Joseph Brown

Joseph Brown (1730-1803) was a General Baptist elder from Coventry, Downton, and later Horsleydown in Southwark, and brother of the Particular Baptist minister in Northampton for a time, John Brown. Joseph was also a printer and publisher (see Whitley, ‘Index to Notable Baptists’, 189). Brown appeared from that address on some 30 imprints between 1775 and 1800.  Brown came to Southwark in 1767 as the minister of the General Baptist congregation there, one of the oldest Baptist congregations in London. The membership was already in decline and in 1771 Brown moved the congregation to new premises in Bury Street, though he retained his business in Fair Street. In 1781, the congregation moved again, this time to Worship Street, near Finsbury Square, where the remnant of the original Horsleydown congregation joined with four other General Baptist congregations in constructing a common meeting place. John Evans (1767-1827), a former Particular Baptist turned Unitarian, became the primary minister at Worship Street in 1792, and by the following year had become a friend and correspondent of Mary Hays. Joseph Brown published a sermon by Evans in 1794 and one in 1799 by Sampson Kingsford (1740-1821), a prominent General Baptist/Unitarian elder in Canterbury who was also a friend of Mary Hays.

It is likely that Joseph Brown, given his connection with Worship Street, had become a Unitarian by the 1780s, but he appears to have associated easily at that time with the Calvinists in the nearby ‘Blackfield’s’ Particular Baptist chapel in Gainsford Street, the chapel in which Hays and her family attended during the ministries of John Dolman (c. 1754-c. 1764), John Langford (1765-1777) and Michael Brown (1778-1820), the latter becoming, like Joseph Brown, Evans, and Hays, a Unitarian by the late 1780s. In 1776 Joseph Brown published Langford’s A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs, which was sold not only in Brown’s shop but also by Langford in the vestry of ‘the meeting, in Black’s Fields, Horsly-Down, Southwark’. In 1783 Brown also printed and sold two editions of John Dunkin, Jr’s, The Divinity of the Son of God, and the Complete Atonement for Sin, by the Sufferings and Death of Jesus Christ, proved from the Word of God (1783), a critique of a pamphlet by the Unitarian Joseph Priestley. Dunkin’s tract was composed ‘for the benefit of a widow’, the widow being Dunkin’s next-door neighbor and mother-in-law, Elizabeth Judge Hays. 

See John Evans, The Circular Letter, to the General Baptist Churches For the Year 1794 ([London] : Printed by J. Brown, at the Printing-Office, No. 31, Fair Street, Horsly-Down Southwark, 1794); also Sampson Kingsford, An Address, from the Assembly of the General Baptists, held at Worship-Street, London, Wednesday, 15th of May, 1799, to the Churches which they represent, on the Respective Duties of Ministers and People ([London] : Printed by J. Brown, at the Printing-office, Fair Street, Horsly-Down, Southwark, 1799). For Hays’s connections to these ministers, see John Evans to Mary Hays, c. early 1793; also Eliza Fenwick to Mary Hays, at Mr. Kingsford’s, Wepham, near Canterbury, 30 August 1799, in Marilyn Brooks, ed., The Correspondence (1779-1843) of Mary Hays, British Novelist (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004); and Timothy Whelan, ed., Mary Hays: Life, Writings, and Correspondence, at https://sites.google.com/site/maryhayscorrespondence. On one edition Brown collaborated with two other Baptist sellers, Joseph Johnson and William Otridge, the latter a member of the Particular Baptist congregation in Eagle Street.