Domesticity and Self-justification in the Writings of Samuel Kevan,Journeyman,Later Master Slater (1764–1829)

Cataloged as a diary in the British Library, the large bound volume of Samuel Kevan’s papers, brimming with his economical script, presents a mixture of autobiography, conversion narrative, transcriptions of and commentary on readings and sermons, transcribed letters from others, and spiritual exercises in addition to a diary. This article has some puzzling features that merit closer scrutiny. Although written between the 1780s and 1820s, it has more in common with the puritan spiritual diaries of the seventeenth century, characterized by their “fluidity” as they “cross and recross lines of genre” than it does the more generically distinct forms of diary and memoir of its time. ¹ The radical Presbyterian outlook it displays, moreover, also seems a throwback to the Restoration era, undoubtedly due to Kevan’s voluminous readings from that period, the continuing contestation among different factions within Presbyterianism as well as his sense of alienation as a Scottish Presbyterian in London. Most intriguing about this article, however, is the way that the authorial voice of the penitent sinner slips as Kevan addresses accusations of wrongdoing made by others.

Kevan left Scotland at nineteen and settled in London after brief unhappy stints in Liverpool, Staffordshire, and Shropshire. As he explained in the opening of this testament, he began keeping memoranda at twenty as “a simple untaught youth” and then rewrote them until 1798 when he deemed the method no longer worth the trouble and from thenceforth kept a straightforward diary. He continued this practice into old age, considering it worthwhile to promote “gratitude and thankfulness—There may be, as Boston says, the right of a Third person (fus Tertu) in the thing, my sons may think little of it, but perhaps my Grand Sons, or daughters may Esteem it more—.” ² Kevan’s writing has received scant scholarly attention. Peter White’s recent history of London points to the unique record it presents of a Scottish working man’s experience in the metropolis. White focuses on Kevan’s social mobility: having no family in London caused him to start from a lower level, but after living in lodgings for a dozen years, he became a householder. He notes the role that marriage played in Kevan’s advancement, but the diary contains much richer fare in that regard. ³ Kevan’s account of courtship and married life from 1795; the death of his wife in 1821; residence with his younger son, Peter, before remarriage in 1824; and the complicated relationship he had with his second wife provide a rare glimpse into a religiously devout laboring-class man’s feelings about family and, to a surprising degree, gender. Amid the bible study, copious notes on his theological readings, and the spiritual testaments that fill these pages, his accounts of familial relations distant and near offer a vivid picture of the ways that economics, religious duty, self-fulfillment, and raw need all came into play in Kevan’s approach to domesticity.

Early historians of the family constructed a model of eighteenth-century affective individualism having encouraged middle class and then aristocratic unions based on companionship and love rather than financial and familial interests. Subsequent research has challenged this model by bringing to light the wide variety of households and family life within the various ranks of society. ⁴ Women’s roles within families and their experience of married life proved more complex than originally thought. ⁵ Most recently, historians have mined autobiographies, journals, and diaries to reconstruct men’s roles in households, particularly of the lower middle and laboring ranks of society. Especially useful to my assessment of Kevan’s peculiarities, Joanne Bailey’s investigation into marriages of the middling sort and wage laborers shows that wives were less their husbands’ helpmeets than their coproviders. In defiance of gender stereotypes, men demonstrated strong emotional dependence on their wives. Her evidence suggests that marriages in the middle and lower ranks of society did not conform to the model of transformation from mercenary to love matches; rather, matrimony remained consistent over time in relations of codependency between husbands and wives. ⁶ Similarly, Hannah Barker’s studies of provincial men of humble circumstances find no transformation in masculinity with the advent of modernity and the rise of the bourgeois public sphere: “it was more constant in nature and rooted firmly in home, workplace and church.” Men tended to choose comfort over passion; yet, they could have the same sort of untoward emotion that literature usually attributed to women. Most of all, “religious belief informed the day-to-day lives of all our Manchester men through their adherence to different Protestant denominations.” ⁷ As was the case for many of the men whom Bailey and Barker discuss, in times of anxious uncertainty, women played key roles in sending Kevan along what he later perceived to be the proper path. Kevan stands out from Barker’s Manchester autobiographers and diarists, however, in his consuming struggle with Protestant sectarianism and lifelong quest for spiritual truth. Significantly, he often viewed divisions within his family in terms of its members’ spiritual complacency or their association with the wrong church.

What most sets apart Kevan’s manuscript from all the other self-writings of the era that I have read or read about is an entry far along in the journal dated October 21, 1822, by the then fifty-nine-year-old Kevan, widowed since January and living with his younger son:

a little family affair took place, which I should not notice had I not felt it to an uncommon degree. Peter’s little girl Martha has been much noticed by me, I carry her out and she has for some time Slept with me: the Nurse however Informed the Mother it was much against the Health of the child to Sleep with an old person, and She was to be with me no More. It arose I suppose from too Great affection (or improper) that cut me so deep—I thought of what Rutherford said of himself about being forbidden to Preach “I had but One Eye, and they have put out the poor Mans one Eye.” I took myself a sever rebuke, I loved the child too much for the grocer and less valuable part. The pretty face engaging looks, & little tricks, but passd over the prime part that lay within: the Soul, looking out at these Eyes and giving motion and action in all its little fancys—Anxious to give her the Air, but less so that the spirit might blow upon her Soul. ⁸

Although Kevan’s writing at the best of times could be fragmentary and elliptical, the contradictory sentiments in this passage—not wanting to take notice but taking notice; claiming his love not in the gross, physical sense but noting his granddaughter’s physical attractions—complicate interpretation. His use of passive voice in his statement that she was noticed by him seems, consciously or unconsciously, an attempt to shift blame from himself. It would seem that the nurse sensed or saw impropriety, and the mother took action based on the nurse’s judgment, perhaps on top of her own observations.

