In 1932, when the Cambridge University Press published as a Christmas gift to friends of the Press selections from the Honours of the table: the art of carving, the author, John Trusler, was described as ‘fair game for the ironical biographer’, not least for ‘his sermons for the slower minded clergy’.Footnote 1 John Trusler is best remembered for his faux manuscript sermons, published commercially in the 1770s. They have attracted the opprobrium of both contemporary and later writers.Footnote 2 The author of his entry in the ODNB wrote that he published them ‘for clergymen who did not want to write their own sermons but wished to appear as though they did’.Footnote 3 Trusler's contemporaries were more trenchant: his entry in the Biographical dictionary of living authors of Great Britain and Ireland of 1816 included the comment: ‘to the disgrace of the age there were not wanting many dignitaries of the Church who gave their encouragement to this scandalous species of quackery’.Footnote 4 Another contemporary, David Rivers, described the sermons in 1798 as ‘the most unspeakable trash that can be conceived’.Footnote 5 The Evangelical parson Charles Simeon regarded the venture as ‘that disgraceful traffic in printed sermons, which instead of meeting with encouragement from the clergy, ought to have excited universal indignation’.Footnote 6 After Trusler, the traffic in sermons was widely attacked and by the end of the nineteenth century was the subject of much criticism. It was often managed circumspectly, with advertisements in the Courier in 1802 printed in Latin, presumably to avoid the laity understanding the nature of the items on sale.Footnote 7 More recent authors have assumed that Trusler's sermons represented the sort of corrupt and negligent practices for which the Church in the eighteenth century used to be attacked, although such assaults have now been largely extinguished.Footnote 8
In 1869 the periodical St Pauls devoted an article to the sermon trade. At this time the usual cost of such a sermon was 1s. 3d. Vendors adopted Trusler's practices ‘to prevent their being detected’ and no duplicates were supplied ‘to preclude the possibility of the same sermons being preached in neighbouring parishes’. St Pauls estimated that there were about a dozen dealers in the trade, and if each had fifty clients, about 1,200 sermons a Sunday were supplied.Footnote 9 By the end of the nineteenth century the trade in sermons had grown significantly. B. G. Johns wrote that the trade was highly profitable with ‘the cool impudence of the vendors … only exceeded by the transparent folly of the clerical customers'; the sermons, he claimed, were worthless. Some newspaper advertisements offered the sermons only to the clergy, some by regular subscription, others in whole sets; there were also offers of sermon-writing services. In some cases executors sold a deceased parson's collection of manuscript sermons, in one case offering 600 for sale, and in another case offering them to publishers.Footnote 10
Of course, as the author of ‘The sermon trade’ pointed out, using the sermons of others was not new: there had always been the potential for ‘a painstaking man of small original power [to copy] out and use the works of some more able divine’.Footnote 11 In the middle of the eighteenth century William Temple told the clergy that he did not regard ‘borrowing’ a sermon from a leading preacher such as Isaac Barrow or Jeremy Taylor as theft.Footnote 12 But, for the Victorians, ‘the really disreputable part of the business' was the attempt to prevent the detection of the use of work by others. Central to this was the use of lithographs to print the sermons in imitation handwriting so that no one observing may be ‘led to suppose that the parson is reading what is not his own’.Footnote 13 The criticism of the traffic lay in two features, firstly the fraudulent claim made by clergy that they had written the sermons themselves, and secondly the evasion of the duty of writing a sermon specifically for their own congregation and circumstances. The origins of the trade lie in what has been assumed to be a low point in the negligence of the clergy of the Hanoverian Church of England. Yet Trusler's own intentions have been largely obscured because the second volume of his memoirs was not published and consequently the scheme as originally devised was not explained.Footnote 14
II
The details of John Trusler's life are obscure and have only recently been uncovered in the unpublished second volume of his memoirs. One of the questions that is significant regarding the faux manuscript sermons is their dating. In a notice of Trusler's death, the dating of the sermons enterprise is given as 1771.Footnote 15 However Stanley Morison doubted this, suggesting a date nearer to 1785. Nevertheless Morison thought it likely that Trusler's venture pre-dated the other significant lithographic handwriting venture, Mary Potter's The poetry of nature, which he understood was published in 1785.Footnote 16 In fact Potter's work with ‘typographical execution in a style entirely new, and decorated with the superb ornaments, of the celebrated Caslon’ was first published in 1789. Moreover Trusler's sermons almost certainly pre-date 1785; his Sublime reader (an edition of the Book of Common Prayer marked with the emphasis required for reading) was