly disputable female characters that embodied precisely those values society valued so highly in women, like Dora in David Copperfield – a child wife who proves a burden to her husband. Apart from novels, Unitarians introduced them into mainstream discourse their feminist views in numerous journals, a particularly noteworthy example which is The Monthly Repository.

Related Material

Bibliography

Adams, William Bridges. “On the Condition of Women in England,” The Monthly Repository 7 (1833), pp. 228-229.

Fox, William Johnson. “A Political and Social Anomaly,” The Monthly Repository6 (1832), pp. 637-642.

Frazee, John P. “Dickens and Unitarianism,” Dickens Study Annual 18 (1989), pp. 119-143.

Gleadle, Kathryn. The Early Feminists. Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831-51. London: MacMillan, 1998.

Hayek, Friedrich August von. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage. London: Routledge, 1951.

Hammond, Barbara and J.L. Hammond. James Stanfield. A Victorian Champion of Sex Equality. Longmans, Green 1932.

Mineka, Francis Edward. The Dissidence of Dissent. The Monthly Repository, 1806-1838. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Mineka, Francis Edward. The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963.

Patterson, A. Temple. Radical Leicester 1780-1850. Leicester: University College Leicester, 1954.

Alice S. Rossi (ed.). Essays on Sex Equality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Last modified 24 September 2020