“The tutors in my time,” wrote Priestley—(“they knew better,” said Miss Lucy Aikin, “than to usurp the title of Professors”)—“lived in the most perfect harmony. We drank tea together every Saturday, and our conversation was equally instructive and pleasing. I often thought it not a little extraordinary that four persons who had no previous knowledge of each other should have been brought to unite in conducting such a scheme as this, and be all zealous Necessarians as we were. We were all, likewise, Arians; and the only subject of much consequence on which we differed respected the doctrine of atonement, concerning which Dr Aikin held some obscure notions. The only Socinian in the neighbourhood was Mr Seddon of Manchester, and we all wondered at him.”
Miss Lucy Aikin, the granddaughter of Priestley’s colleague, the niece of Mrs Barbauld, and the accomplished authoress of Memoirs of the Courts of Queen Elizabeth, and the biographer of Addison, has left us a little sketch of that society in which the early years of her girlhood were spent.
“I have often thought,” she says, “with envy of that society. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge could boast of brighter names in literature or science than several of those Dissenting tutors—humbly content, in an obscure town and on a scanty pittance, to cultivate in themselves, and communicate to a rising generation, those mental acquirements and moral habits which are their own exceeding great reward. They and theirs lived together like one large family, and in the facility of their intercourse they found large compensation for its deficiency in luxury and splendour.”
But we learn there were other attractions in the Warrington circle besides the tutors and their philosophy.
“We have a knot of lasses just after your own heart,” writes Mrs Barbauld (then Miss Aikin) to her friend Miss Belsham, “as merry, blithe and gay as you would wish them, and very smart and clever—two of them are the Miss Rigbys.”
We are further told the beautiful Miss Rigbys, whose father was “provider of the Commons,”
“made wild work with the students’ hearts; and the trustees had to insist that they must be removed from the house if any students stayed there. And so for a time they were, but Mrs Rigby’s health fortunately broke down, and the young ladies were brought back again.
“Rousseau’s Heloise, too, had much to answer for, and at its appearance (so Miss Aikin tells me), ‘everybody instantly fell in love with everybody’; and then it was that our poetess, after winning the hearts of half the students, some one or two of whom for her sake lived (I am informed) ‘sighing and single,’ was carried off to Palgrave by that queer little man whom henceforth she was to ‘honour and obey.’”
On another occasion she wrote:—
“Somebody was bold enough to talk of getting up private theatricals. This was a dreadful business! All the wise and grave, the whole tutorhood, cried out, ‘It must not be!’ The students, the Rigbys and, I must add, my aunt, took the prohibition very sulkily, and my aunt’s Ode to Wisdom was the result.”
Those wicked Miss Rigbys must have made the life of that “dullish person,” Mr Seddon, who acted as Rector Academiæ, and who was responsible for law and order, well-nigh insupportable. On one occasion—perhaps it was to celebrate their return—they asked some of the students to supper.