Anne Dutton

Anne Williams Dutton was baptized at the All Saints Parish Church in Northampton on December 11, 1692.[1] At some point the Williamses began attending the Independent congregation at Castle Hill during the ministry of John Hunt. Anne was converted at the age of thirteen and joined the congregation two years later in 1707, having become an avid reader of the works of the High Calvinist Independent minister at Cambridge, Joseph Hussey. After Hunt’s departure from Castle Hill in 1708, Anne found the new minister, Thomas Tingey, unsatisfactory in regards to his theology and preaching, and soon made her way to a Baptist congregation led by John Moore that was meeting in a house near what was then known as “the Watering Place.” She joined the congregation in late 1710 and was baptized in 1713, just prior to the congregation’s move to a new chapel in College Lane (later College Street). 

On January 4, 1715, she married Thomas Cattle (Cattel) (b. January 7, 1691), a merchant originally from nearby Harlestone who was also a member at College Street.[2] Anne and her new husband settled shortly thereafter in London. By August 1715 she was attending the Baptist meeting in Curriers’ Hall, Cripplegate, led by John Skepp, a minister who, like Hunt, Hussey, and Moore, was also a High Calvinist. Anne became a transient member on October 1 of that year and officially joined the congregation on March 31, 1718, at which time she gave “a Large & very Choice account of the Work of the Spirit of God on her Soule to the great Joy of the Church.”[3] Anne was received into full communion with the congregation on April 6, 1718. For whatever reason, her husband never joined at Cripplegate. At some point his business took him to Warwick, where she felt that her spiritual situation declined. The Cattles soon returned to London, and not long thereafter her husband died, though no death record has yet surfaced. He must have died during or before the early months of 1719, for she writes in her spiritual autobiography that she returned about that time to Northampton to live with her parents. 

On November 2, 1719, she married Benjamin Brown Dutton (1691-1747) at the All Saints Parish Church in Northampton.[4] Dutton was the son of the Baptist minister at Eversholt, who apprenticed him in his youth to a draper and clothier in Newbury. While there, he was converted, an event that led to his calling to the ministry in 1709. He spent much of the next decade studying under ministers in Buckinghamshire, Westmoreland, Scotland, and London, having relocated to Northampton and the College Street congregation in 1719 upon the death of his father.  During his time in London, Dutton joined the Baptist congregation at Maze Pond on March 12, 1716 (the Church Book records his name as “Benjamin Dunton”). He was later censured by Maze Pond for falling into an unspecified sin (most likely his long-term attraction to alcohol). In January 1721 he applied for a letter of dismission so that he could join at College Street, but a decision by Maze Pond was postponed until June 21, 1722.

After her second marriage, Dutton lived for a time in Northampton and then around 1724 moved to Wellingborough where her husband had joined the Baptist church there under William Grant. For the next several years he ministered in Cambridgeshire (Whittlesey and Wisbech) until Anne's health fored their return to Wellingborough in 1728. While she lived in Wellingborough, he traveled much of the next three years to Arnesby, working under the Baptist church there. In 1731 he began preaching at Great Gransden (once Huntingdonshire but now Cambridgeshire) and a year later accepted the call to be the stated minister there. He sailed for America in 1743, ostensibly to raise funds for a new chapel in Great Gransden but also to promote his wife’s writings. Upon his return to England in 1747, his ship was lost at sea. Though saddened by her loss, Anne remained at Great Gransden and continued to publish.  Prior to her death on 18 November 1765 (it has been incorrectly given as 17 November since George Keith's "Account" of her final days was published in 1769), she was instrumental in the call of Robert Robinson to St. Andrew’s Street in Cambridge in 1759. Robinson wrote an admiring account of his visit with Dutton shortly before her death in a letter to John Robinson of Eriswell on 30 November 1766, now in the Crabb Robinson Correspondence, Dr. Williams’s Library, London. 

