Print Culture

The study of print culture and the history of the book in the eighteenth century has benefited significantly in the past three decades from studies that have placed varying degrees of emphasis on the three key components of print culture—author, publisher, and reader—and their interwoven relationships. This scholarship has also spurred new research on the literary and print culture of evangelical Anglicans, Methodists, Quakers, Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists, Moravians, and Independents in Great Britain and America, including specific studies related to the transatlantic nature of the printing histories of Philip Doddridge and Jonathan Edwards. This chapter seeks to further this discussion by exploring three areas of eighteenth-century evangelical print culture in England: the interplay between readers, writers, and producers with informal and formal sources; the ecclesiastical/topographical reconstruction of reading/selling communities of chapel-goers and neighboring (and usually like-minded) booksellers; and the interaction of these two elements in the publishing history of one representative text, Samuel James’s An Abstract of the Gracious Dealings of God with Several Eminent Christians (1760).