published in 1784 and Trusler's manuscript memoir indicated that he only intended to publish it when the publication of the sermons was already well under way.Footnote 17 From the fact that Trusler discussed the sermons with Bishop Richard Terrick, who died in 1777, the venture must have started before that date. The Cambridge Chronicle and Journal for 1771 advertised the sermons, which seems to confirm an early date for the project.Footnote 18 It is clear that the quantity of the sermons was such that the project almost certainly took a number of years, and by 1790 214 individual printed sermons were available. Morison estimated that such a project would have taken at least four years.Footnote 19 But either way, Trusler's venture certainly pre-dated that of Mary Potter, so it seems likely that Trusler invented the idea of lithographic type face which imitated copperplate handwriting. Trusler's own memoirs do not ascribe any model for the idea of sermons ‘engraved in imitation of manuscript’.Footnote 20 The similarity between Trusler's and Potter's font suggests that she used the style adopted by Trusler.
The British Library catalogue lists Trusler's thirty-sixth sermon in the series ‘On compassion’ as dated 1785, which also suggests that the venture had been under way for some time. Moreover, in January 1783, the London Chronicle included notice that ‘since Christmas 1781’ Trusler had added sixty new sermons, bringing the list available to 187.Footnote 21 While Trusler's advertisement of 1788 (A list of books, published by the Rev. Dr. Trusler, at the Literary-Press, no. 14, Red-Lion-Street, Clerkenwell) does not mention the sermons (though it does include The sublime reader), this may simply reflect the original intention which was that the sermons would not be offered to the public. It was only in 1790 that his List of books, this time issued from the Literary Press, 62 Wardour Street, included mention of the ‘engraved sermons, imitating manuscript’. By 1800, when the advertisement was included in Trusler's Clerical Almanack, a volume of twelve sermons were described as ‘engraved by Grignian’.Footnote 22
III
Trusler's own account of the sermons venture is contained in his second volume of memoirs, written in 1809. In it, Trusler described how, having lived in Europe for some years, he returned to England and found himself perusing Gilbert Burnet's Discourse of the pastoral care. This was first published in 1692 but frequently reprinted – running to thirteen editions in its first twenty years – and was perhaps the most widely-used guide to clergy of their duties in the first half of the eighteenth century. Burnet recommended that young clergy should read the printed sermons of other, leading clergy while they were developing their skills and before they began to compose their own.Footnote 23 Adopting Burnet's principles, Trusler decided ‘to publish a collection of approved discourses on all subjects calculated for the use of the pulpit – and that the clergy might use without the trouble of transcribing to have them engraved in imitation of manuscript’. Trusler therefore did not, as some critics assumed, compose the sermons himself.Footnote 24 He wrote:
I did not presume to compose them myself and thus dictate to a whole body of learned men perhaps of far greater abilities than I could boast of, but if I could save them much labour & thus afford them time and leisure for study and the pastoral duties of their office & at the same time furnish them with such a collection of well-written discourses as if well delivered would do credit to the Preacher and edify his congregation I conceived that I could not act wrong.Footnote 25
Trusler pointed out to his readers that clergy often inherited sermons from family members and sometimes used printed discourses which could ‘subject them to painful detection’.Footnote 26 Rather than expect inexperienced clergy to find such sermons or select from those authors whom they happened to come across, he
accordingly selected such a number from the best printed sermons extant, such as were scarce and of course little known, adapted them to the pulpit of the present day and published them in single discourse – and lest [he] might wound the delicacy of the clergy did not publish them in the common mode through booksellers and newspapers but conveyed the intelligence through the post office addressing a letter to the officiating minister in every parish, so that in the course of one month [he] made it public to all clergy, and yet a secret to the rest of the people – and had they kept their own counsel it never would have otherwise been known – but what they condemned me for they effected themselves.Footnote 27
Thus it is clear that from the outset that, on the one hand, Trusler's plan was indeed to deceive the public, but on the other it was to supply clergy with better sermons than they might have access to, given that Trusler's were adapted from the sermons of leading clergy. Since Trusler abridged the sermons, usually to less than a dozen pages of engraved manuscript, it is very difficult to trace the sermons that he used as his sources. Trusler's venture was a hybrid of deceit and professional improvement. It was also one which developed the idea of ‘direct sales’ to a professional group which by-passed booksellers, and consequently earned their enmity.
