Blackwell Reference Online

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Richard ‘Citizen’ Lee (ca. 1774–98?) served as printer for the London Corresponding Society (LCS). His origins were obscure, but according to the government spy James Powell, Lee worked as a clerk at Pechards and subsequently at Daniel Eaton's bookshop ( Mee 2002b ). Reportedly a Methodist, Lee employed a devotional language in his early poetry that was politically ambiguous. Between August 1793 and January 1794, Lee published a series of poems in the first two volumes of the Evangelical Magazine under the pseudonym Ebeneezer ( Mee 2002b ). His first volume of poetry was Flowers from Sharon; or Original Poems on Divine Subjects (1794), a collection of devotional poetry that the Evangelical Magazine reviewed favourably. The work remained popular enough that Lee was referenced in E.F. Hatfield's The Poets of the Church (1884) ( Mee 2002b ), which claimed that Lee's ‘Song of Praise to the Trinity’ was ‘extensively used as a Doxology’ ( Hatfield 1884 ). Lee's preface struck an antinomian tone with regard to free grace and the limits of human reason, and it was sold by radicals like J.S. Jordan, the original printer of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man , and Garnet Terry, who had republished a seventeenth-century Ranter tract with Jordan the year before ( Mee 2002b ). Although Powell suggests that Lee became involved in radical circles through his work on behalf of Hardy and other ... log in or subscribe to read full text