Robert Aspland

Robert Aspland (1782-1845) was raised a Particular Baptist in a small village near Cambridge, often hearing Robert Hall, Andrew Fuller, and other leading Particular Baptist ministers preach at St. Andrew’s Street in the mid-1790s.  After studying briefly with the Baptist minister Joseph Hughes (1769-1833) at Battersea, Aspland matriculated at the Bristol Baptist Academy in 1798.  He left in October 1799 for Marischal College, Aberdeen, as a Ward Scholar, but his Unitarian leanings became more evident at that time.  He was removed from the membership rolls of the Baptist church at Devonshire Square in London in October 1800, and subsequently left Marischal, relinquishing his scholarship.  He returned to London and preached in various Unitarian pulpits before being recommended to a General Baptist (Unitarian) chapel at Newport, Isle of Wight.  He ministered there from the spring of 1801 until February 1805, when he accepted the pastorate of the influential Unitarian chapel at Gravel Pit in Hackney, a position he retained until his death in 1845.  

In 1802, Aspland married Sara Middleton, the daughter of John Middleton, a London artists’ colourman who lived in St. Martin’s Lane, next to Charing Cross.  He was raised a Churchman, but became a Dissenter, worshiping for a time among the Particular Baptists, though his views were moderately Calvinistic at best. He was a good friend of Benjamin Flower’s favorite preacher, Robert Robinson.  Aspland first met the Middletons in 1798 while living in the home of Timothy Thomas, pastor of the Particular Baptist congregation at Devonshire Square.  Aspland and Middleton’s son, Joshua, who attended Thomas’s school, became good friends.  Aspland even worked in Middleton’s shop after returning from his studies in Scotland in 1801.  Most likely the Middletons attended the General Baptist church at Worship Street under John Evans, a former student, like Aspland, at Bristol Baptist College. By 1802 the Middletons had become Unitarian Baptists, subscribing regularly to the Unitarian Fund after its inception in 1806. In 1819 Sara Middleton Aspland's sister appeared as a subscriber to the Fund, living at that time in Hackney, prob­ably to be nearer her sister. 

In 1806 Aspland commenced work on the influential Unitarian journal, The Monthly Repository, which he edited until 1826.  In 1813 he helped establish the Hackney Academy for training Unitarian ministers, and in 1815 another magazine, The Christian Reformer.  He was active in politics, especially matters respecting the rights of Dissenters, and was instrumental in the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828. Benjamin Flower published Aspland’s Divine Judgments on Guilty Nations, their Causes and Effects Considered, in a Discourse delivered at Newport in the Isle of Wight, before a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters (1804), as well as Aspland’s An Oration delivered on Monday October 16, 1809, on Laying the First Stone of the New Gravel-Pit Meeting-House, in Paradise Field, Hackney (1809). Aspland wrote a loving tribute about the life of Eliza Gould Flower (1770-1810), the wife of Benjamin Flower (see his entry below), for the Monthly Repository (1810, 203-06). During Flower's years in Dalston, he was a frequent attendant at Aspland’s church and probably joined Aspland’s Non-Con Club. See Robert Brook Aspland, Memoir of the Life, Works and Correspondence, of the Rev. Robert Aspland, of Hackney (London: E. T. Whitfield, 1850), 160-62; J. T. Whitehead, A Historical Sketch of the Congregation now Meeting in the New Gravel-Pit Church, Hackney, and of its Successive Ministers (London: Book-room, Essexhall, 1909), 35-36, 203-06; Alan R. Ruston, “Radical Nonconformity in Hackney 1805-1845,” Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society 14 (1980),  7-8; and Rules of the Unitarian fund, established 1806: to which are added, a Statement of the Society’s accounts, and a List of Subscribers, &c &c for 1819 and 1820 (Hackney: Stower and Smallfield, 1820), 24.