The decision to send a copy of the advertisement to each parish in the country was one which was both advantageous and dangerous. In reply Trusler claimed to have received thousands of letters, some angry denunciations and some orders for the sermons. Characteristically entrepreneurial, he said that he had struck a deal with the controller of the Post Office which meant that he only paid the postage on those replies which contained orders for the sermons. Naturally there were those who regarded Trusler's venture as scandalous, including a clergyman whom Trusler overheard in a bookseller's shop attacking the venture; when Trusler mildly introduced himself to the parson the latter subsided and found himself charmed by Trusler into buying a set of the sermons.Footnote 28 Despite the controversy, Trusler, incapable of great modesty, was proud of the work, concluding in his memoirs that ‘I may say without vanity that having published upward of 200 of these sermons taking them in the whole there never was a finer collection of practical discourses ever made public – my not having composed more than one or two of them myself I am at liberty to say this.’Footnote 29 Some of the sermons that Trusler adapted were, he claimed, published over two centuries earlier, some were composed by dissenting ministers but modified by him to conform to the Church of England, and others were French and Dutch sermons. They were all, he observed, ‘perfectly orthodox’.Footnote 30
At the outset of the venture, Trusler had considered asking the bishop of London, Richard Terrick, to be the patron of the sermons but chose not do so in the end. However, a year after the publication of the first fifty sermons Terrick sent for Trusler to discuss the scheme which had clearly attracted considerable attention from his fellow bishops. The account of the meeting covers some pages in Trusler's memoirs and is worth considering in detail. The meeting did not go well. Terrick was convinced that Trusler had not properly considered the scheme; but Trusler was characteristically combative and did not submit to the bishop's bluster. In his opening defence Trusler said that he had got the idea from Bishop Burnet and cited others who recommended that young clergy use the sermons of others, including Bishop Samuel Peploe of Chester; he added, ‘I wish the majesty of the pulpit were more looked to and that no sermon was offered from thence but such as should make the hearers both the wiser and the better.’Footnote 31 Terrick was worried that the scheme would lead younger clergy to be idle, to which Trusler replied that he regarded the clergy as a body of educated men who would take the opportunity of less time spent writing sermons for pastoral visits among their parishioners which he regarded as an important part of their duties. Terrick argued that one problem with the business was that the laity would now assume that any good sermon a cleric preached was one of his; in reply Trusler thanked the bishop for the compliment. Terrick icily replied, ‘I mean to pass no compliment; my design in sending for you is to reprimand you.’Footnote 32 But Trusler was impervious to the bishop's condemnation; he joked that people sometimes referred to ‘penny sermons’ – at least with his scheme people would know the parson had paid a shilling for each one. Terrick was enraged by this and said ‘this is not a moment to be pleasant’ – he went on that Trusler had been the subject of complaints to Terrick from ‘almost all my clergy’ and that ‘the bench of bishops have declared that unless I sent for you and reprimanded you it would have the appearance of my giving it countenance’.Footnote 33
Unwisely, Trusler then mentioned that he had considered asking Terrick to be patron of the scheme, to which Terrick exploded that the sermons were ‘an insult to the whole order’.Footnote 34 Now Trusler mounted a serious defence, asking how the scheme could be an insult: he did not dictate to the clergy, the sermons were not written by him, he only aimed to assist parsons. Suppose a curate served two churches; was he really expected to write four sermons each week? What would become of his other duties? He claimed that there was not one parson or layman who, if they reflected on the idea, would not agree that the occasional use of one of his sermons was no insult. He also argued that ‘with regard to the intent of preaching and its influence on the hearers it is in fact immaterial who pens the discourse, provided it be well penn'd and well delivered’.Footnote 35 In this, Trusler was drawing on considerable concern that composing sermons was too onerous a duty for the clergy, especially as the usual length of a sermon was around half an hour and sometimes longer.Footnote 36 If a parson preached twice a Sunday, leaving aside ecclesiastical festivals, he would have to write over a hundred sermons a year. If each sermon took half a day to compose he would commit almost two months a year to composition.Footnote 37 It was therefore to be expected that clergy often swapped and recycled sermons and chose to read sermons from the published sermons of the best preachers.Footnote 38
