John Towill Rutt

John Towill Rutt (1760-1841) was raised among orthodox Independents in London. He spent a year at John Collett Ryland’s academy in Northampton before studying under the General Baptist (Unitarian) Joshua Toulmin at Taunton. He became a Unitarian and leading member of the Unitarian congregation at Gravel Pit in Hackney. He published important biographies of Gilbert Wakefield and Joseph Priestley, edited the entire works of the latter, and became a close friend of Henry Crabb Robinson in 1796. A number of his poems appeared throughout the 1790s and early 1800s in Benjamin Flower’s Cambridge Intelligencer and numerous monthly periodicals. When HCR first met Rutt, the latter was operating as a ‘drug merchant’ at 239 Rutland Place, Upper Thames Street, London (Lowndes London Directory for 1799).