Itinerant Preachers Baptists popular evangelicalism

Abstract

"Dissenting itinerancy holds considerable importance for the secular historian as a part of the popular evangelicalism that was such a prominent and universal social phenomenon during the 1790s and the early decades of the nineteenth century, but for the denominational historian it has additional significance, for whereas the more exciting developments concerned with overseas missions tend to steal the limelight, this work on the domestic front by hundreds of largely unremarkable men effected the transformation in English Dissent that made extended overseas activity possible and laid the foundation of a significant proportion of the social and political influence of Victorian Nonconformity. "