One of Bishop Terrick's concerns was the issue of duplication: what would happen if two clergy who served the same church preached the same sermon, one in the morning, the other in the afternoon? Trusler smoothly replied that the same danger existed when any clergyman read a published sermon, but he regarded it as no danger at all and said that no serious man would have an objection to hearing the same sermon twice. No layman assumed that because his parson sometimes read a sermon written by someone else he was incapable of writing one himself, and Trusler pointed out that the most able clergy of their day had often read sermons from the pulpit. Trusler said that when he preached a published sermon and was complimented on it, he often showed the published version to his congregation so that they could see where they could buy a copy. He also claimed that some of his clients were guaranteed not to be detected as they were ‘noblemen keeping domestic chaplains to furnish them with there [sic] discourses’.Footnote 39
Terrick resorted that if Trusler's plan was so worthy, why had he received so many requests to suppress it? Trusler replied that he had equally many testimonials from prominent clergy who approved of the idea. Irritably the bishop said, ‘Sir you will allow me to know as many respectable clergymen as you do and they did not approve it.’Footnote 40 Trusler again went on the offensive, asking the bishop whether he had seen any of the sermons and saying that if he had not read any he was not competent to judge them. Terrick mentioned that he had bought a complete set, to which Trusler asked whether he found any of them theologically deficient. Terrick inadvertently replied that he wished every sermon was as good; and Trusler thanked him for this ‘second compliment.’ Terrick again replied that he had not intended it as a compliment. Trusler pressed on, saying that he was surprised to hear that the whole bench of bishops were against the plan as the bishop of SalisburyFootnote 41 had ordered two whole sets of the sermons for his nephews who held livings in his diocese. Terrick gaped at this news and replied that he had not known of it.Footnote 42
Trusler blithely added that he intended to compose an edition of the Book of Common Prayer with the words to be emphasised underlined as an aid to the clergy (later published as The sublime reader), and also that Scottish clergy were ordering his sermons in considerable numbers. Terrick could see that he was making no headway with Trusler and asked him if there was anything he could say which would induce him to give up the business, to which Trusler replied that he planned to produce 150 individual sermons and nothing would persuade him to give up the undertaking.
According to Trusler, the bishop and he parted on good terms; on this occasion, unlike on his entry into the chamber, Terrick politely rose. Of course only Trusler's account of the meeting survives; there is no record of Terrick's opinion of it. It was after the meeting that Trusler undertook the most remarkable piece of effrontery. After he left the bishop he spoke to his secretary and suggested that he keep two sets of the sermons to sell to clergy who came to see the bishop, either for the diocese of London or the Church in America (which lay under the bishop of London's jurisdiction). Trusler suggested that he would give the secretary 25 percent of all such sales, and estimated that it would yield much more than the fees that he currently earned from the episcopal licences that he issued. It was another remarkable sales model invented apparently on the spot. Trusler managed to get away with the ruse for over a year – he called it his ‘revenge’– until Terrick discovered that he had been made ‘the vendor of what he feigned to disapprove’.Footnote 43 When he discovered what had happened Terrick again sent for Trusler and while this time he refused to get angry, he told Trusler that he had no intention of being a sales outlet for the sermons of which he still disapproved.Footnote 44 Nevertheless Trusler claimed to know, through a mutual friend Colonel Ramsden, that Terrick did not take such a dim view of the sermons: ‘his Lordship said the collection of sermons was a fine one, that he wished it in general use and was sorry to find himself called upon to censure me’.Footnote 45 Thereafter Terrick and Trusler occasionally met and on each occasion they were civil to one another.
