Anne Dutton

bpt. 11 Dec. 1692—18 November 1765

Despite being the most published woman writer of the eighteenth century, ANNE DUTTON remains virtually unknown outside a small circle of Baptist historians and scholars, especially those interested in women who were active in the Evangelical Revival in England, Scotland, Wales, and America in the 1730s and ’40s. 

Anne Williams (her maiden name) was baptized at the All Saints Parish Church in Northampton on 11 December 1692.[1] At some point the Williamses began attending the Independent congregation at Castle Hill during the ministry of John Hunt. Anne was converted at the age of thirteen and joined the congregation two years later in 1707, having become an avid reader of the works of the High Calvinist Independent minister at Cambridge, Joseph Hussey. After Hunt’s departure from Castle Hill in 1708, Anne found the new minister, Thomas Tingey, unsatisfactory in regards to his theology and preaching, and soon made her way to a Baptist congregation led by John Moore, which was meeting in a house near what was then known as “the Watering Place.” She joined the congregation in late 1710 and was baptized in 1713, just prior to the congregation’s move to a new chapel in College Lane (later College Street). 

On 4 January 1715, she married Thomas Cattle (Cattel) (b. 7 January 1691), a merchant originally from nearby Harlestone who was also a member at College Street.[2] Anne and her new husband settled shortly thereafter in London. By August 1715, she was attending the Baptist meeting in Curriers’ Hall, Cripplegate, led by John Skepp, a minister who, like Hunt, Hussey, and Moore, was also a High Calvinist. Anne became a transient member on October 1 of that year and officially joined the congregation on 31 March 1718, at which time she gave “a Large & very Choice account of the Work of the Spirit of God on her Soule to the great Joy of the Church.”[3] Anne was received into full communion with the congregation on 6 April 1718. For whatever reason, her husband never joined at Cripplegate. At some point his business took him to Warwick, where she felt that her spiritual situation declined. The Cattles soon returned to London, and not long thereafter her husband died, though no death record has yet surfaced. He must have died during or before the early months of 1719, for she wrote in her spiritual autobiography of her return about that time to Northampton to live with her parents. 

On 2 November 1719, she married Benjamin Brown Dutton (1691–1747) at the All Saints Parish Church in Northampton.[4] Dutton was the son of the Baptist minister at Eversholt, who apprenticed him in his youth to a draper and clothier in Newbury. While there, he was converted, an event that led to his calling to the ministry in 1709. He spent much of the next decade studying under ministers in Buckinghamshire, Westmoreland, Scotland, and London, having relocated to Northampton and the College Street congregation in 1719 upon the death of his father.  During his time in London, Dutton joined the Baptist congregation at Maze Pond on 12 March 1716 (the Church Book records his name as “Benjamin Dunton”). He was later censured by Maze Pond for falling into an unspecified sin (most likely his long-term attraction to alcohol). In January 1721, he applied for a letter of dismission so that he could join at College Street, but a decision by Maze Pond was postponed until 21 June 1722.

After her second marriage, Dutton lived for a time in Northampton and then around 1724 moved to Wellingborough where her husband had joined the Baptist church there under William Grant. For the next several years he ministered in Cambridgeshire (Whittlesey and Wisbech) until Anne’s health fored their return to Wellingborough in 1728. While she lived in Wellingborough, he traveled much of the next three years to Arnesby, working under the Baptist church there. In 1731, he began preaching at Great Gransden (once Huntingdonshire but now Cambridgeshire) and a year later accepted the call to be the stated minister there. He sailed for America in 1743, ostensibly to raise funds for a new chapel in Great Gransden but also to promote his wife’s writings. Upon his return to England in 1747, his ship was lost at sea. Though saddened by her loss, Anne remained at Great Gransden and continued to publish.  Prior to her death on 18 November 1765 (it has been incorrectly given as 17 November since George Keith’s account of her final days was published in 1769), she was instrumental in the call of Robert Robinson to St. Andrew’s Street in Cambridge in 1759. Robinson wrote an admiring account of his visit with Dutton shortly before her death in a letter to John Robinson of Eriswell on 30 November 1766, now in the Crabb Robinson Correspondence, Dr. Williams’s Library, London.

During her lifetime, Dutton published more than sixty titles, with another twenty-five works embedded in those volumes. Her career spanned more than three decades, a remarkable achievement for any woman writer at that time. Given the sparse amount of remuneration her husband received as pastor at Great Gransden and the loss of at least at portion of that income after his death, Dutton most likely used monies from the sale of her works to supplement her meagre income, qualifying her as an early example of a professional woman writer. She was aided by her connections with a select coterie of dissenting printers and booksellers, which included John Oswald, Ebenezer Gardner, John Hart, John Lewis, Samuel Mason, and George Keith. Hart was Dutton’s sole printer from 1742 through 1762, and Lewis was her primary seller from 1743 to 1754. Lewis corresponded with Dutton in the 1740s and was instrumental in presenting her works to the public and to the followers of Whitefield in England, Wales, Scotland, and America through his work at various times as editor, printer, and seller of The Christian Amusement (1740–41), The Weekly History (1741–42), An Account of the Most Remarkable Particulars relating to the Present Progress of the Gospel (1742–43), and The Christian History (1743–48).

