Watts had a classical education at King Edward VI School, Southampton, learning Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

Watts took work as a private tutor and lived with the nonconformist Hartopp family at Fleetwood House on Church Street in Stoke Newington.

He particularly enjoyed the grounds at Abney Park, which Lady Mary planted with two elm walks leading down to an island heronry in the Hackney Brook, and he often sought inspiration there for the many books and hymns that he wrote.

Sacred music scholars Stephen Marini, Denny Prutow and Michael LeFebvre describe the ways in which Watts contributed to English hymnody and the previous tradition of the Church.

Watts led the change in practice by including new poetry for "original songs of Christian experience" to be used in worship, according to Marini.

The practice of singing Psalms in worship was continued by Biblical command in the New Testament Church from its beginnings in Acts through the time of Watts, as documented by Prutow.

The teachings of 16th-century Reformation leaders such as John Calvin, who translated the Psalms in the vernacular for congregational singing, followed this historic worship practice.

[5] Watts also introduced a new way of rendering the Psalms in verse for church services, proposing that they be adapted for hymns with a specifically Christian perspective.

Isaac Watts explained his methods as follows: “Where the Psalmist describes religion by the fear of God, I have often joined faith and love to it.

He divided the content of his elementary treatment of logic into four parts: perception, judgement, reasoning, and method, which he treated in this order.

The content of the chapters and sections is subdivided by the following devices: divisions, distributions, notes, observations, directions, rules, illustrations, and remarks.

According to Watts, judgement is "to compare... ideas together, and to join them by affirmation, or disjoin then by negation, according as we find them to agree or disagree".

When preparing his own textbook, titled A Critick of Arguments: How to Reason (also known as the Grand Logic), Peirce wrote, "I shall suppose the reader to be acquainted with what is contained in Dr Watts' Logick, a book... far superior to the treatises now used in colleges, being the production of a man distinguished for good sense.

His much-visited chest tomb at Bunhill Fields dates from 1808, replacing the original that had been paid for and erected by Lady Mary Abney and the Hartopp family.

It stands in Dr Watts' Walk, in front of the Abney Park Chapel, and was designed by the leading British sculptor, Edward Hodges Baily.

A scheme for a commemorative statue on this spot had been promoted in the late 1830s by George Collison, who in 1840 published an engraving as the frontispiece of his book about cemetery design in Europe and America, and at Abney Park in particular.

It was lost to redevelopment after the Second World War, but the Isaac Watts Memorial United Reformed Church was built on the site.

The clock on Southampton Civic Centre chimes the tune of the opening line of 'Our God, our help in ages past', three times a day, at 8 am, 12 noon and 4 pm.

[14] In his novel David Copperfield (1850), Charles Dickens has school master Dr. Strong quote from Watts' "Against Idleness and Mischief".

In Herman Melville's epic novel Moby-Dick (1851), a minor investor in the whaling ship Pequod is Charity Bildad, "a lean old lady of a most determined and indefatigable spirit, but withal very kindhearted" (chapter 20).

Her brother, the captain, had forbidden the sailors to sing "profane songs" such as sea shanties, so she "placed a small choice copy of Watts in each seaman’s berth" (chapter 22).