An address to students on the subject of reading, notes in shorthand, by Thomas Belsham. Written on a used postal cover addressed to Daventry, the residue of a letter from Samuel Whitbread MP (1720-1796). It is unclear whether the Address was delivered at Daventry, or to students at New College, Hackney, soon after Belsham became the College’s resident divinity tutor in 1789. In a reference to the students’ Reading Society, Belsham complains that, ‘from a prudent, useful and commendable institution, [it] is grown up to be an evil of the first magnitude which calls for immediate redress’.
Citations should take the form: ‘An Address to Students on the Subject of Reading, notes in shorthand, c.1789, by Thomas Belsham’, transcribed and edited by Tony Rail and Beryl Thomas, Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies (2014), https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sed/religionandliterature/online-publications/address-to-students