During her life, Dutton published more than sixty works, making her the most prolific woman writer of the 18th century. Her writings reflect the evangelical desire for salvation by faith through grace, assurance of salvation, and genuine evangelical piety and sanctification (represented as well in her spiritual autobiography). She also published numerous titles of a more polemical nature, patterned after the thought and style of several Calvinistic preachers of the Great Awakening whom she admired and with whom she corresponded, especially George Whitefield. She was an ardent opponent of Wesley’s Arminianism. She was also instrumental in the call of Robert Robinson to St. Andrew’s Street in Cambridge in 1759. Robinson wrote an admiring account of his visit with Dutton shortly before her death in a letter to John Robinson of Eriswell on 30 November 1766, now in the Crabb Robinson Correspondence, Dr. Williams’s Library, London.  Among her writings are A Narration of the Wonders of Grace, in Verse (1734), Letters on Spiritual Subjects, and Divers Occasions (1747), and A Brief Account of the Gracious Dealings of God with the Late Mrs. Anne Dutton (1750).  For her complete bibliography, click here. 

For Dutton's complete bibliography, click here; for more on Dutton's printers and booksellers, click here; for the complete transcript of her unprecedented work as keeper of the Church Book at Great Gransden between 1743 and 1759, click here.  For selections of her hymns, click here; for a few selected poems by Dutton, click here; for selected letters by Dutton, click here; for a selection of some of Dutton's published letters, click here; for the complete text of several of Dutton's published tracts, click here.

For more on Dutton, see John Cudworth Whitebrook, “A Bibliography of Mrs. Anne Dutton,” Notes and Queries (December 1916), 471-73; idem, “The Life and Works of Mrs. Ann Dutton,” Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society 7 (1921), 129-46; idem, Ann Dutton: A Life and Bibliography (London: A. W. Cannon, 1921); H. Wheeler Robinson, The Life and Faith of the Baptists, rev. ed. (London: Kingsgate Press, 1946; orig. ed., 1927), 52-60; and W. T. Whitley, A History of British Baptists (London: Kingsgate, 1932), 214–15; Stephen Stein, “Note on Anne Dutton, Eighteenth-Century Evangelical,” Church History 44.4 (December 1975), 485-491; Barbara J. MacHaffie, Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 84-85; JoAnn Ford Watson, “Anne Dutton: An Eighteenth Century British Evangelical Woman Writer,” Ashland Theological Journal 30 (1998), 51-56; idem, Selected Spiritual Writings of Anne Dutton: Eighteenth-Century, British-Baptist, Woman Theologian, 6 vols (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2003-15); Michael A. G. Haykin, “Anne Dutton and Calvinistic Spirituality in the Eighteenth Century,” The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth (July/August 2002), 156-57; Timothy Whelan, “Six Letters of Robert Robinson from Dr. Williams’s Library, London,” Baptist Quarterly 39 (2001-2002), 355-356; Joilynn Karega-Mason, “Anne Dutton: Eighteenth-century Calvinist Theologian,” M.A. thesis, University of Louisville, 2008; Michael D. Sciretti, “‘Feed My Lambs’: The Spiritual Direction Ministry of Calvinistic British Baptist Anne Dutton During the Early Years of the Evangelical Revival,” Ph.D. Diss., Baylor University, 2009; Huafang Xu. “Communion with God and Comfortable Dependence on Him: Anne Dutton’s Trinitarian Spirituality,” Ph.D. Diss., Southern Seminary, Louisville, 2018; Huafang Xu, "Anne Dutton 1692-1765," in The British Particular Baptists 1638-1910, vol. 4, ed. Michael A. G. Haykin and Terry Wolever (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptists Press, 2018), 104-25. See also Jane Shaw, “Religious Love,” in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1690-1750, ed. Ros Ballaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 192-93; Andrew M. Pisano, “Reforming the Literary Black Atlantic: Worshipful Resistance in the Transatlantic World,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 44 (2015), 81-100; and Wendy Raphael Roberts, Awakening Verse: The Poetics of Early American Evangelicalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020), 60-68.