Whether or not Kevan had an incestuous relationship with his granddaughter and whether or not he had dark imaginings before being called out remains moot. His method of self-justification here and elsewhere, however, admits to multiple interpretations. The theological analogy he used in this case suggests that he knew his behavior did not accord with social convention and thus was vulnerable to misinterpretation. His identification with Samuel Rutherford, an anti-Arminian member of the Westminster Assembly and pastor of Anwoth, later professor at St. Andrews, seems an odd way of asserting his innocence given that Rutherford lost his regentship at Edinburgh University for having premarital sex with his first wife and would later gain notoriety by writing about his struggles with sexual temptation. ⁹ Suggestive in another way, considering the love Kevan would express of Espousals, Rutherford, while exiled to Aberdeen, wrote devotional letters that sparked criticism “on the ground that they use[d] so freely the language of nuptial love.” ¹⁰ Rutherford’s biographer, John Coffey, quotes an eighteenth-century source that claimed “lecherous drunkards were wont to use the Letters as pornographic reading material.” Coffey, however, thinks the shocked reaction to Rutherford’s relish of erotic imagery exaggerated, given its origin in the Song of Songs. ¹¹ My study attempts to gain a better understanding of this “little family affair” by viewing it in the larger context of Kevan’s domestic life. In the process, it will pose broader questions regarding the impact that religious sectarianism had on gender and familial relations as well as the view of family life one can construct from self-writings.

Kevan’s theological reflections await examination from someone better versed in Presbyterian splinter groups, their proponents and their literatures. For the purpose of trying to comprehend Kevan’s conceptions of and approach to domesticity, I have focused on the spiritual ponderings that came into play in his navigation of household issues. As usual in eighteenth-century journals and autobiographies, but rare in spiritual journals written the previous century, he began by setting out his family’s heritage. ¹² In his case, his genealogy was relevant to the central role that religious sectarianism had in shaping his identity. Kevan recorded that his forebears suffered in the conflicts generated by the Covenanters, the Scots Presbyterians who held out for the Church of England reforming on a Presbyterian model and who rejected the settlement of 1689–1690. Then his father, Peter, having been mistaken for one of the Cavans, “zealous Catholics,” had his property burnt to the ground in 1767 during an expulsion of tenant farmers. Of this Samuel had a vague memory, being the last born in the family and a toddler at the time. Kevan observed that his father “always considered himself a member of the Established Church but heard Seceders, and always the Hill folk.” ¹³ Seceders, disgusted by the Kirk’s further concessions to the English state, had separated from the mainstream Presbyterians in 1733. They soon would divide into two groups, the Burghers and the Antiburghers, over the issue of the anti-Popish burgess oath, which to the latter seemed tacit approval of the established church. The Hill folk were a breakaway group of Covenanters also known as the Cameronians, the antigovernment party, and by other names, who kept alive the memory of Richard Cameron’s martyrdom at the battle of Aird’s Moss against the Stuarts in 1680. ¹⁴ As Kevan’s self-writing will reflect, the quarrels among the different sects involved disagreements over the way to salvation, not just over the obedience owed to political authorities. In 1788, Kevan made up his mind that the Seceders were wrong and the Hill folk right; however, in 1825, he admitted that his zeal for the Reformed Presbytery had abated. ¹⁵

In the retrospective account of his youth, Kevan’s spiritual disquiet seemed to emerge from troubled power relations within his family. He tended to see his own weaknesses as his father’s; inherited behavioral tendencies would surface time and time again. In a story about his father’s bad business sense, he observed, “being pressed for the money and being an easy soft man, he was greatly taken advantage of.” Several pages later, recounting his own work history, Kevan wrote that with two neighborhood brothers he “drove the plow & was a very soft boy and could be of little use.” In the earlier passage, he assessed his father’s shortcomings:

It is said of some men that they are better Priests than Kings in their families—this will apply here. he was very defective in ruling and instructing his children—the weight of this lay upon Our Mother. worship was attended to, but there were defects in having us all call’d together—his natural temper was calm and even but if he took offence it discover’d itself by silence.

In the later account of boyhood employment, he explained how subsequent masters gave him “the opportunity of being a little sharpened.” His cousin Alexander McKean, he recorded, “was extremely surley, and laid the blame upon me for all disasters which were not few” but this Seceder family’s religiosity changed his life. Mrs. McKean “was an extraordinary woman for piety & good sense; In the midst of a Large family she constantly presided at family worship in all its parts.” The singing of psalms captivated young Samuel. ¹⁶ When he and his brother Peter went to hear Mr. Curtis at Red brae, the Hill preacher’s singing sent him into transports:

I was anxious to tell my mother what a fine man I had been hearing; tho’ I had not one sentiment to communicate either doctrinal, or practical, all lay in the sound of the good mans voice strongly tinctured with the old Scottish tone, whither there were any thing good, or any thing bad, I cannot tell, but the consequence was, that whenever I hear of a hill preacher coming near, I still attended. ¹⁷

Not surprisingly, when spiritually moved, he went to his mother first to sort out his feelings. When his father sent him to join his brother John at Liverpool in 1783 “to push my fortune in the Land of commerce and Money”: “My dear Mother gave me many good hints and affectionate councel. She saw where my dangers lay and strove to fortify me.” In contrast, thirty-eight years after the end of his father’s life in 1789, Kevan remembered his deathbed declaration, “I am safe in Christ” and his advice to Samuel’s twenty-four-year-old self to trust in Jesus Christ. In a footnote added later, Kevan declared: “it was dangerous to be so confident” and recorded that it was his wish then as it was now to attain solid ground. His mother, meanwhile, had died in 1786 at age sixty-six: “worn down by hard labour.” ¹⁸

