| This dissertation is a study of the 12,500-page spiritual diary of a Leeds clothier and Dissenter, Joseph Ryder (1695--1768). By itself an archive and arguably the last great fully intact spiritual journal of early modern Britain, Ryder's diary was the product of two forces: his highly self-conscious spiritual watchfulness, which encouraged him to write in the first place, and his entrepreneurial life in Leeds' protoindustrial textiles industries, which generated the endless spiritual anxieties that led him to write so much. Like Max Weber's "Protestant-Capitalist," Ryder saw both sin and salvation in his business life and used his diary to hold himself between the extremes of poverty and abundance, while the diary for its part began to embody the rising sense of self-interest it attempted to curtail. But this lifelong balancing act brought on intense anguish, which in turn molded and reflected virtually every other aspect of his life: his affective and instrumental relationships with friends and his "family" of orphan workers, his fearful view of natural, social, and political events, and his basic psychological state. Not all was dreadful and static, however. Ryder's record of close to 5,000 Dissenter sermons, preached by Joseph Priestley's obscure, heretical predecessors as well as Priestley himself, reveals that antitrinitarianism arose precociously in places like Leeds because it solved the predicament godly entrepreneurs faced daily: a human Christ was a more sympathetic object of worship for those driven to enjoy the earthly rewards of their labors. Further, Ryder's charitable distribution of his surplus wealth and embrace of the middle-class ethos helped stabilize his ambivalence. The story of Ryder's acquisition of the capitalist mindset thus illuminates the psychological consequences of the period's major economic, religious, and intellectual shifts. More particularly it reveals the agony concealed in capitalism's forgotten past and points to the spiritual and psychological reasons that countless eighteenth-century Britons embraced a religiosity that accommodated their rationality and a sociability that conditioned and contained their material aspirations. |
