Newington Green - Unitarian Church, Price and Wollstonecraft

Unitarian Church, Price and Wollstonecraft

In 1708 the Newington Green Unitarian Church was built on the north, Hackney side of the Green. That congregation continues today as New Unity. The minister whose name is still remembered centuries later is Dr Richard Price, a libertarian and republican who cemented the village's "reputation as a centre for radical thinkers and social reformers". He arrived in 1758 with his wife Sarah, and took up residence in No. 54 the Green, in the middle of a terrace even then a hundred years old (The building still survives as London's oldest brick terrace, dated 1658). A large number of important politicians, thinkers, reformers, and writers visited him at Newington Green, including Founding Fathers of the United States, British politicians such as Lord Lyttleton, the Earl of Shelburne, Earl Stanhope (known as "Citizen Stanhope"), and even the Prime Minister William Pitt ; philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith; agitators such as prison reformer John Howard, gadfly John Horne Tooke and husband and wife John and Ann Jebb. Price was fortunate in forming close friendships among his neighbours and congregants. One was Thomas Rogers, father of poet and banker Samuel Rogers, a merchant turned banker who had married into a long-established Dissenting family and lived at No. 56 the Green. Another was the Rev. James Burgh, author of The Dignity of Human Nature and Thoughts on Education, who opened his Dissenting Academy on the green in 1750 and sent his pupils to Price's sermons. Price, Rogers, and Burgh formed a dining club, eating at each other's houses in rotation. When Joseph Priestley's support of dissent led to the riots named after him, he fled Birmingham and headed for the sanctuary of Newington Green, where Rogers took him in.

Arguably the most important resident of the Green was the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who moved her fledgling school for girls from Islington to Newington Green in 1784, with the help of a fairy godmother. This was Mrs Burgh, widow of the educationalist, who used her influence to find the young schoolmistress a house to rent and twenty students to fill it. The flavour of the village and the approach of these Rational Dissenters appealed to Wollstonecraft: they were hard-working, humane, critical but uncynical, and respectful towards women. The ideas Wollstonecraft ingested from the sermons at NGUC pushed her towards a political awakening. A couple of years after she left Newington Green, these seeds germinated into A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Burke's denunciation of the French Revolution and attack on Price. In 1792 she published the work for which she is best remembered, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in the spirit of rationalism extending Price's arguments about equality to women. Newington Green had made its mark on Mary, and through this founding work of feminist philosophy, on the world.