Kevan dated the “moulding of my future days” beginning in late 1779 while apprenticed to his brother William, a mason and slater, who set a good example of family worship and private meditation that he tried to imitate. Ultimately, he was not satisfied: “I think he did not take sufficient pains to lead me forward in the doctrines of the Gospel.” Although William had received his first “religious impressions,” from the Hill folk, he joined the Seceders. Kevan thus sought an advisor outside the family. Shortly after his emotional response to Curtis’s singing of psalms, Kevan heard the Reformed Presbyterians John Reid and James Reid preach. He fixed upon the latter as advisor after “the savour & relish” of his sermons took hold of him: “I think if ever my heart was drawn to close with Christ it was about this time—If I did not then take hold of Christ in the Love of Espousals, I suppose I have it yet to do.” ¹⁹ Espousals, the covenant of love between God and believers, provided a more attractive alternative to his family. At this point in his narrative, Kevan described the heated discussions he had with his brother while sharing a scaffold at work and related examples from his own life of that “special protecting providence over every individual, all thro their lives, some more visible than others.” As typical in spiritual journals, he presented near brushes with death as acts of providence. Occasions when he suffered injury he saw as “usefull to check and curb pride and vanity.” ²⁰ In discussing the importance of religious experience in childhood and adolescence in earlier Scottish spiritual narratives, David George Mullan explains: “Self writers were anxious to uncover signs both of innate human sinfulness and also of prevenient grace from as early a time as possible.” ²¹ As we shall see, as Kevan gained in experience, he had to work out the function of sin in his life.

Dissatisfaction with his father spilled into Kevan’s relations with his brother John, who Samuel perceived to be a chip off the old block. John had been apprenticed to a mason, married who Samuel characterized as a “rich” woman with a pawnbroker’s shop, and became a successful businessman and father to four sons and a daughter. Echoing his complaint of their father’s failure to instruct and direct, Kevan observed that John’s children “were under no kind of restriction, to their great hurt, there was something kind and agreeable, genteel and of a Superior turn in every one of them but alas, the evil within, the weeds were suffered to grow rank and strong. Every time my thoughts turn to the daughter, I have an Aching heart.” Kevan blamed John’s lack of spiritual application and rigor for the disorders in his family:

When he came to Liverpool he was like myself not well grounded in the Principles of the Gospel.—when finishing Mr Medleys Meeting house, he had much conversation with him, and much information no doubt also but, Mr M’s Baptist peculiarities he did not adopt. The Weslean Methodists seemed to have the most life and warmth among them and among these he associated and for want of better information Joined in their communion—but he never was a real Weslean, but a sort of halter between two Oppinions. ²²

As for Kevan’s sister, Elizabeth, she appears to have married a man like their father: “Hughy was always good natured and a pleasant companion, yet a most miserable partner as he did little or nothing for his family all his days—they had 6 or 7 daughters—clever, smart, well looking lasses and aphair’d genteel.” ²³ Samuel disliked the work his brother found him with a “blustring man” as well as how they spent the Sabbath. John took him to hear ministers “so very different in their doctrine & manner from my former favourite Preachers, that I found no pleasure nor profit—beside the very name of Methodist I could not be reconciled to—This was the foundation laid of a dispute that was not quite ended, when my B^r was called away to the Land of Light and perfect knowledge.” John Kevan frequently defamed John Calvin, which angered Samuel, most of all because he felt that he had insufficient knowledge to answer his brother’s arguments. ²⁴

From the moment that the sloop from Croftangrey to Liverpool sailed out of sight of his parents, Kevan had been exposed to sin: “Several young Man passengers that encouraged each other in improprieties on leaving.” ²⁵ The more distance he placed between himself and his family, the more temptation drew near. Against his brother’s wishes and the advice of people with whom he lodged, he took up the offer of a friend of his ill-mannered employer for a position in Newcastle, Staffordshire, only to find himself “in the hands of a cheat.” While desperately seeking work, he continued to worry about the state of his soul: “During the time I was about Staffordshire, Shropshire, &c I never heard a Sermon but One. Sabbath retire & read my Bible—was very steady, quiet & sober, and tho’ mixt with very loose fellows at my work, I was mercifully kept from falling into their gross vices—.” On impulse, he paid the 25s. fare to London on October 1, 1783, and arrived with four shillings and six pence left in his pocket: “Here was a young soft lad with out friend or advisor Master of no trade, and without Tools—one spare shirt & pair of stockings, all the rest at Newcastle.” ²⁶ Thus, he made the break from his unsatisfactory family.

In desperate straits, Kevan took recourse in prayer. Seemingly in answer, while walking in Hyde Park he happened upon a house that needed slating and told his sorry tale to the workmen. The master hired him, took him back to his home in Store Street, and let him share a bed with one of his sons. Kevan then temporarily lodged with Joseph and Susan Sewell in Red Lion Court before settling into the back parlor of his fellow-worker Tyson’s house in Tooley Street, which became his book-filled retreat for a dozen years: “I set on with Eagerness to obtain Knowledge, the Calvinistic System, being opposed by my Brother at Liverpool. The Baptist dispute I was led into by my former Lodging and connections,—about both these I had to grope out of my way well as I could having no religious guide.” ²⁷ Disagreements among the Protestant sects, a source of friction within his family, would continue to torment Kevan as he ventured into the wider world and eventually form his own household.

