From Thomas Mullett to Charles Dickens, Jr: Creating, sustaining and expanding a west country-london baptist circle

Though Baptist historians have placed considerable emphasis upon the lives and careers of prominent ministers, recent archival work has revealed much about the lives, careers, and activities of laypersons, especially those in the second half of the eighteenth century. A salient example is Thomas Mullett (1745–1814), a Quaker turned Particular Baptist and eventually a General Baptist Unitarian whose intimate connections with the Evans family of Bristol in the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s were significantly enlarged in London between 1790 and 1815 through a circle of Dissenting literati and political figures that included the controversial writers William Godwin and Mary Hays and the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson. The residue of these influences eventually spread around the globe through Mullett’s descendants in a variety of occupations: ministers, missionaries, surgeons, writers, scholars, teachers, printers, and entrepreneurs.