The only other account of the meeting between Trusler and Terrick is from the Spirit of the English Magazine which claimed that Terrick called Trusler to Fulham to speak to him because of the success of the sales of the sermons. When Terrick asked Trusler to give up publishing them, the latter replied that he earned £150 a year from the sales and if the bishop would give him a living of that value he would give up publishing them; the bishop declined to do so.Footnote 46 Given Trusler's audacity this account has the ring of truth about it, though it is unlikely that Trusler would ever have settled happily into a parish living. The episode provides an insight into Trusler's strong will, refusal to be intimidated and self-confidence. His independent income, partly from publishing, meant that he was not reliant on a stipend from a parish and therefore less affected by Terrick's disapproval.
IV
John Trusler's venture in publishing sermons was not simply that of a cheeky journeyman parson-publisher with an eye to a profit. Much of Trusler's early life had convinced him of the importance of preaching in the life of the Church. Having graduated from Cambridge in 1757,Footnote 47 Trusler took orders and secured a succession of curacies as his father, proprietor of the Marylebone Gardens, was in no position to procure him a living. One of the first curacies that he held was at Ware in Hertfordshire, where, according to his memoirs, he began to learn how to preach and became an accomplished preacher. Trusler knew that he had a good voice, good stature and graceful delivery.Footnote 48 He recognised that preaching was not a natural talent for all, claiming that most clergy get ‘into the pulpit as untaught in his mother tongue as when he left the knees of his school-mistress’ and that not even one in fifty young men were fit for preaching.Footnote 49
While in deacon's orders at Ware, Trusler also acted as curate at All Saints, Hertford, which was not as well attended as Ware. However, by preaching to his congregation ‘in an easy, familiar style, a language they understood and were pleased with’, he soon attracted a larger congregation. His sermon on the death of the Princess of Orange, daughter of George ii, was widely admired and published and, as he recorded, ‘not satisfied with hearing this latter sermon once, several gentlemen requested me to repeat it in the afternoon at the village church to which I was going, and they could accompany me there’.Footnote 50 The reputation of the sermon had spread quickly so that when he got to the village church in the afternoon it was crammed and he only managed to reach the pulpit by pressing through the crowd. The church accommodated one hundred and fifty but on that day contained at least twice that number, with people standing in every empty space. Even the windows were opened so that people could hear outside. Such was the quality of the sermon, Trusler claimed, that it not only convinced some Quakers in the parish to convert to the Church, but when the published version was presented to the king he permitted Trusler to kiss his hand. Trusler later claimed that when he was examined for admission to priest's orders the chaplain did not examine him because he was the author of the celebrated sermon.Footnote 51
Trusler was not, however, an irenic figure, quite the reverse; he described himself as having the weakness of not cultivating people and this hampered his success.Footnote 52 When he became curate at Ockley, Trusler was invited by one of his parishioners, who was a bencher of the Temple, to preach there. Among Trusler's many idiosyncrasies was a fierce antagonism to publishers, physicians and lawyers.Footnote 53 So Trusler's sermon was an account of the abuse of the law by lawyers. He described his preaching as ‘warm and animated’ and claimed that the agitation of the congregation was suppressed by its desire to hear him so ‘you might have heard a spider fall’. As he wrote of the sermon ‘though I by no means approve of severities in the pulpit, yet as the conduct of our lawyers is so very exceptionable and condemnable, I was determined not to miss the opportunity of opening the eyes of some of them… [and] of communicating my own sentiments freely on the subject’. In Trusler's self-satisfied account, after he had lambasted the lawyers the congregation crowded round and thanked him for his sermon.Footnote 54
Another of Trusler's characteristics was a restlessness that did not encourage him to remain in one place for long. From Ockley he took up the curacy of St Clement Danes in about 1760, where he was, by his own account, also a popular preacher, but where he found the many duties of a large parish ‘laborious’ despite finding his parishioners very appreciative. From there he went to the preachership of the Somerset House chapel and a chaplaincy to the Poultry-Compter, a gaol for minor felons and debtors.Footnote 55 As these were both minor posts which only required Sunday duty, in 1762 Trusler had sufficient time to set up a school to teach elocution and rhetoric which attracted large numbers of pupils.Footnote 56 But before long this too did not retain Trusler's attention and he turned to medicine, obtaining the necessary training and testimonials to earn the degree of doctor of medicine from Leiden at some point in 1762.