Becoming accustomed to London ways did not come easy, and Kevan did not expect to stay long. Friends directed him to a Scottish Presbyterian church and he found succor in the sermons. Reminiscent of Mrs. McKean’s providential intervention in his childhood: “The conversation of two old women one day pleased me much—one had been very wishfull, like myself, to get to Scotland, the other made this observation, ‘We have the same God, and the same Gospel here, that they have in Scotland’—This abated my ardent wish for the North.” ²⁸ Kevan attended a number of churches and halfheartedly accepted one of his new friends in London as his advisor: “he held out to me the propriety of being united with some church for my edification, and put into my hands their Art and Testimony, doctrine of Grace &c and tho’ I still remembered M^r Reids Sermons I could not argue the point with my acquaintance.” ²⁹ In the peaceful seclusion of his room, Kevan read a wide range of divines, with a particular interest in their life stories. Among the most influential authors he devoured, Thomas Boston reassured him of redemption, Isaac Ambrose provided instructions on self-examination through a spiritual diary, and William Guthrie inspired him to make a formal personal covenant with God. Outside the walls of his room, the split between Burger and Antiburgers within the Seceders raged, his disputation with his brother John continued by letter, numerous preachers filled his ears, and signs of the miraculous teased him until he found his way back to James Reid.

Kevan’s inability to settle upon a church perennially distressed him, especially when he worried about his prospects for starting a family and fretted about growing old alone:

as I had no prospect of a Minister, or Ordinances this way, it was placing myself in a very Awkward circumstances; This has been a kind of unaccountable Singularity all thro’ my Life: had I remained Single less would it matter, but when I came to have children it was of serious importance. I could not take my wife and children to a place of worship without some sort of violation of conscience—There was my crook in the Lot and whither the difference between the Ref ^d P ^by and other Presbyterians, is of that magnitude, as to warrant an absence from Ordinances, for a continued track of time or not, I have never fully learned. Occasionally I went to Bow Lane, but it was a kind of stealth—To be attached to a people more than three hundred miles distant was a very unhappy thing. ³⁰

Calvinists stressed the “cohesive nature of the gathered church community” and looked down upon this sort of singularity. ³¹ After turning thirty in February 1794, he found himself “toss’d hither and thither by contending principles,” keeping bad company, and getting into trouble. He admitted, “From this time till my Marriage, I was in a great measure under the Irrevelancy of powerfull Indwelling, Sin, which gave me many melancholy conflicts.” ³² At the same time, he convinced himself of the spiritual benefits of his solitary reading and contemplation:

A wicked man (said a certain preacher) could not endure solitude or self reflection, but still would rush into company, whilst a man who had a view of his interest in Christ did delight in retirement and inward reflection. In affliction a wicked man wanted all comfort, whilst the Assured Christian could look to his best friend from whence these things did proceed. the well ordered covenant was the relief of the Soul. ³³

Nevertheless, by his next birthday, he was lamenting “I always tremble at the thought of growing old—am Ill provided for old age.” ³⁴ By this time, he was corresponding regularly with Reid who promised to visit him in London after Kevan threatened to sell his books and return to Scotland. Providentially, the Tysons informed him that they wished to evict him from their back parlor, his treasured sanctuary, at the same time that his former landlord, Joseph Sewell died, leaving his widow Susan an attractive prospect.

Before this point, Kevan had not mentioned any other love interest except for his cousin, the daughter of his father’s only brother at whose funeral young Samuel was given a little rum “and I have often said, it was the first time I had too much.” Like his mother, his beloved cousin died young a martyr to a selfish man: “Nelly was the companion of my youth and I believe the mothers thought of a meaner alliance—she married a Man unworthy of such a very likely sensible woman—she died in her prime leaving one son—her death was in Aug^t 1804 about her 41st year—being my age.” ³⁵ In keeping with his vision of female spiritual succor and sacrifice, Kevan introduced Mrs. Sewell in the retrospective narrative of his early years in London as “a every way Superior woman” who took care of him “like a mother.” Reminiscent of the families he knew in his youth: “They were Baptists, the Husband received most of his religious knowledge from his wife.” ³⁶ Tellingly, when he ambushed her in her kitchen with a proposal on June 22, 1795, Widow Sewell did not take him seriously.

Kevan had calculated carefully before pressing his suit and knew there would be obstacles: “She had all the qualifications of a good wife—had no children, a house furnished, and a little money beforehand—beside she had a very respectable school that averaged about Sixty pounds pr An ^m . Her friends had another person pointed out, whose prospects were much better than mine at that time.” ³⁷ More seriously, as a devout Baptist, she had doubts about his sincerity in religion and demanded a written statement of his beliefs, which had him writing to Reid for guidance. Kevan transcribed Reid’s response in his journal. Essentially, Reid wrote that it was not for him to say what was proper, given the absence of any moral obstruction, the mutual attraction, and his hope of Kevan “having cried unto the Father of Lights for direction.” Reid cautioned that her religion might bring discord, “but the description of the woman, perhaps may partly remove this, as piety and providence will make a considerable alteration in the case, or perhaps there may be come prospect of her being gained over to a profession of Reformation principles.” Reid assured him that he would be reconciled to Kevan’s settlement in London as long as he lived and died in Reform principles. Less optimistic was Samuel’s Methodist brother John who stated simply: “I trembled at the very thoughts of your being a married.” Mrs. Sewell’s friends had similar tremors. Considering that Kevan had alluded to his bad behavior prior to marriage, his denial of their allegations seems in bad faith or an act of self-deception. To a chilling degree, Kevan’s righteous indignation against their gossip resembles his reaction to his granddaughter’s nurse’s accusations twenty-seven years later. In letters exchanged with Mrs. Sewell while Kevan was working at Rygate:

she stated openly & frankly what objections some of her friends had to the match from various trifling storeys—I resented this warmly & hinted to her breaking off the affair; which gave her great grief, and was one of my unwise missives—I once visited her from there: there were another little Misunderstanding that her Sister Mary made up by meeting me in Bemondsey church yard—These were times of suspended pains & pleasures. Since we rested our jealous fears—. ³⁸

