These remarks were occasioned by news of the launch of the Wesleyans’ Centenary Fund. That fund seemed remarkable to contemporaries in 1838 because of its scale and likelihood of achievement. A cascade of charitable compassions was released in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, promoted by Dissenters, Churchmen, Quakers and, supremely, the evangelical party in the Church of England. Most Church of England projects relied on upper- and some middle-class support. In contrast, the Wesleyans, in funding chapels and preachers, tapped the sympathies of a wide group of middle- and lower-class supporters, a small number of much wealthier individuals. Indeed Wesley and his successors harboured an ambivalent attitude towards rich men in their midst, fearing their power and influence.

Fortunately for posterity, Wesleyans, like their founder, cared about statistics. Before 1914 they organised seven non-annual ‘crowd-funding’ projects for philanthropic ends. The Centenary Fund of 1839–44 was the pioneer. There followed the Wesleyan Methodist Relief and Extension fund of 1853–57, the Jubilee Fund of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society of 1863–68, the Wesleyan Mission Fund of 1868, the Thanksgiving Fund (in gratitude for the admission of laymen to the Wesleyan Conference without yet another schism) of 1878–83, the Twentieth Century Fund of 1898–1908, and the Centenary Fund of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society of 1911–13. Before the 1880s, as was common in newspapers during much of the nineteenth century (contrary to the teaching of Jesus, and extraordinary to twenty-first-century minds), Wesleyan (and other Methodist) donation lists published the names of donors and the sums they gave, first in the denominational weekly The Watchman and then, after the fund closed, in bound volumes, listing all subscribers and their donations by district and circuit.