What’s Up, Doc?

Introduction. In my article The Fair Children of Sherwood posted on this website on 7 January 2023, I included a quote from George Orwell’s essay “Charles Dickens” (Inside the Whale, 1940). Part of it read:

Mr Fairchild, for instance, when he catches his children quarrelling, first thrashes them, reciting Dr Watts’s ‘Let dogs delight to bark and bite’, between blows of the cane, and then takes them to spend the afternoon beneath a gibbet where the rotting corpse of a murderer is hanging.

I promised to explain who Dr Watts was. He was evidently well known enough in 1940 for Orwell not to need to do this or even give Dr Watts’s full name. The situation is different today.

Family Background and Early Life. Isaac Watts was born on 17 July 1674 in Southampton the oldest of eight children of Isaac Watts senior (1650-1737) a master clothier; and Sarah Watts nee Tanton who was of French Huguenot i.e. Protestant descent. According to Isaac Watts junior’s account his paternal grandfather Thomas Watts was drowned when his ship was blown up during the First Dutch War.

During the Civil War most of the Royal Navy sided with parliament. Five royalist captains who objected were murdered by their crews. The English Civil War was not as brutal an affair as the Spanish Civil War but they were not as different as is sometimes supposed.

The First Anglo-Dutch War was a naval trade war between the parliamentarian and Dutch navies at the behest of the Rump parliament that was dominated by the allegedly puritan clothing interests. This was a Protestant versus Protestant War and was an ironic contrast to Cromwell’s one time dream of a Protestant foreign policy.

After the Restoration Isaac Watts senior was imprisoned for being a nonconformist in 1674, 1678 and 1683. He moved from Southampton to London where in 1688 he was appointed Secretary and Deacon of the Above Bar Congregational Church.

Isaac Watts junior studied at Southampton Grammar School where he learnt Latin, Greek, French and Hebrew. He could not go to Oxford or Cambridge as he was not an Anglican. From 1690 to 1694 he studied at Thomas Rowe’s Dissenting Academy in Little Britain in London. Dissenting Academies were institutions for the higher education of Protestant non-conformists.

The Tutor and Non-Conformist Minister. On 15 October 1696 Isaac Watts was appointed tutor to John Hartopp the oldest son of Sir John Hartopp a baronet (a hereditary knight) who was a Protestant Independent (Congregationalist) Non-conformist; and whose father in law was the Cromwellian general Charles Fleetwood. Isaac Watts lived in Hartopp’s Newington near London home.

Isaac Watts began preaching in 1698 and in 1699 was appointed assistant to Isaac Chauncy the minister of Mark Lane Independent Chapel in London. In 1702 Watts was appointed its Minister a post which he held with the help of assistants until he died. This was despite much poor health. He was short with a weak bodily presence but was a powerful preacher. The congregation which had declined under Chauncy increased under Watts.

In 1702 Watts moved to lodge in the house of the Non-conformist philanthropist Thomas Hollis in the Minories in the City of London. In 1708 the Mark Lane congregation moved to a new purpose built chapel in Bury Street in the City of London. In 1710 Watts became a lodger with a Mr Bowes. In 1712 Watts began lodging with Sir Thomas Abney a non-conformist merchant who belonged to the Fishmonger’s Company and was Lord Mayor of London in 1701-1702.

Isaac Watts lodged with the Abneys at their Lime Street in the City of London townhouse and Theobald’s their Hertfordshire country home. Sir Thomas Abney died in 1722 aged eighty three and Watts then lodged with Lady Abney and her two surviving daughters at Abney Park in Stoke Newington.

Isaac Watts never married but he once proposed to a widow Elizabeth Rowe nee Singer a non-conformist poet and devotional writer. Her late husband Thomas Rowe junior was the son of Thomas Rowe senior who run the Dissenting Academy where Watts had studied.

The poet and hymn writer. Isaac Watts was a prolific poet and hymn writer regarding his poetic talent as a divine gift. He began writing poetry when he was seventeen. The full text of the hymn that Orwell quoted one line of in his article about the writer Mrs Sherwood reads:

The educator and theologian. Isaac Watts was unmarried and childless but he had had contact with children as a tutor and lodger. He wrote for children on secular and religious subjects. Such works include The Art of Reading and Writing (1721); and the Catechism (1730) which he dedicated to the parents in his congregation.

Isaac Watts was interested in educational theory wanting to balance science and religion. His Logic or the Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth was published in 1725; and a sequel The Improvement of the Mind in two parts in 1741 and posthumously in 1753.

As a theologian Watts supported traditional Christian and Puritan doctrines such as the Holy Trinity and salvation by atonement. He opposed extremists of all types including hard line Calvinists and fashionable deists, and supported freedom of worship even for people with whom he disagreed such as Unitarians. His theological writings expressed his moderate viewpoint.

Reputation. Isaac Watts had a high reputation. In 1728 Edinburgh and Aberdeen Universities made him a Doctor of Divinity. He had many friends in the various Protestant non-conformist denominations. They included the Methodists John Wesley and George Whitefield; and Selina Countess of Huntingdon who founded her own religious Connexion

Dr Watts’s Anglican friends included Thomas Secker whose father was a non-conformist and whose grandfather was a Lincolnshire butcher. Thomas Secker was born in 1693; studied at a Yorkshire Dissenting Academy; became an Anglican; attended Exeter College, Oxford; was ordained in 1722; was appointed Bishop of Bristol in 1734 and of Oxford in 1737; was made Archbishop of Canterbury in 1758; and died in 1768 aged seventy four.

Bishop Secker believed that the best way for the Church of England to fight Protestant non-conformity was for Anglican clergy to be good Christians and priests. Even today this is good advice and in his period it was a refreshing change. Not all Anglicans followed his advice.

Dr Watts corresponded with American Protestant clergy especially New Englanders such as Cotton Mather; and had German Lutheran Protestant friends including Anton Wilhelm Boehm who translated into English works by the German Lutheran theologian August Herman Francke. The name Boehm was a version of Bohemia, suggesting that Boehm’s Czech Protestant ancestors became refugees after the Hapsburgs crushed Czech Protestantism during the Thirty Years War.

The End. Dr Isaac Watts died at Abney Park on 25 November 1748 aged seventy four. He was buried at Bunhill Fields. His coffin was carried by six non-conformist ministers – two Independents (Congregationalists), two Presbyterians and two Baptists. Some of his writings were published posthumously including a six volume Collected Works in 1753. A seven volume Collected Works was published in 1800 after the copyright (then fifty years) had expired.

Christians still sing some of Dr Watts’s hymns. His Dictionary of National Biography entry lists several biographies of him the most recent full length one dating from 1948. His most famous biographer was Dr Samuel Johnson, of Dictionary fame whose, The Life of the Reverend Isaac Watts DD, first appeared in Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets published in three volumes in 1779-1781.

*