The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  On his way to attend a recently founded Anglican religious group in London in May 1738, John Wesley experienced a profound religious conversion. A Church of England priest, a missionary and an Oxford don, Wesley himself traced the origins of Methodism to the ‘Holy Club’ formed by his brother Charles in 1729, while they were both at Oxford. But the significance of the Holy Club would have remained confined to the cloisters of Oxford had it not been for further developments. Wesley himself seems to have recognized as much when he went on a missionary journey to Georgia in the American colonies from 1736 to 1738, but he returned to England still uncertain of his future religious direction. At this time he came under the influence of the Moravians, familiarizing himself with their organization into classes and bands, their attempts to educate the poorest members of society and, most vital of all, their belief in the indispensability of faith to salvation. About this time, too, the influence of George Whitefield, one of the members of the Holy Club, who had already established himself as the most effective, popular preacher of the day, made itself felt. Whitefield brought together American missionary methods and a charismatic preaching personality. Inspired, in turn, by the open-air preaching of the Reverend Griffith Jones in Wales as early as 1714, Whitefield began to preach to huge open-air meetings in the Bristol area in 1739. Within a few weeks John Wesley was following his example and, in a series of over 150 outdoor meetings in a 10-week period from April to June 1739, addressed huge audiences. Later, in London it was reported that he drew crowds of 50,000. It was during these weeks that he discovered his power to move crowds and to inspire faith even among the poorest and most wretched elements in society. Within this short time, his national reputation was made. The rest of his life was to be spent on missionary tours, using his talents to move the godless to salvation by faith. Sometimes, indeed, his appeal was so overwhelming that he drew under the wing of his church small groups and connections of revivalists which already existed, especially in Yorkshire.

  The numerical growth of Methodism was steady rather than spectacular. Down to his death in 1791, John Wesley covered a quarter of a million miles on horseback, preaching the word of God in no fewer than 40,000 sermons. By 1767 there were about 22,000 Wesleyan Methodists in England alone, by 1791 around 56,000, and perhaps 72,000 in the whole of Britain. By 1816, however, there were no fewer than 180,000 Methodists in Britain. Although in some places the growth was patchy, especially during the war years after 1793, by 1832 there were a quarter of million, in addition to perhaps another 50,000 in the various Methodist schismatic groups. These figures, however, understate the real numbers, as they include only those class members who were formally enrolled; attendance at Methodist services was considerably higher. By this time, moreover, Methodists were beginning to outnumber Anglicans in some towns.

  Although the rise of Methodism owes everything to John Wesley, to his brother Charles’s hymn-writing abilities – over 5,000 composed during his lifetime – and to Whitefield’s own spectacular preaching, a further cluster of reasons for the solid growth of Methodism lay in its organizational ingenuity. Wherever Wesley went, he left behind him small groups of people, usually fewer than twenty, organized at first into ‘bands’, later into classes. These classes met once a week for discussion, self-confession, reading and instruction. Their members, women as well as men, were encouraged to preach. They paid a subscription of one penny a week and elected a leader who acted as their delegate to a district meeting which, in turn, elected delegates to a larger district, and thence, after 1744, to the annual conference. Methodist unity and momentum were generally maintained through a mixture of services, class meetings, band meetings, quarterly meetings and the distinctive Methodist ‘love feasts’. In 1746 the societies were grouped into seven circuits. By the early nineteenth century, the 19 districts and 300 circuits delivered the word of God and gave institutional permanence to Wesley’s message. Methodism is sometimes dismissed as an emotional and irrational faith; but a more productive view would be to regard it as bringing vigour, discipline and rationality to the fragmented and sometimes chaotic experiences of thousands of individuals, enabling them to find peace and security after religious disappointment and suffering.

