John Foster

John Foster (Baptist essayist) (1770-1843) was born near Hebden Bridge, not far from Halifax, Yorkshire. He was raised in a strict dissenting home and attended John Fawcett’s congregation at Wainsgate. When he was seventeen the church set him apart for the ministry, and four years later (1791) he matriculated at Bristol Academy, under the immediate supervision of Joseph Hughes, then classical tutor at the Academy and assistant pastor at Broadmead. During his year at Bristol, Foster met Joseph Cottle, a member at the Pithay church as well as a frequent attendant at Broadmead and soon to be member of the Committee of the Bristol Education Society. Foster left Bristol on 26 May 1792 to pastor the struggling congregation at Tuthill Stairs at Newcastle. After about a year, he left for Dublin, where he preached occasionally and taught in an academy. While in Ireland, Foster embraced radical politics, associating with some “violent Democrats” and helping to form a society called the “Sons of Brutus,” which, he says, “exposed me at one period to the imminent danger, or at least the expectation, of chains and a dungeon.”  Foster returned to England in 1796, pastoring a General Baptist congregation in Chichester for two and half years before moving to Battersea, near London, to assist his old tutor and friend Joseph Hughes (now pastoring the Baptist congregation there) in instructing a class of twenty young Africans from Sierra Leone as part of a civilizing missionary outreach. Between 1800 and 1804, Foster ministered to a small congregation of Baptists at Downend, near Bristol. In 1804 he removed to the Baptist congregation at Sheppard’s Barton, Frome, and shortly thereafter published his famous Essays in a Series of Letters (1805), which went through thirty-five British and American editions between 1805-1920. Two of these essays, “On the Application of the Epithet Romantic” and “On Some of the Causes by which Evangelical Religion has been rendered less Acceptable to Persons of Cultivated Taste,” were Foster’s first critical essays on literature and aesthetics. He resigned his pastorate in 1806 and commenced a connection with the Eclectic Review that would last until 1839, contributing 185 articles during those years. He returned to Downend in 1817, and in 1821 removed to Stapleton, three miles from Bristol, where he lived until his death in October 1843.  Throughout his life he was an advocate for political reform and a staunch Nonconformist with a strident belief in freedom of conscience along with the need for greater education among the masses. See J. E. Ryland, Life and Correspondence of John Foster, 2 vols. (London: H. G. Bohn, 1852) (quotation above found on 1:26); Timothy Whelan, “John Foster and Samuel Taylor Coleridge,”  Christianity and Literature 50 (2001), 631-656.