Kevan appears to have been aided in his courtship on one occasion when they were returning from an outing and an uncommon flash of lightning from the heavens alarmed Mrs. Sewell. In spite of his regretted childhood nip of rum, he seemed happy to have been able to comfort her with brandy. Their marriage took place on October 25, 1795, in a double ceremony with her sister Martha who commandeered the arrangements and united the pair in their dissatisfaction with some of its details, including it taking place on the Sabbath and circumventing the talents of the fine singers in attendance. ³⁹

Although in recounting the circumstances of his betrothal, Kevan represented marriage saving him from sin, it brought new terrors of conscience. On Wednesday, the new Mrs. Kevan proposed family worship: “this was a new thing for me I was under much fear & agitation, but by use it became more Easey.” She believed neglect of public worship to be a serious sin while he had serious misgivings about hearing sermons by ministers of other persuasions, but “the serious wisdom of Mrs K” helped alleviate his guilt. ⁴⁰ In a note he added in 1832, however, he admitted that this memory still produced uncertainty and uneasiness with him. While her “Judgement and Prudence” prevented unhappiness, he could not help resenting the disruption to his private reading and contemplation on the Sabbath, which he complained had become too sociable. Her Baptist friends sometimes provoked a sharp response from him when they held forth on their different views of baptism, but the Kevans did work to accommodate one another’s different modes of worship. Kevan was even pleased to discover serious, humble, godly people who knew nothing of Covenants or the Reformation in Scotland. His sister-in-law Mary, who assisted Susan with the school, he pronounced obliging and pious. Kevan included their family history to underline their superiority. ⁴¹ Nevertheless, trouble in the household took him from God. When Susan fell ill (she must have been in her second month of pregnancy) in February 1796 everything seemed to fall apart: “God hides his face; no liberty in prayer.” Kevan stewed over trouble at work and within the family, an “Ill-spent Sabbath,” neglect of his soul, and making promises he later broke: “a load of Ingratitude lies upon me.” ⁴² His brother William continued to send letters offering unwanted marital advice and Reid remained his stalwart mentor, probably because of his assurances of redemption. When Kevan’s cousin, John McKean fell fatally ill that year and Kevan was flooded with remorse for the sins of his youth, Reid assured him: “the Salvation of Great Sinners, brought Great Glory to God.” ⁴³

Kevan professed a caring love for his wife, but he found domesticity trying after baby Samuel was born on September 18, 1796. Susan’s first delivery at age thirty-six occasioned much worry and prayer, but, once the anxiety lifted, fatherhood soon settled into something more prosaic: “Nursing and the crying of a child are new Scenes, but I must endeavour to pass on patiently.” In defiance of the Baptists, he sent for Reid to perform the christening. Meanwhile, on the Sabbath of October 23, he reported, “Chiefly engaged in cooking & nursing—this kind of employ was new & in itself unpleasant—but I saw duty in it.” ⁴⁴ Intriguingly, at this point of the narrative, the order-and-obedience-oriented Kevan discussed a satire he had written on the controversy over William Pitt’s hair powder tax, as if to relieve the tedium of domestic life. Further, sectarian dispute soon provided drama. Arranging a meeting house for Reid’s anticipated arrival at Christmas involved negotiations with Burgers and Sandemanians (the latter, taking a more intellectual approach to faith, disapproved of the Cameronian’s emphasis on emotional reactions to the gospel’s truth), dealing with objections to the “Scotch version of the psalms,” and his brother John writing that he was sorry to hear no minister in England was fit to christen the child. ⁴⁵ What Mrs. Kevan thought about all this went unrecorded; if only her journal had surfaced. At the baptism held at a Burgher meeting house, Reid’s preaching featured setting out his principles, offering prayers for the present government, and several congregants walking out. Subsequent efforts met with more success. Reid stayed for thirty-one days and raised subscriptions for his lives of the Westminster divines. ⁴⁶ Kevan’s efforts to gather support for a Reformed church and donations to meet expenses came to naught, however. Moreover, he no longer derived the warm feelings that Reid’s sermons had given him as a boy although he had been grateful to have the gospels in the form he desired. After Reid’s departure, Kevan tried worship with two companions but their spirits did not unite. He attributed this to the change his life had undergone having a wife, son, and many ties. ⁴⁷

Baby Samuel died on February 22, 1797, which brought new challenges to the marriage. Still torn between his solitary study of theological questions and participation in family life, Kevan noted in August, “after an unprofitable day I had a little comfort in family conversation, a thing I am very defective in.” ⁴⁸ Nevertheless, on January 1, 1798, in the first-of-the-year self-examination recommended by Ambrose and other proponents of spiritual diaries, Kevan admitted that he found it hard to be a good husband. Unwittingly, he appears to have turned into his father. He took notice of his “sourness and stiffness,” forgetting his brother, John’s description of their father’s “stiff and sour” temper, which Kevan assumed he had escaped: “had I never been out of Scotland I should largely drink of a sullen spirit.” He registered pain at Susan’s remark about his wounding her. ⁴⁹ He continued his correspondence with Reid and helped him with his research on the Westminster divines, but at this point began to question his method of reading. He also ceased writing his journal from memoranda.

