The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence 1750-1810 Volume 2: 1784-1790

This is the second volume of the Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence 1750-1810. Reverend James Wodrow (1730-1810), minister of the Church of Scotland at Stevenston in Ayrshire, and Samuel Kenrick (1728-1811), tutor to a Renfrewshire family until 1763, and subsequently a merchant and banker in Bewdley, Worcestershire, began corresponding around 1750, soon after leaving the University of Glasgow. They continued to do so until James Wodrow's death in 1810. Their correspondence is an exceptionally rich resource for the study of British culture and society in the era of Enlightenment and revolutions, here made easily available to scholars for the first time. Samuel Kenrick lived in England from 1765, and the men only met again in 1789, so their friendship was carried out almost entirely on paper for forty-five years. The correspondence constitutes a remarkable record of a friendship.

In Volume 2: 1784-1790, Wodrow and Kenrick were long established in successful careers, and their daughters were now adults. A major theme in this book is Mary Kenrick's visit to Scotland to stay with the Wodrow family in summer 1784, and Helen 'Nell' Wodrow's return with her to Bewdley, to become part of the Kenrick household until September 1785. Wodrow himself visited Bewdley, on the only occasions he ever did this, in early September and late October 1788, on his way to and from London to arrange for the publication of two volumes of the sermons of his mentor, Principal William Leechman of Glasgow University. As well as discussing family, friendship, and the practicalities of publishing, the letters in this volume contain lively and highly readable exchanges on theology and church politics in Scotland and England, university politics in Glasgow, a wide range of contemporary literature, and an enormous spectrum of famous and less well-known politicians, authors, clergymen, and local figures in Ayrshire and Worcestershire.

Martin Fitzpatrick, Emeritus Senior Lecturer, Aberystwyth University.,Emma Macleod, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Stirling,Anthony Page, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Tasmania

Martin Fitzpatrick is a graduate of Aberystwyth University. He subsequently joined the staff of the History department, where he taught for many years. He works on the history of ideas in the late eighteenth century and is particularly interested in comparative dimensions of the English and Scottish Enlightenments. His publications concern the life and thought of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, Rational Dissent (especially its relationship with radicalism), the theme of toleration, and the nature of the Enlightenment. In 1977, he was a co-founder, with Dr D. O. Thomas, of the Price-Priestley Newsletter and subsequently of the journal Enlightenment and Dissent.


Emma Macleod was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and she has taught at the University of Stirling since 1996. She has published widely on British attitudes to America and France during the Revolutionary period, and she is now working on a comparative study of the political trials in the 1790s in the Anglophone North Atlantic world alongside co-editing The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1750-1810. She was co-editor of the Scottish Historical Review (2018-23).


Anthony Page is a graduate of La Trobe and Adelaide Universities, and has lectured in History at the University of Tasmania since 2002. He has published on the impact of war on eighteenth-century Britain and the role of unitarian Rational Dissent in campaigns for religious, antislavery, and political reform. He is author of John Jebb and the Enlightenment Origins of British Radicalism (2003), Britain and the Seventy Years War, 1744-1815 (2015), and co-edited Blackstone and His Critics (2018), with Wilfrid Prest.