Following this, later in 1762, Trusler accepted an appointment as weekly lecturer at St George's, Botolph Lane, and then gave up the preachership of the Somerset Chapel, accepting in its place a preachership at a proprietary chapel owned by a Mr Lowe.Footnote 57 His reputation as a preacher then presented a new opportunity. Trusler quickly filled pews in St George's for his sermons and in course of business met some builders. The builders came to Trusler with a proposal: they would build a larger chapel for him on a speculative basis. A site was found near Bloomsbury Square and a deal was proposed:
that they should erect this building at their own expense & either appoint me as the sole preacher at a salary of one hundred pounds a year for the Sunday duty, or the building should be let to me on lease its value ascertained by measurement & that the rent should be at the rate of seven per cent according to its estimated value I paying the ground rent & if in the course of the first fifteen years I should be inclined to purchase it, it should be mine on paying the price so estimated.
Trusler, characteristically confident in his abilities in the pulpit, accepted the latter option.Footnote 58 This offer to build a chapel for a preacher is evidence of the buoyancy of commercial investments in sermons. The countess of Huntingdon was already building proprietary chapels for her Evangelical connexion and they clearly more than covered their costs from the sale of tickets to enthusiastic sermon-goers. Such commercial ventures were an important element in the ecclesiastical economy.Footnote 59 That Trusler's lease was valued by the measurements of the chapel suggests that there was a direct ratio between space for seats and income from the sale of tickets or collections at sermons.
Trusler's reputation as a preacher in London grew so that he was often invited to deliver two or three charity sermons a week. He claimed to have preached in almost all the churches and chapels in London as a result of these invitations. But this popularity became the cause of some discontent among his parishioners of St George's, where he remained weekly lecturer. In order to preach charity sermons he often absented himself from St George's and got other clergy to preach on his behalf. The result was that his income from the voluntary collections there fell away. He grumbled, ungraciously, that ‘a little consideration might have taught them that whilst I was serving the cause of humanity it was a laudable excuse for occasional non attendance’.Footnote 60
It might be assumed that Trusler was not the most reliable or objective of judges of his talents as a preacher, but his memoirs include the admission of his failure to move the condemned at Newgate when he preached there at the invitation of Mr Vilette, the minister of the gaol. On that occasion when Trusler spoke to the prisoners one of them made a popping sound with his mouth at the parson to mock him.Footnote 61
In 1761 Trusler had turned to publishing, beginning with A certain great man vindicated, which was a defence of William Pitt the Elder, on his retirement from government. The work quickly went through two editions and earned Trusler £10 for just a few hours' work. As a natural communicator, he saw immediately that he could reach far more people through publishing than he could through the pulpit, so he resolved to become a full-time writer and publisher.Footnote 62 Even so, Trusler continued to keep his hand in preaching from time to time. In 1763, when his wife died, Trusler returned to parish ministry briefly, acting for his cousin who was rector of Solihull. The duty led him to realise that congregations rarely appreciated the talents of a preacher. Trusler's cousin, Francis Dawes, was a widely-admired preacher and when a traveller heard him preach, he told the parishioners that
of all the good preachers and sermons he had heard he never in his opinion heard a better sermon nor one half so well delivered –‘surely gentlemen’ continued he ‘you are very happy in a Preacher?’ ‘Certainly’ returned one of those whom he had addressed, ‘our parson is a good preacher but we have heard him so often that we are tired of him.’Footnote 63
This gave Trusler cause to reflect that new preachers were like new actors; their novelty alone attracted large crowds to see them perform. But he also concluded that ‘long sermons in which abstruse points of divinity and morality are systematically discussed are beyond the capacity of two thirds of general congregations – short and plain ones or large portions of scripture paraphrased are better harkened to, and have a much better effect if clearly and forcibly explained’.Footnote 64