From June, on the fiftieth page of this manuscript, Kevan began keeping a diary directly. Family life remained a barrier to the Lord, but the couple began pulling together in adversity. Crisis had ensued when Master Tyson sent Kevan to Poole to work with another baby due and other troubles heaping up. In his litany of woe, his tendency toward self-righteousness and blaming others resurfaced: “a wicked unreasonable woman threatens to summons my wife for what she calls a shilling debt while she is indebted near that to us.” In trying to determine whether or not to refuse the job: “I endeavoured to Lay it before the Lord but found no Outgate.” Reading Josiah failed to clear his mind: “I again cried to the Lord for light but oh he seem’d to hide his face.” The solution came in discussion with his wife: “She Express’d a great deal of Resignation than I had formerly seen telling me that nothing could reconcile her mind, but that the hand of Providence seem’d manifest in it.” Mrs. Kevan bore her husband’s departure with fortitude, although she admitted later that she had cried harder than she ever had in her life, but after all the turmoil, he did wind up returning in time for the birth of Nathaniel. This baby thrived. Kevan felt anxiety when the boy reached the age at which his first son had died. The anniversary of little Samuel’s death became an occasion for self-blame: “many a Twinge I have in taking so little delight in the Sweet Baby now Rotting in the Grave, my sin, my Baseness—brought on his end—Leaven’d him with Sin & Loaded him with misery.” ⁵⁰

By Kevan’s account, the household continued in its cycles of drama, prayer, self-recrimination, discussion, anxiety, and resolution. They had another son, Peter, and two daughters, Mary and Phoebe. He saved enough to start his own business and they prospered. Yet, when Susan became ill in September 1821, he confessed:

a great dole of Sourness & rebellion, fretting & impatience possessed my mind & it has still much hold of me—very far from being like a weaned child, may I be kept from the power of Temptation. I am certainly in an evil & awfull frame, when I feel so little for the pains & trouble of so dear a partner—so usefull & active a wife—and while this is my Sin & Shame were it know, I would look upward for forgiveness—& plead the healing of my Nature thus depraved. ⁵¹

This would be Mrs. Kevan’s final illness. Not surprising, by December, this “usefull & active” wife made her own funeral arrangements, chose the clothes in which she would be laid out, and gave away the rest while her husband emoted: “it was truly affecting, cloathes seemed of no further use—O how speaking this!” ⁵² Unlike his father, who died too confident in justification by faith, Kevan’s wife died willingly but articulated fears of being impatient: “it was reply’d Jesus Christ, who himself died, would give her patience Suitable to her need, as in all her afflictions he was afflicted.” ⁵³ As Kevan expressed his trepidation regarding the funeral, he revealed what it meant to him for a wife to be her husband’s helpmeet. He wrote that he did not want to appear affected: “If I have grief, I wish it to be inward, deep & real, such as is proper on the Loss of one who so much studied my interest in every thing—& this recalls to mind her standing rule, or real desire that whoever of us were left behind, should be the better for the Union.” ⁵⁴ He discovered a letter she had written, while in childbed with their first son, directing that if she died and he must remarry, he should only do so with someone who loved his soul as well as his body. Susan’s letter underlines the ongoing struggle between the needs of the body and the salvation of the soul. Although Samuel continued to chastise himself for how he had treated Susan, it was always more about how it reflected upon him than how it had affected her. He regularly questioned whether he was fit for death at that particular moment, how he would appear at Judgment.

Kevan’s self-absorption, fueled by the perceived primacy of securing God’s grace, combined with his perennial questioning the ordinances of various faiths, could well have permitted the “little family affair” in his son Peter’s house. Kevan’s writing dropped off in summer 1822, and he felt compelled to explain that he was too busy to keep up his journal. God had not returned to him, and he went so far as to interpret Susan’s death at sixty-two as God’s stroke of anger against him, in contrast to his having attributed his mother’s death at sixty-six to overwork. Kevan then disclosed that his time had been occupied by his granddaughter Martha as her mother had no servant; he mentioned in passing that she slept with him. August featured acts of repentance and prayer for unspecified reasons; normally he specified his failings. ⁵⁵ The confrontation with the nurse took place in October between Susan’s birthday on the fourteenth and their wedding anniversary on the twenty-fifth. On her birthday, Kevan had lamented “my blindness prevented me from rightly appretiating the treasure I was in possession of.” ⁵⁶ Although he never made clear how the matter of Martha resolved, he had a good enough relationship with his sons to hand over his business to them by the beginning of 1823. His dealings with others in London, however, seemed full of trouble and strife; in 1824, he went back to Scotland.

In current psychological studies of grandfather–granddaughter incest, which, research has found, usually progresses slowly and produces conflicted loyalties that keep the child silent, he looks like a textbook case:

These older grandfathers appeared to be motivated by the social effects of age rather than by senility, namely by loneliness and loss, low self-esteem and depression, physical helplessness and deterioration, need for affection and for reassurance about their sexual potency and desirability. Anger about getting old and about being stereotyped or given stereotypical roles such as baby sitter may precipitate incest. ⁵⁷

As Kevan proclaimed on his wedding anniversary the following year, “I seem an old man neglected & forsaken.” He had been looking around to replace the loss of his wife but felt little prized at his age. ⁵⁸ Additionally, his old singularity plagued him. On the three-year anniversary of Susan’s death, he reflected: “there has been a vanity & folly about me not common to men my Age—I think myself exceedingly Sunk in the Estimation of all my friends—and the thought is very painfull to out live friendship.” ⁵⁹ Most damning, when he suffered an attack of gout, little Martha stood at the foot of the bed and earnestly enquired when he was going to “the pit hole.” He asked her whether she wished him there and she said yes. When he asked again and got the same response he declared: “it struck me much.” ⁶⁰ Was this childish prattle or did she really wish him dead; and, if so, why? An alternative explanation would be that the nurse, resentful at his interference with her charge, made accusations that both activated residual guilt and served to poison the child’s mind against him.

