This article explores the ways in which Little Gidding and its inhabitants – including the leader of that pious seventeenth-century household, Nicholas Ferrar – were remembered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The memory of Little Gidding was shaped, in part, by a passage in Richard Gough’s British Topography, in which Gough dismissed Nicholas Ferrar as a ‘useless enthusiast’. Gough’s attack was answered by the liberal churchman Peter Peckard, who defended the reputation of his wife’s ancestor in his Memoirs of the Life of Mr. Nicholas Ferrar. And yet Peckard’s response to the Ferrars of Little Gidding was not entirely approving: while Peckard celebrated their piety and benevolence, he also worried over their ‘ceremonials’ and their ‘austerities’. This article presents a reading of the Memoirs, as well as a study of the relationship between Peckard’s text and other contemporary sources, in order to shed light on the complex nature of Peckard’s liberal Anglicanism.

What makes prayer valid? For the poet, T.S. Eliot, there is something more, something that is sometimes unnoticed, but which, if realized, can reanimate prayer life. This brief essay unfolds in three steps: (1) pointing to the contemplative influence of Eliot's conversion to the Church of England; (2) depicting the seventeenth-century Little Gidding lay-monastic community as the definitive influence on Eliot's final quartet; and (3) unpacking six interrelated prayer-revitalizing insights from a passage in ‘Little Gidding’, practices that help make prayer valid.