Abraham Rees

• 1. Introduction

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  Abraham Rees spent the last eighteen years of his life finishing a project that had consumed decades of his energy: a cyclopaedia in forty-five volumes that would document the arts, sciences, and literature of the age. When John Evans congratulated him on completing the enormous task in August 1820, Rees replied that he felt more grateful simply to have survived long enough to publish his four volumes of sermons. That response tells you something essential about the man. He was, first and foremost, a minister. The encyclopaedia was a monument to the age of reason, but Rees himself was a creature of the chapel, the lecture hall, and the dissenting congregation. How did a Welsh nonconformist born in Montgomeryshire become the compiler of one of the largest reference works in the English language? And what does his long, quiet career reveal about the world of liberal dissent in Georgian Britain?

• 2. Roots and Formation

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  Rees was born in Llanbrynmair, Montgomeryshire, the second son of Lewis Rees and his wife Esther, daughter of Abraham Penry. The family was already deep in the dissenting tradition. His father Lewis Rees, born in 1710, served as independent minister at Llanbrynmair from 1734 to 1759, then moved to Mynyddbach in Glamorganshire, where he continued in the ministry until 1800. That is a continuous ministerial career spanning more than six decades, and it shaped the household Abraham grew up in.

  When the time came for Abraham to train, he entered Coward's Academy in Wellclose Square near London in 1759, studying under David Jennings. Within three years he had distinguished himself enough to be appointed assistant tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy. Jennings died in 1762, and the academy relocated to Hoxton. Rees stayed with it, becoming resident tutor, a position he held until 1785. His colleagues during those years included Andrew Kippis and Samuel Morton Savage, men who would remain part of his intellectual and professional circle for decades. From 1786 to 1796 he moved to the New College at Hackney, where he taught Hebrew alongside mathematics.

• 3. A Life in the Pulpit

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  Rees's ministerial career began modestly, preaching once a fortnight as assistant to Philip Furneaux at the independent congregation at Clapham. In 1768 he took a more substantial post, becoming assistant to Henry Read at the presbyterian congregation at St Thomas's in Southwark. Read died in 1774, and Rees succeeded him as pastor. Nine years later, in 1783, he moved to the Old Jewry congregation and kept that charge until the end of his life.

  What made him unusual among London presbyterians was that he served as both morning and afternoon preacher, a double duty that was uncommon for the period. He also shared, from 1773, a Sunday-evening lecture at Salters' Hall, and served as one of the Tuesday-morning lecturers there until 1795. When the Old Jewry congregation needed larger premises, a new meeting-house of octagon form was built for him in Jewin Street. It opened on the 10th of December 1809.

  Alexander Gordon, writing in the Dictionary of National Biography, described Rees's theology as mediating and transitional in character. His doctrines carried an evangelical flavour but were essentially of an Arian type, inclining toward those of Richard Price, and he held the tenet of a universal restoration. He was, Gordon noted, the last of the London dissenting ministers to officiate in a wig.

• 4. Institutional Man

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  Beyond the pulpit, Rees accumulated a set of administrative and honorary roles that traced the contours of dissenting institutional life. In 1774, the same year he became pastor at Southwark, he was elected trustee of Dr Daniel Williams's foundations. In 1778 he became secretary of the presbyterian board. He held both positions until his death.

  On the 31st of January 1775, the University of Edinburgh awarded him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He also made triennial visits to Wales as examiner of Carmarthen Academy, maintaining a link to the Welsh dissenting community his father's generation had built. In 1806 he was appointed distributor of the English regium donum, a government fund for dissenting ministers. In 1813 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  A particular moment in 1820 crystallized the span of his life. When he presented the address of the body of ministers of the three denominations, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists, on the accession of George IV, observers noted that as a student he had attended the similar deputation to George III sixty years before. He had outlasted an entire reign.

• 5. The Cyclopaedia

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  Rees's path to encyclopaedism began with revision work. The Cyclopaedia of Ephraim Chambers had first been published in 1728 in two volumes. Rees re-edited it in 1778, and in 1781-86 he issued an expanded version in four volumes that incorporated a supplement and substantial new material. That edition was reprinted in 1788-91. The work earned him election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1786, and subsequently of the Linnean Society.

  That achievement was prologue. The first part of what would become Rees's Cyclopaedia, formally titled The Cyclopædia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, appeared on the 2nd of January 1802. The parts came out at irregular intervals, two parts constituting a volume. The completed work ran to forty-five volumes, including six volumes of plates, and was finished in August 1820, eighteen years after the first part appeared.

  The botanical articles were generally contributed by Sir James Edward Smith, and the music articles by Charles Burney. Rees paid particular attention to English biography throughout. The scale of the enterprise makes the reply to John Evans all the more striking: after nearly two decades assembling one of the largest reference works in the language, Rees said his sermons were what he was truly grateful to have published.

• 6. Final Years and Legacy

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  Rees outlived his wife and all his children. His son Nathaniel Penry Rees died on the 8th of July 1802 on a voyage from Bengal to St Helena. Another son, Philip Lewis Rees, born on the 12th of October 1772 in Hoxton Town, died on the 25th of February 1798 and was buried in the Dissenting Chapel Yard at Rivington in Lancashire. His daughter Joanna, born on the 17th of April 1769 in Hoxton Town, married John Jones. She survived him.

  Rees died at his residence in Artillery Place, Finsbury, on the 9th of June 1825. He was buried on the 18th of June in Bunhill Fields, the traditional burial ground of London dissenters, with the pall borne by six ministers of the three denominations. A funeral oration was delivered by Thomas Rees. The funeral sermon, on the 19th of June, was preached by Robert Aspland.

  The hymnal he had helped compile with Kippis, Thomas Jervis, and Thomas Morgan, generally known as Kippis's, had already reached a ninth edition by 1823, revised by Rees and Jervis. It had been the first attempt to provide a general hymnal for liberal dissenters to replace Isaac Watts's, and it was supplemented again in 1807 and then in 1852, nearly three decades after Rees's death.