  One subsidiary reason for the steady expansion of Methodism and the fervent commitment of Methodists was the constant and intensive use of the press. Pamphlets and books, Bibles and lives of the saints, hymn-books and worthy literature poured from the printing presses. Indeed, the Methodist movement was to prove an excellent vehicle for the rapid and cheap circulation of print, as well as oral, culture throughout Britain and the wider world. In the Arminian Magazine of John Wesley, after 1778, in the Methodist Magazine, edited by Joseph Benson, which succeeded it, and in the large number of other Methodist periodicals and pamphlets which appeared during the reign of George III, the Methodists had constant communication with their leaders and enjoyed the benefit of their advice and influence on affairs, political as well as religious, as they arose.

  Who were the Methodists? Which social and occupational groups tended to adopt Methodism? Skilled and semi-skilled artisans can account for almost one-half of Methodist congregations in some places. Female servants also figure prominently. Women frequently outnumbered men, especially the widowed and the unmarried, who in some Methodist communities outnumbered married women. Certain occupations recur throughout the early history of Methodism, especially cloth workers, weavers, coal miners, tin miners and seamen. However, there is often not much difference between the profile of Methodists and that of the communities in which they lived. In other words, the type of community and its geographical location are of no less importance than the occupation of individual Methodists.

  Not surprisingly, Methodism was primarily to be found where the Anglican church and its hierarchical patterns of paternal and social control were weak. It tended to prosper where the Church of England was particularly unpopular, such as in Lincolnshire and Caernarvonshire, where clerical magistrates had not endeared themselves to the population. It also made converts where Evangelicals made an impression and where Old Dissent was faltering. In view of the greater difficulty of seeking conversions in small, rural parishes already covered by the Anglican church, it is not surprising that Methodism tended to struggle in many country districts. In urban areas Methodists did best where economic change and population growth found the Anglican authorities unable to respond with a positive religious appeal. It prospered in many of the new industrial villages and rapidly growing towns but also in many market towns, but it was also to be found in more dispersed rural settlements which lacked unity and integration and in which Methodism could provide a solid structural core to a community. But much always depended on local factors and, above all, on the moral strength and personal charisma of particular Methodist leaders.

  Methodism was much more pronounced in some districts than in others. It prospered in London, the north (Lancashire and Yorkshire), north-east (Durham and Northumberland), the north Midlands (particularly Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire) and parts of the west and south-west of England. Other parts of the country did not prove to be attractive to Methodists: East Anglia and the counties of southern England from Wiltshire to Surrey. Methodism flourished in Wales and Ireland but not in Scotland. Calvinistic Methodism in Wales had its origins in the 1730s and remained somewhat independent of the English movement. Largely the achievement of Howell Harris, the Welsh Evangelical revival had its own momentum and organization.34 Yet Wesley made over forty visits to Wales, and in 1746 reached an agreement with Harris to avoid duplication of effort and competition. Wesley made twenty-one visits to Ireland and by 1789 there were 14,000 Irish Methodists, many of them in Ulster in areas already attuned to Protestantism. By the early nineteenth century Irish Methodists were 23 per cent of the total, springing up rapidly in those parts of Ulster with the outwork system in the linen industry. Few converts to Methodism were made among the Catholic peasantry.

  The first generation o
f Methodists saw themselves as loyal Anglicans, working within the Church of England to promulgate the message of Christ. Until his death in 1791 John Wesley regarded his movement as an agency for strengthening and revitalizing the Church of England, not as a means of weakening it. Wesley always urged his followers to attend their local parish churches, and he was always careful to ensure that his meetings did not clash with Anglican services. As we have seen, however, Methodist church organization was quite distinct from that of the Anglican church. Methodist ministers were itinerants, operating within their own national structure. In practice, moreover, the appearance of a Methodist society could draw members from the local Anglican congregation and, to all intents and purposes, weaken the established church. The culture of Methodism, and especially the emotionalism engendered by its meetings and occasional displays of religious extremism, seemed incompatible with the stately ritual and order of Anglican services. Methodists themselves seemed instinctively to see their society as an immediate and preferable alternative to that of the Anglican church. By the 1750s, indeed, the annual conference was already debating the issue of secession. Since 1739 Wesley had found it necessary to appoint lay preachers, and in the early 1750s he had to resist pressure from his followers to ordain his own ministers. The independence of the American colonies forced the issue; the reluctant Wesley was forced by the pressure of events to appoint his own American church officers. After Wesley’s death a series of secessions split the movement. In 1797 the ‘Kilhamite Secession’ of Alexander Kilham, a ‘Methodist Jacobin’ who preached the virtues of simplicity, led to the establishment of the New Methodist Connexion, which differed from the Methodist church in its desire to enhance still further the power of the laity. In 1806 the Independent Methodists left and, more seriously, in 1811–12 the Primitive Methodists split off from the main branch of Methodism. The Primitives represented an intensely revivalist and emotional form of popular Methodism, imported from America by the preacher Lorenzo Dow in 1805, which proceeded to sweep through the north of England and the Midlands. The Methodist leaders refused to countenance popular religious excess.

