11 - The critical rise of the King James Bible

Summary

THE INFLUENCE OF POPULAR FEELING

What we have just seen from The Critical Review is a reminder of just how important popular feeling was in shaping critical opinion. Ever since Tyndale set out to give the Bible to the ploughboy, there had been an association between the English Bible and the ill-educated: literacy and Bible-reading went hand in hand, as in the stories of William Maldon or of Defoe's Somerset schoolboy (see above, pp. 10 and 214). The kind of simple love and faith such as Bishop Patrick's maid had shown for the singing Psalms (see above, p. 124) were common responses to the Bible. One Josiah Langdale, born in 1673, recalls that ‘I had not time for much schooling … yet I made a little progress in Latin, but soon forgot it; I endeavoured, however, to keep my English, and could read the Bible and delighted therein.’ Such comments have a representative value, as does this recollection of the ‘domestic interiors of the husbandmen or farmers’ in the Lothians in the 1760s: ‘no book was so familiar to them as the Scriptures; they could almost tell the place of any particular passage, where situated in their own family Bible, without referring to either book, chapter or verse; and where any similar one was situated’.

From the 1760s on such intense and widespread feeling and familiarity among the less educated played an important role in the rise of admiration for the KJB among the intelligentsia. In spite of their wider reading and their education in Augustan standards, they were catching up with the people.