Synopses & Reviews
Seventeenth-century England has been richly documented by th lives of kings and their great ministers, the nobility and gentry, and bishops and preachers, but we have very little firsthand information on ordinary citizens.
This unique portrait of the life, thought, and attitudes of a London Puritan turner (lathe worker) is based on the extraordinary personal papers of Nehemiah Wallington—2,600 surviving pages of memoirs, religious reflections, political reportage, and letters. Coming to maturity during the reign of James I, Wallington witnessed the persecution of Puritans during Archbishop Lauds ascendancy under Charles I, welcomed what he thought would be the godly revolution brought by the Long Parliament, and watched with increasing disillusionment the falure of that dream under the Rump republic and the Cromwellian Protectorate.
The author reconstructs Wallingtons inner world, allowing us to see what an ordinary man made of a lifetime of reading Puritan doctrine and listening to the sermons of Puritan preachers. For the first time we can penetrate the mind of one of those who made up the London mob calling for the end of episcopacy and the death of the Earl of Strafford in 1641, who welcomed the revolution, if not the war that followed, and who finally came to approve the death of his king.
Review
"Wallington's world was a very small one, the parish of St. Leonard's Eastcheap, in the larger world of London. Here he was born in 1598 and here he died in 1658. He learned his father's trade, that of turner, and was made free of the Company of Turners by patrimony at an unusually early age. He was not as successful as his father, perhaps because of his insatiable itch for reading and writing. Some 2,600 surviving pages, written from 1620 to 1654, testify to that urge to record his thoughts, his prayers, his excerpts from other men's writings. Paul Seaver has made full use of all Wallington's extant work—memoirs, letters, reflections—and in the course of doing so has given us a remarkable portrait of a 17th-century urban artisan." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)