  As the decades advanced Methodism became increasingly respectable. Methodists began to impose their values of sobriety and discipline upon the rowdy and ill-disciplined world of popular culture. There had always been an enormous gulf between the admonitions of the Church of England and the vigour and exuberance of popular leisure and sports, a vigour which Anglican parsons and curates had long since reluctantly steeled themselves to accept. Now, Methodists came out against wakes and parish feasts, against sports which caused cruelty to animals (including badger-, bull- and bear-baiting, cock-fighting) and even disorderly sports like village football. Most of all, however, Methodists took a stand against drinking, dancing, swearing and Sabbath breaking. Their denunciation of the popular leisure activities open to the masses in a bleak and harsh society had the merit of courage, but it also explains the hostility, and sometimes the violence, with which their self-righteousness was greeted in some quarters. Clerical hostility towards the Methodists, and especially to the fervent emotionalism which they displayed, often closed the local Anglican church to Methodists preachers and left them vulnerable to displays of hostility when they attempted to preach out of doors. Anglicans could become particularly angry if the preacher were female. Within their own communities, Methodists were anxious to replace the existing pattern of popular culture with a new popular culture of their own, a culture of hymn-singing, love feasts, and night watches. Insofar as Methodists promoted values of discipline and sobriety, it might be argued that they were seeking to undermine the old values of festivity and celebration with a new, perhaps recognizably ‘modern’ culture of restraint, work and self-discipline. In a very real sense, then, Methodists were serious in their attempts to improve the quality of daily life even if, in so doing, they made themselves less welcoming.

  In such ways, Methodism bred sober, respectable and conformist personal qualities. This is not necessarily to argue that Wesley was a political reactionary. Like so many of his contemporaries he believed in the divine origins of monarchy, but he also believed that the king was bound by the laws and conventions of the nation. During the last two decades of his life he defended George III, condemned the Wilkites and in the 1790s threw his support behind the loyalist defenders of the regime against its opponents. Nevertheless, by the early years of the nineteenth century Methodist influence in some communities in the north and Midlands was awakening some sections of the labouring poor from their torpor and arousing them to political activity. Indeed, Methodism gave humble men the opportunity to express themselves in public while schooling them in the arts of organization, group activity, and even financial management. In many areas of Yorkshire in 1811–12, for example, Methodists were sympathetic to Luddism. This, and the presence of Methodists in areas of radical strength like Bradford and Huddersfield, cannot have been a coincidence; it is short-sighted simply to argue that Methodism was nothing more than a conservative force which acted as a controlling agent upon radical and revolutionary tendencies.

  What, then, were the consequences of Methodism? Although it is hazardous to attribute too much to a single cause, Methodism did much to awaken the established church from its apathy, to pave the way for the Evangelical revival and, at the personal level, to heighten and intensify religious experience. Significantly, many Methodists had had prior religious involvements and, sometimes, an intense personal religious life before their conversion and an enormous inclination to detailed self-analysis, and even to diary-keeping, afterwards. There can be little doubt that Methodism propagated moral strength and stamina, enabling people to withstand the harsh routines of contemporary life. Indeed, it fostered sociability and self-improvement and even a modest degree of social mobility, emphasizing the reform of the individual and a personal acceptance of life’s harshness, rather than collective or class action. Furthermore, Methodists contributed to many charitable causes to help the suffering and the underprivileged. They were active in a wide variety of philanthropic movements, educational, penal and medical, and were to be found in such groups as the movement for the abolition of the slave trade and the Society for the Reformation of Manners.