Dutton’s writings appeared in nearly 70 volumes during her lifetime, with another 25 separate compositions embedded in those volumes. She published 18 volumes of her letters and several formal discourses, many as formal letters, on important doctrines of Calvinism, such as assurance of salvation, justification, election, adoption, and genuine evangelical piety. A number of her works were polemical in nature, patterned after the thought and style of Calvinistic preachers of the Great Awakening she admired and with whom she corresponded, such as George Whitefield. Dutton’s canon of work encompasses many of the dominant genres popular among religious writers of the eighteenth century: personal diary, spiritual autobiography, hymns, long narrative poems, letters, and formal religious discourse and treatises. She was an ardent opponent of the Wesleys’ Arminianism.  Among her more popular works are A Narration of the Wonders of Grace, in Verse (1734), Letters on Spiritual Subjects, and Divers Occasions (1747), and A Brief Account of the Gracious Dealings of God with the Late Mrs. Anne Dutton (1750). 

by TIMOTHY WHELAN
Nonconformist & Dissenting Women’s Studies, 1650–1850

1. Northamptonshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1532–1812, Northampton, All Saints, Parish Registers, 1559–1722. Thomas Williams was listed as a “gardiner.”

2. Northamptonshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1532–1812, Northampton, All Saints, Parish Registers, 1559–1722.

3. Curriers’ Hall, Cripplegate, Church Book, 1692–1723, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, fols 93v., 106v. 

4. Northamptonshire, England, Church of England Baptisms, Marriages and Burials, 1532–1812, Northampton, St. Sepulchre, Parish Registers, 1566–1723. 

Collections of Hymns:

A Narration of the Wonders of Grace in Verse

1st ed. (1734): PDF
2nd ed. (1734): PDF

A Discourse Concerning the New-Birth: to which are added Sixty-Four Hymns; Compos’d on Several Subjects (1743): WorldCat

Editions:

Joann Ford Watson, Selected Spiritual Writings of Anne Dutton, 7 vols. (Macon, GA: Mercer, 2003–2015).

Related Resources:

Anne Dutton, A Brief Account of the Gracious Dealings of God, with a Poor, Sinful, Unworthy Creature, in Three Parts (1743–1750).

Anne Dutton, Letters on Spiritual Subjects, and Divers Occasions: Sent to Relations and Friends. By Mrs. Anne Dutton, Prepared for the Press by the Author, before her death, and now Published at her Desire; to which are Prefixed, Memoirs of the Dealings of God with her, in her last Sickness. 2 vols. (London: Printed for G. Keith, in Gracechurch-Street, 1769).

Thomas Gibbon, rev. Samuel Burder, “Mrs. Ann Dutton,” Memoirs of Eminently Pious Women of the British Empire, vol. 2 (London: Ogle, Duncan & Co., 1823), pp. 227–255: HathiTrust

W.R. Stevenson, “Anne Dutton,” A Dictionary of Hymnology, ed. John Julian (London: J. Murray, 1892), p. 316: HathiTrust

John Cudworth Whitebrook, “A Bibliography of Mrs. Anne Dutton,” Notes and Queries, ser. 12, vol. 2 (December 1916), pp. 471–473: HathiTrust

John Cudworth Whitebrook, “The Life and Works of Mrs. Ann Dutton,” Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, vol. 7 (1921), pp. 129–146: HathiTrust

John Cudworth Whitebrook, Ann Dutton: A Life and Bibliography (London: A. W. Cannon, 1921): HathiTrust

H. Wheeler Robinson, The Life and Faith of the Baptists, rev. ed. (London: Kingsgate Press, 1946; orig. ed., 1927), pp. 52–60.

Stephen Stein, “Note on Anne Dutton, Eighteenth-Century Evangelical,” Church History, vol. 44, no. 4 (December 1975), pp. 485–491.

JoAnn Ford Watson, “Anne Dutton: An Eighteenth Century British Evangelical Woman Writer,” Ashland Theological Journal, vol. 30 (1998), pp. 51–56.

Michael A.G. Haykin, “Anne Dutton and Calvinistic Spirituality in the Eighteenth Century,” The Banner of Sovereign Grace Truth (July/August 2002), pp. 156–57.

Timothy Whelan, “Six Letters of Robert Robinson from Dr. Williams’s Library, London,” Baptist Quarterly, vol. 39 (2001–2002), pp. 355–356.

Karen O'Dell Bullock, “Anne Dutton (née Williams),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (23 Sept. 2004, rev. 8 Jan. 2009): DOI

Joilynn Karega-Mason, Anne Dutton: Eighteenth-century Calvinist Theologian, M.A. thesis (University of Louisville, 2008).

Michael D. Sciretti, “Feed My Lambs”: The Spiritual Direction Ministry of Calvinistic British Baptist Anne Dutton During the Early Years of the Evangelical Revival, Ph.D. Diss. (Baylor University, 2009).

Huafang Xu, Communion with God and Comfortable Dependence on Him: Anne Dutton’s Trinitarian Spirituality, Ph.D. Diss. (Louisville, KY: Southern Seminary, 2018): SBTS

Huafang Xu, “Anne Dutton 1692–1765,” The British Particular Baptists 1638–1910, vol. 4, ed. Michael A.G. Haykin and Terry Wolever (Springfield, MO: Particular Baptists Press, 2018), pp. 104–25.

Holly M. Farrow, Theology Inspires Doxology: The Hymnody of Anne Dutton and Anne Steele, dissertation (Ft. Worth, TX: SWBTS, 2023): ProQuest

Timothy Whelan, “Anne Dutton,” Nonconformist & Dissenting Women’s Studies, 1650–1850, https://www.nonconformistwomenwriters1650-1850.com/biographical-summaries/dutton-anne-1692-1765