There was no significant new study of the Countess of Huntingdon between the complex and confused Life and Times by A. C. H. Seymour (1839) until after the opening up of the Cheshunt College archive in the late 1960s. The archive contains a major part of the correspondence that Lady Huntingdon received in the last twenty-five years of her life, and shows in detail what day-to-day life was like in the Connexion during that period. Two major studies of Lady Huntingdon were published in the 1990s (by Welch and by Schlenther); the focus of the present work is different from theirs, in that it is concerned principally with the Connexion, rather than its founder. It considers the origins and development of the Connexion, its relations with other sections of the Evangelical Revival, and its impact on the broader religious life of late eighteenth-century England.
Keywords: Huntess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, Boyd Stanley Schlenther, A.C.H. Seymour, Edwin Welch