  Religious revivalism was not confined to Methodists and Evangelicals. It contributed markedly to the revitalization of the Protestant Dissenters. The Dissenters had maintained their enthusiasm for Whiggism and the Whig Party since the early eighteenth century and were unswerving supporters of the Hanoverian dynasty, which had guaranteed their toleration. Many Dissenters supported Wilkes, there was Dissenting support for their brethren in the American colonies and they are often to be found in the reform groups of the period. Nevertheless, the history of Dissent is a mixed one. In the first part of the eighteenth century the Dissenters had declined in numbers as well as in spiritual enthusiasm. In 1715 there had been perhaps 300,000 of them out of a population of 5.5 million, but by the middle of the century that number had been at least halved. Like the Anglican church, the Dissenting churches were failing to meet the spiritual and social needs of the lower orders of society. Within Old Dissent the fortunes of the Presbyterian church were the most serious. In 1715–16 there were over 900 Presbyterian congregations; 60 years later over 100 of them no longer existed. By then they were fast becoming Unitarian in their views and drifting away from the more rigid Calvinism of the Congregationalists and Baptists. Their liberal and tolerant Christianity may appeal to the modern mind but it was not particularly conducive to their numerical health. In the early eighteenth century, Presbyterians had made up about two-thirds of all Dissenters. By 1800, however, they accounted for less than half. Similarly, the Quakers were steadily declining. At the end of the seventeenth century there had been about 40,000 of them. A century later this number had declined to 20,000 and was continuing to shrink.

  It was the churches of New Dissent which prospered after the middle of the eighteenth century, and whose numbers increased spectacularly in t
he early nineteenth century. There were only 15,000 Congregationalists in 1750 but their numbers increased steadily thereafter, to 26,000 by 1790, 35,000 by 1800 and, remarkably, to 127,000 by 1838. A corresponding increase was experienced by the Particular Baptists, who had numbered only 10,000 in 1750. Their number had grown to 17,000 by 1790, 24,000 by 1800 and 86,000 by 1838.

  One of the principal reasons for the expansion of New Dissent in the second half of the eighteenth century was the competition between Dissent and Methodism which encouraged the former to revitalize its organization. This initially took the form of itinerant preaching, often on the part of students of the Dissenting academies. Where a minister was the agent and representative of his congregation, as he usually was in the congregations of Old Dissent, itinerant preaching was not encouraged and the minister came under pressure to remain at his post. But the Congregationalists enthusiastically adopted itinerant preaching, establishing in Lancashire in 1786 a county association within which it could take place. Within a few years most counties were copying the Lancashire model. In 1796 the Baptists began to follow in their footsteps and to organize itinerant preaching tours. Significantly, in 1784 the Baptists had established a central committee to assist the construction of chapels. Furthermore, in 1816 they founded a central body to assist needy ministers. More importantly, in 1812 sixty churches united to establish the Baptist Union. In 1830 even the Congregationalists decided to follow this example.

  There was little significant difference in the social and occupational strata from which Old and New Dissent drew their congregations. Perhaps half of them were skilled artisans, particularly carpenters, masons, shoemakers, spinners and weavers. On the whole Old Dissent tended to draw upon a somewhat more affluent section of society than Methodism. It was less their social distinctions than their geographical locations which set them apart. Old Dissent was strongest in the London area, the south and west and, in general, other areas where Anglicanism was strong and where they had competed for religious support in the previous century. As we have seen, Methodism and New Dissent, on the other hand, flourished where both Anglicanism and Old Dissent failed to establish a popular and permanent presence. Within the Dissenting tradition, New Dissent was a phenomenon analogous to that of Methodism within the Anglican tradition.35