In Search of a Lost Culture

When a DVD on the history of Luton was produced in 2006, its sleeve notes explained that some subjects covered in detail in earlier printed histories were not included in the film. Two redundant topics specifically mentioned were the development of educational provision in the town and the history of Methodism. It is easy to see why the story of, what is today, a small Christian denomination should seem a rather uninteresting byway, not only of Luton's story but also of history generally. To venture into the world of religious nonconformity in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries is certainly to make a journey into a landscape quite unfamiliar to the twenty-first century mind. The pious language in which these people expressed themselves is now foreign to modern ears and the basic experience of their lives, spartan, hard and uncertain, was quite different from today’s. Even more challengingly, it requires an act of imagination to understand the thinking of people who made sense of their world using a mental framework alien to current presumptions. To make such a venture is not, however, to disappear into the backwaters of English history but rather to explore what was once a significant moral, cultural and political influence on society.

The emergence in Bedfordshire during the late 1730s of the movement called Methodism forms part of far wider religious developments that occurred not only across England and Wales, but also across the North Atlantic world in the early eighteenth century. From the small Protestant communities in the Habsburg territories of central Europe to the Puritan settlements of New England, a shift is discernable away from the cerebral acceptance of doctrinal systems to a new emphasis on the spiritual authenticity of emotion and personal experience. (Indeed, this shift was not confined to Protestant Christianity but was mirrored in eastern European Judaism by the simultaneous rise of the Hasidic movement.) The first manifestation of this new religious spirit is generally acknowledged to be ‘the revolt of the children’ in Silesia, in 1707, when young Protestants, whose churches had been confiscated and closed by the Catholic authorities, began to hold open-air meetings for prayer and hymn-singing.