Kevan’s appropriation of Martha, whatever its motivation or true nature, was consistent with the role that the female sex had long played in his life as a source of comfort and solace. His justification for his second marriage to Janet Badden, sixteen years his junior, to whom he proposed in Glasgow in 1824, said it all: “I stand in need of a bosom advisor—One to assist me under my gouty pains & the approach of age, which I could not expect from my Daughters, who have a Family of their Own.” Still in thrall to his lamented Susan, her miraculously retrieved letter from beyond the grave conveniently had convinced him it was his duty to marry again “when providence pointed out a proper object.” Invoking a principle of casuistry, he reasoned that when faced with evils, avoid the greater. ⁶¹ With self-serving logic, he explained that for twenty-six years he had been greatly indulged so he had greater wants. Moreover, he asserted, providence would allow the match without much injury to his children. Although it would reduce his sons’ property, “the promotion of Sanctification, & living more to the Glory of God and my own real comfort must be chiefly pursued.” After Susan’s death, he bemoaned how he had been unwatchful and less attentive to prayer until then. ⁶² Somehow he convinced himself remarriage would repair his relationship with God.

The financial gains and losses matrimony entailed somewhat detracted from its spiritual promise. With pangs and nostalgic memories, Kevan removed his belongings from and sold what originally had been the Sewell residence in Red Lion Court and purchased a lease for two properties in Magdalen Street for himself and his sons in October 1825. The second Mrs. Kevan remained in Scotland, leaving him to contemplate the oddity of the arrangement. He mused that during that same month thirty years ago he had first become a householder: “there is some kind of providence in this that I do not understand. I am now practically learning that this is a changeable world.” He was also fretting over the sort of temporary settlement he should make for his new wife. He had her assurances that she wanted his sons pleased, but it was a delicate matter. ⁶³ Susan’s birthday on the sixteenth featured, his usual regret and memory of her as helpmeet: “I have been thinking what great defect it was in one not duly to praise such a partner as this … I shall have to give an account of the use I made of her gifts and Talents.” Although his sons kept him occupied, he wanted direction. By the end of the month, he had given up Magdalen Street and was back in Scotland trying to take hold of Christ. ⁶⁴ His former society was gone; even the arrival of his books did not ease his disquiet.

While Kevan married Janet to take care of his “gouty pains,” loneliness, and lack of direction, she appeared to have had more mercenary motives. In December, an attorney threatened Kevan’s sons with legal action for payment of their stepmother’s late husband’s debts. They wound up settling for £15. Her father and son would die the following year with their business doing poorly, so the Kevans would face further financial straits. The second Mrs. Kevan had more expensive tastes than the first. Early in the marriage, her bewildered husband described his first time riding out in a gig with a harness, he marveled, costing £18.15. He took pains to emphasize that a gig and an agreeable wife would not bring contentment, only God himself. Nonetheless, in 1826, while jaunting in the gig, Kevan savored the air and thought of his poor children and grandchildren suffocating in London. Kevan found parting from Janet difficult when he visited them. Consistent with his old pattern, staying with family (this time his daughter Phoebe) brought unspecified disagreements. Additionally, he sensed that Janet’s family disliked him but could not figure out why—perhaps his age, he speculated. That, he declared, he could not help. The diary ended in 1827, two years before his death, still remembering Susan’s virtues, and with subsequent pages filled with religious reflections. ⁶⁵ Given the number of times that Kevan recorded the disapproval or hostility of others for reasons he could not fathom, it seems safe to assume that the narcissism displayed on the pages of his journal reflect the manner he related to those around him.

The doctrines and forms Kevan followed seem to render it impossible to ascertain what actually happened and why, and cast doubt on whether the Kevan family exemplified laboring-class domesticity. This problem of interpretation haunts scholars of self-writing. With reference to historians who treat nineteenth-century working class autobiographies as akin to oral histories, John Sturrock warns that their “profession demands that they treat all such writings as typical, and certainly not as the work of resolutely and idiosyncratic individuals whose experiences and responses were unlike those of anyone else. They would do well moreover to heed the worry of the theorist and question to what extent artifice and literary convention may have determined the ‘historical’ evidence they assume they have found.” The influence of reading on the ways that autobiographers of all social classes fashioned their life stories has been well documented. Spiritual autobiographies and journals in particular often seem formulaic as the godly followed instructions from the pulpit and from published guides. ⁶⁶ The autobiographical section of Kevan’s writings is striking in this regard for its appropriation of the language of Rutherford and others. For example, using the expression “the weeds were suffered to grow rank & strong” to describe his brother, John’s children, cited above, echoed Rutherford’s self-flagellating description of himself “overgrown with weeds; corruption is rank and fat in me.” ⁶⁷ Kevan’s experience of faith and his spiritual practices resembled those of the early puritan Scots whose writings he consumed. As he stated outright in his account of early married life: “Evening I divided between my books & my wife.” ⁶⁸

These qualities do not necessarily render Kevan’s writing derivative or unreliable. In the introduction to his study of the sort of seventeenth-century spiritual works that obsessed Kevan, Mullan offers a thoughtful survey of the scholarship addressing the problem of truth in autobiography. He notes that while some of the writers might seem to be trying to force their life into an exemplary model—King David, St. Paul, and St. Augustine setting the main traditions—or they might misremember, choose events selectively, or self-censor, the act of writing in itself constituted the impossible process of trying to make lived experience accord with conscience in the drama of salvation. Nonetheless, he cautions, “amongst religious athletes there is also a tendency to magnify sinfulness that grace might be seen to abound the more.” Yet, as Margaret Bottrall contends, in autobiography based on self-scrutiny, the inner life was more important than external events in the pursuit of self-knowledge. ⁶⁹

