MIDDLETON, a market and manufacturing town of Lancashire, is situated on the Irk, near the Rochdale Canal, and on the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, about 5 miles north of Manchester and 4 west of Oldham. It includes the township of Tonge, an isolated portion of the parish of Prestwich. The church of St Leonards is an old structure of mixed architecture, with a low square tower. The oldest portion of the building dates from the 12th century, but the main portion from 1412, and the south aisle from 1524. It underwent extensive restoration in 1869. The Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, a building in the Tudor style, was founded in 1572. There are public baths and a free library. The prosperity of the town dates from the introduction of manufactures at the close of last century. The staple trade is the spinning and weaving of cotton, and the other industries include silk weaving, calico printing, bleaching, dyeing, ironfounding, and the manufacture of soap and chemicals. There are several collieries in the neighbourhood. The town was at an early period in possession of the Bartons, from whom it passed by marriage in the 16th century to Sir Ralph de Assheton. The population of the urban sanitary district of Middleton and Tonge in 1881 was 18,952.
MIDDLETON, Conyers (1683-1750), the earliest and most eminent example of the spirit of theological rationalism in the English Church of the 18th century, was the son of the rector of Hinderwell near Whitby, and was born at Richmond in Yorkshire, on December 27 (or, according to another account, on August 3), 1683. He graduated at Cambridge, took orders, and in 1706 obtained a fellowship, which he soon resigned upon contracting an advantageous marriage. In 1717 a dispute with Bentley, upon an extortionate demand of the latter on occasion of Middleton’s being created D.D., involved him in an acrimonious controversy, which called forth several pamphlets from his pen full of powerful invective, and among them his first considerable literary performances, the Remarks and Further Remarks on Bentley’s Proposals for a New Edition of the Greek Testament (1721). “You have laid Bentley flat upon his back,” wrote Colbatch. “I scorn to read what the rascal has written,” wrote Bentley,—who, however, only resorted to this affected disdain after a fruitless attempt to fix the authorship upon Colbatch, but who might justly have commented upon the impropriety of Middleton’s endeavour to visit his grievances upon the text of the New Testament. Private resentment and uncurbed personality were throughout his life too frequently the motive and the note of Middleton’s controversial publications. In 1723 he was involved in a lawsuit by personalities against Bentley, which had found their way into his otherwise judicious tract on library administration, written on occasion of his appointment to the honourable office of university librarian. In 1726 he gave great offence to the medical profession by a dissertation contending that the healing art among the ancients was only exercised by slaves or freedmen. Between the dates of these publications he visited Italy, and made those observations on the pagan pedigree of Italian superstitions which he subsequently embodied in his Letter from Rome (1729). This cogent tract, while establishing the author’s main proposition with abundant learning and wit, gave at the same time the first clear indication of the anti-supernaturalistic bias of his intellect, and probably contributed to prepare the storm which broke out against him on his next publication (1731). In his remonstrance with Waterland on occasion of the latter’s reply to Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation, Middleton takes a line which in his day could hardly fail to expose him to the reproach of infidelity. He gives up the literal truth of the primeval Mosaic narratives; and, in professing to indicate a short and easy method of confuting Tindal, lays principal stress on the indispensableness of Christianity as a mainstay of social order. This was to resign nearly everything that divines of the Waterland stamp thought worth defending. Middleton was warmly assailed from many quarters, and retreated with some difficulty under cover of a sheaf of apologetic pamphlets, and a more regular attendance at church. A freethinker in the strict sense of the term he certainly was; but how far freedom of thought was carried by him it is not easy to ascertain. His adversaries—some of them men who gravely maintained that Egyptian civilization originated in the age of Solomon—were unable to fix any serious imputation upon him; on the other hand it is clear that the natural attitude of his mind towards supernatural pretensions was one of suspicion, and that his temperament was by no means devout. That he was nevertheless not incapable of a disinterested hero-worship was evinced by his next important publication, the elegant but partial Life of Cicero (1741), a work which, if far below the standard of modern exactness, may yet compare in spirit and execution with the best productions of the Italian Renaissance. It is, indeed, as remarked by Forsyth, “rather an historical composition, in which Cicero is the principal figure, than the portrait of the man himself”; and Dr Parr has pointed out Middleton’s unacknowledged obligations to the forgotten Bellendenus, which, however, with the ardour of a discoverer, he seems to have considerably overrated. The work was undertaken at the instance of Lord Hervey, in correspondence with whom also originated his disquisition on The Roman Senate, published in 1747. The same year and the following produced the most important of all his writings, the Introductory Discourse and the Free Inquiry concerning the miraculous powers then commonly deemed to have subsisted in the church after the apostolic age. In combating this belief Middleton indirectly established two propositions of capital importance. He showed that ecclesiastical miracles must be accepted or rejected in the mass; and he distinguished between the authority due to the early fathers’ testimony to the beliefs and practices of their times and their very slender credibility as witnesses to matters of fact. Some individual grudge seems to have prompted him to expose, in 1750, Bishop Sherlock’s eccentric notions of antediluvian prophecy, which had then been before the world for a quarter of a century. The same year he died of a decline at his seat at Hildesham in Cambridgeshire, leaving a widow, but no children.
Middleton’s most ambitious work is obsolete from no fault of his, but his controversial writings retain a permanent place in the history of opinion. In his more restricted sphere he may not inappropriately be compared to Lessing. Like Lessing’s, the character of his intellect was captious and iconoclastic, but redeemed from mere negation by a passion for abstract truth, too apt to slumber until called into activity by some merely personal stimulus. His diction is generally masculine and harmonious. Pope thought him and Hooke the only prose writers of the day who deserved to be cited as authorities on the language. Parr, while exposing his plagiarisms, heaps encomiums on his style. But his best qualities, his impatience of superstition and disdain of mere external authority, are rather moral than literary. As a scholar he is rather elegant than profound; as a controversialist he has more vigour than urbanity, and more wit than humour. He has been unjustly attacked both as author and as man by De Quincey, who strangely accuses his style of colloquialism, and taxes him with eating the church’s bread while denying her doctrines. In fact Middleton’s private means were ample, his ecclesiastical emoluments trifling, and his candour obstructed his path to much more considerable preferment. The best general view of his intellectual character and influence is to be found in Leslie Stephen’s English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, chap. vi. A handsome edition of his works, containing several posthumous tracts, but not including the Life of Cicero, appeared in 1752.
MIDDLETON, Thomas (c. 1570-1627), held a leading place among the dramatists of the reign of James I. His
