Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transcription
- Abbreviations
- 1 Hunting the Methodist Vixen: Methodism and the Eighteenth-Century Media Revolution
- 2 An Overview of Methodist Discourse Culture, 1738–1791
- 3 The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist
- 4 Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women's Life-Writing
- 5 The Shifting Discourse Culture of Methodism, 1791–1832
- 6 Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm
- 7 Agnes Bulmer, Felicia Hemans, and Poetry as Theology
- 8 Evangelicalism, Mediation, and Social Change
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Hunting the Methodist Vixen: Methodism and the Eighteenth-Century Media Revolution
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Transcription
- Abbreviations
- 1 Hunting the Methodist Vixen: Methodism and the Eighteenth-Century Media Revolution
- 2 An Overview of Methodist Discourse Culture, 1738–1791
- 3 The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist
- 4 Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women's Life-Writing
- 5 The Shifting Discourse Culture of Methodism, 1791–1832
- 6 Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm
- 7 Agnes Bulmer, Felicia Hemans, and Poetry as Theology
- 8 Evangelicalism, Mediation, and Social Change
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In his 1820 biography of John Wesley, entitled The Life of Wesley and the Rise of Methodism, Robert Southey, the poet and first non-Methodist to pen a history of the movement, wrote this of the general character and effects of Methodism:
Some evil also, as well as some good, the Methodists have indirectly caused … . Perhaps the manner in which Methodism has familiarized the lower classes to the work of combining associations, making rules for their own governance, raising funds, and communicating from one part of the kingdom to another, may be reckoned among the incidental evils which have resulted from it; but in this respect it has only facilitated a process to which other causes had given birth. The principles of Methodism are strictly loyal; and the language which has been held by the Conference, in all times of political disturbance, have been highly honourable to society, and in strict conformity to the intentions of the founder.
While hardly the first person to recognize it, Southey is correct in identifying a fundamental conflict at the core of Methodism between the conservative central authority of Wesley and the Methodist Conference on the one hand, and the democratizing tendency of Methodist practice on the other; between the discourse practices of the movement, such as open-air preaching, which were unbounded and radically unstable, and the regulatory impulses that came to define official Methodism during the early nineteenth century. As E.P. Thompson famously argued over one hundred years after Southey’s biography,
throughout the early history of Methodism we can see a shaping democratic spirit which struggled against the doctrines and the organisational forms which Wesley imposed. Lay preachers, the break with the Established Church, self-governing forms within the societies – on all these questions Wesley resisted or temporised or followed after the event.
Indeed, both Southey and his friend Coleridge conclude that, overall, Methodism was a force for social and religious order. In his annotations to Southey's Life of Wesley Coleridge wrote that ‘Arminian Methodism contains many true Christians God forbid that I should doubt! … it has been the occasion, and even cause, of turning thousands from their evil deeds, and that it has made and tends to make bad and mischievous men peaceable and profitable neighbours and citizens.’
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- Eighteenth-Century Women's Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution'Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader', pp. 1 - 27Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2019