Trusler's concern for preaching was undoubtedly sincere. He recalled in his memoirs when, having to preach at Ware, he was astonished by a large congregation and discovered it was because William Romaine, the great Evangelical, was due to visit the parish the next day and people had assumed that he might preach twice.Footnote 65 Trusler recognised that not a twentieth of the congregation were Evangelicals but they wanted to hear Romaine because of his reputation. This, thought Trusler, was ‘the advantage of oratory in the cause of religion’.Footnote 66 Trusler had no love of Evangelicals; indeed he attacked Augustus Toplady, saying that he was not a Methodist but only committed to fame and attention. Nevertheless Trusler was ambivalent about Methodists: he considered that they did a good deal of harm but at the same time recognised that ‘there would have been little religion, I believe, in the purlieus of St Giles, London, but for the preaching of Whitefield and Wesley’.Footnote 67 Trusler, like Johnson, hated the claims of Methodists and Evangelicals to election or to conversion, but his arguments about the nature of preaching owed a good deal to Evangelical methods. Trusler argued that ‘it is not enough to adduce a bare explanation of sound doctrine with a gentle expostulation, it requires something more animated to attract and fix the attention’. People had to be made to feel what they had been taught, or as Trusler put it, ‘they must have heat as well as light’; and he saw the danger that ‘if our churches supply not the former they will seek it elsewhere’. Trusler wanted clergy to become more zealous about preaching. Paradoxically, given his sermon-publishing venture, Trusler did not believe that a well-written sermon was sufficient:
Though a discourse be penn'd with the greatest judgement – though it be elegantly written and even addressed to the passions, still if it be delivered as is too commonly the case, with a tone between singing and saying and with all the art of nasal eloquence, or with the same unanimated monotony as the preacher in his boyish days was used to say his qua genus the emphatical words marked only by a nod of the head as with a hammer – what can he expect but that his congregation should smile at his oratory or doze over his doctrines?Footnote 68
Trusler in fact shared a good deal with Evangelicals, at least in pastoral theology and preaching. In his manuscript memoirs he spoke of St Paul as his model for preaching: Paul spoke in plain language and was simple but energetic, he did not rely on rhetoric, ‘he never soared on the down of an angel's wing or dwelt on the beautiful locks of the cherubim’. Trusler believed that Paul's language was that of an Apostle; he told the world in plain terms ‘that he who believed should be saved and that he who believed not should be damn'd!!’Footnote 69
V
The reception of Trusler's sermons was remarkable. Trusler himself became something both of a hero and a villain. He claimed to be beset with requests to write ‘occasional discourses for assizes, visitations, funerals & charities which I did for money, some of these have been printed in the name of those who preached them’.Footnote 70 The sales of his sermons, along with the rest of his prodigious publishing ventures, earned him enough money in due course to buy an estate at Englefield Green and to retire to Bath as a wealthy man. To some, he seemed to have been unjustly attacked. The Morning Herald on Wednesday, 20 June 1792, commented that
of all persons recommended in the public prints for a vacant bishopric it is astonishing not to see the Revd Dr Trusler, who is allowed not only to be one of the very best preachers of the age; but by the variety of useful books he has published, in Divinity, and every other science, has done more good in his generation, than any one man existing.Footnote 71
However he was clearly demonised by many. Samuel Foote, the dramatist, depicted Trusler on stage as Dr Doubtful the Deist, which Trusler said was more a matter of alliteration than any representation of his theology.Footnote 72 William Cowper in The task included a satire on Trusler:
The Church of England turned against him. Archbishop John Moore of Canterbury refused even to reply to Trusler's request that he sanction his Sublime reader. And when he retired to Bath, Charles Moss, bishop of Bath and Wells, refused to permit him a licence to officiate in the diocese. Trusler's attempt to promote more use of singing in London churches was also met by a stonewalling response from the clergy.Footnote 74 He was called, with some justification, ‘the Revd Advertiser’ in various publications.Footnote 75