Kevan’s view of his life through the lens of religious faith often produced what looked like boilerplate pieties and exaggerated expressions of horror at his sins, but, as we have seen, he could use these pieties in creative ways to justify conduct of dubious godliness. The scholarship on spiritual autobiography emphasizes the degree to which the religious community mediated solitary self-examination. Mullan observes that sociability was a palliative to the melancholy suffered by Puritans due to their awareness of the world’s sinfulness and not knowing for certain whether or not God had elected to save them. Similarly, Andrew Cambers details how reading diaries became an element of family devotions as well as of building a community of the godly. ⁷⁰ Marrying a Baptist required Kevan to make compromises in his religious practice. His isolation from a community of like believers placed him in moral peril, as preachers had warned him. Although Susan Kevan clearly took her role as helpmeet seriously, the journal suggests that their relationship generated a lot of guilt when he saw his own stubbornness or peevishness undermining the prescriptive ideal of mutual advice and support. ⁷¹ Lack of a real community throughout his life, in spite of great efforts to gain one, when combined with the loss of his wife, pitched Kevan into a perilous state. Kevan admitted his disillusionment with the Reformed Presbytery around the time of his second marriage. Meanwhile, although he continued to worry over the state of his soul, he had been left with habits of reasoning that allowed him some dangerous means of self-justification in regard to the needs of his body.

Kevan’s methods of reasoning, archaic and piecemeal as they were, had the potential to descend into antinomianism, a risk certainly recognized by early Puritans. ⁷² In addition to the puritan anxiety about election, constructing a self in an autobiography and performing self-examination in a diary could produce what modernists would call an existential crisis. The practice required splitting the self in two: subject and observer. Taking stock of the ways that the Elizabethan-era diary of Samuel Ward, a puritan divine, was more communal than individualistic, Margo Todd contemplates the amount of stress it nonetheless caused by requiring him to “fashion himself as both preacher and auditor, exhorter and penitent.” ⁷³ The emotional anguish Kevan expressed was characteristic of earlier spiritual diaries, as was his loss of God’s presence, in spite of his cries to heaven, after the death of children and his first wife. As Cynthia Garrett points out, Calvinists prayed fully aware that God could not be emotionally moved; nonetheless, ministers instructed the godly to learn to persist with sincerity, although learned sincerity might seem oxymoronic. Some literature described the prayer as an importuning child and ample examples existed of believers arguing passionately with God. Prayer was meant to provide temporary respite from the constant sway of emotions. Garrett and Mullan each detail the other contradictions that the pious faced as they lurched between extremes of hope and despair, unable to be at peace because of the danger that came with ceasing self-inspection and lowering one’s guard. Paradoxically, doubt gave assurance but that assurance could not be truly sure until death. ⁷⁴ Significantly, Kevan did not seem to recover a sense of God’s presence in due course the way others did.

We can gain a better perspective on the problems caused by Kevan’s spiritual isolation by comparing his life to that of a troubled native Londoner of analogous social status, who, in contrast, thrived when Puritans were a close-knit group under siege by the government, and whose community extended overseas. Nehemiah Wallington (1598–1658), a turner, was unique for a person of his class in this time and place for producing voluminous writings. These began as a means of battling a puritan despair in youth that drove him to eleven suicidal imaginings, some of which resulted in serious attempts, including ingestion of rat bane. Unlike Kevan, he had a large supportive family united in faith near him and married young at twenty-three, both unusual for the time. Although unacknowledged family interventions saved him, and his wife of thirty-seven years helped him through near-fatal accidents, heartbreakingly numerous losses of loved ones, and taking in kin left behind, which stressed their resources, Wallington rarely mentioned her beyond giving thanks to God for giving him a “comfortable yokefellow.” ⁷⁵ To an even greater degree than Kevan, he eschewed pleasurable family activities to pursue his writing in solitude. Wallington interpreted all disasters that befell his family as God’s way of weaning him from the world, but had to admit that the Lord had fallen short of his goal, given that his love of family remained strong; he worried about them incessantly. Unlike Kevan, however, he did not blame others for his misfortunes, most strikingly in the case of his journeyman, shockingly, one of the godly community, who helped himself from the till for two years to the point of being able to set up his own shop. He plunged the Wallingtons into debt and had the effrontery to sue them for back wages. Fortunately, a maid’s eyewitness testimony to the theft and a good dose of guilt dispensed by the shocked Wallington elicited a confession, but the Wallingtons did not recover the loss; nonetheless, Nehemiah expressed gratitude for God’s mercy in allowing its detection. ⁷⁶ Family, friends, and other members of the godly community, near and far, assisted him here as in other times of trouble and need. Judging by his reaction to far less egregious financial importuning during his wife’s pregnancy, as detailed above, Kevan would not have had the confidence to extend such generosity to a wrongdoer.

The generational pattern of family conflict in Kevan’s writings supports David Leverenz’s observation of puritan families featuring weak anxious fathers and strong confident mothers. Even his Freudian interpretation seems plausible with respect to Kevan’s world:

Puritan sermons, largely through imagery and analogy, encouraged a shared fantasy that Freud has named the “Family Romance”: a wish that one can be born (or reborn) of higher parents than what one actually has. The Puritan version of the Family Romance offered the possibility that sons could rescue the father’s authority by being reborn of the greater Father, without a mother’s help, and suckled and raised by Him alone. ⁷⁷

The craving to be with God the Father helped justify Kevan’s rebellion against his earthly father. In contrast to Wallington and others though, Kevan acknowledged his dependence on the women in his life. Viewing Kevan’s writing in relation to the sorts of literatures that inspired it suggests that in spite of the search for patterns and the love of repetition displayed in spiritual diaries, individual temperaments and life events produced different outcomes. The religious teachings Kevan absorbed shaped his worldview and personal habits. At the same time, his personal character and experience shaped the way he interpreted these religious teachings and applied them to his own life. The paradoxes that emerge in Kevan’s testament demonstrate how we must not lose sight of individual subjectivities, as we place our subjects into categories and construct historical models.