The public, in its reception of Trusler's sermons, was, as Terrick suggested, prone to misunderstand them. In Letters to a young clergyman, from the late Reverend Mr. Job Orton, published in 1791, the author mentioned that he had seen one of Trusler's advertisements for his sermons which a fellow clergyman had referred to as ‘a help for the lame and the lazy’.Footnote 76 Of course an artless preacher remained an artless preacher. When an account was given of a man who went to witness his nephew preach and heard how poorly he spoke because of an impediment, he added ‘he is obliged to that great professor of theology, Dr Trusler for all his divinity’.Footnote 77 In the public prints Trusler was unmercifully lampooned by his natural enemies the printers. In ‘The clerical exercise’,Footnote 78 which parodied the life-cycle of a parson, in between the stages ‘profess humility’, ‘follow the hounds’ and ‘smile at the squire’ was ‘purchase your sermons’. And in The virgin shape warehouse, Trusler was caricatured as Mr Trussup, whose knowledge of all fields, including clerical, seemed even to qualify him to advise women on their undergarments.Footnote 79
Trusler's sermon venture was soon joined by others. In 1794 John Deighton of Cambridge offered fifty-three sermons by a pseudonymous clergyman, Theophilus J. St John llb, in imitation manuscript,Footnote 80 and in 1796 W. H. Lunn, also a Cambridge bookseller, offered the remaining stock of the sermons of Daniel Pape, a preacher in Northumberland whose work was first published in Newcastle, which were also printed in imitation manuscript.Footnote 81 The business flourished into the nineteenth century, hovering, as David McKitterick called it, ‘between manuscript and print’.Footnote 82 In this respect, Trusler's trade seems more closely akin to the sale of manuscripts from deceased parsons than to anything else. Nevertheless, the buoyant sales of Trusler's sermons meant that he was best known for the claim that they were an aid to the lazy. The British Library copy of one of Trusler's sermons indicates that the purchaser preached it fourteen times.Footnote 83 As late as 1852 complete sets of Trusler's sermons were on sale.Footnote 84 In November 1860 the Athenaeum reported that Trusler's ‘mysterious packets’ were still available from clerical booksellers.Footnote 85
There is no doubt that Trusler created many enemies who were only too willing to use the sermons as a stick to beat him with. He had made outspoken attacks on professional groups such as lawyers, printers and especially booksellers whom he infuriated by refusing to sell them the copyright to his numerous works, choosing instead to become his own publisher, printer and salesman. The sheer volume of his books and the subjects across which they ranged – from etiquette and manners to science and mathematics, history and exploration to economics and agriculture – meant that people were suspicious of someone who claimed knowledge of all these areas. At the same time some critics suggested that he had had no real education.Footnote 86
In attacking Trusler some nineteenth-century critics sought to go beyond the scope of Trusler's scheme and make him representative of the perceived weaknesses of the eighteenth-century Church as a whole. In Stomata procatholica, a general attack on ‘paper-preaching’ – that is, reading sermons – Edward Attwood considered Trusler: ‘The eighteenth century alas! was eminently the period of abuse in almost everything … of the copied and finally the manufactured sermon, whether penned by the penurious author or transferred from the plastic stone. Trusler's was the acme of the artificial system.’Footnote 87 Yet Trusler was right in sensing that the sermon culture of late eighteenth-century England was more tolerant of the perception that preachers could legitimately read the sermons published by other clergy. The demand for perceived novelty and authenticity was what Trusler met in his sermons venture, without abandoning the tradition of supplying the best sermons from the Anglican and other traditions. While congregations might regard originality and authenticity highly, these were, in Trusler's view, simply matters of perception which did not affect the intrinsic content of a sermon. Trusler represented the future when he argued that clergy – released from the grind of spending hundreds of hours composing sermons – could use that time more effectively in pastoral work, and especially the sort that large, populous London parishes needed. In his method, not least in print technology and direct sales techniques, Trusler was an innovator, but in his goals for parish preaching and the improvement of the professional duties of the clergy he represented the best, rather than the worst, of eighteenth-century churchmanship.
