1. MORAL MACHINERY
PURITANISM – Dissent – Nonconformity: the decline collapses into a surrender. Dissent still carries the sound of resistance to Apollyon and the Whore of Babylon, Nonconformity is self-effacing and apologetic: it asks to be left alone. Mark Rutherford, one of the few men who understand the full desolation of the inner history of nineteenth-century Nonconformity – and who is yet, in himself, evidence of values that somehow survived – noted in his Autobiography the form of service customary in his youth:
It generally began with a confession that we were all sinners, but no individual sins were ever confessed, and then ensued a kind of dialogue with God, very much resembling the speeches which in later years I have heard in the House of Commons from the movers and seconders of addresses to the Crown at the opening of Parliament.
The example is taken from the Calvinistic Independents: but it will also serve excellently to describe the stance of Methodism before temporal authority. This surrender was implicit in Methodism’s origin – in the Toryism of its founder and in his ambivalent attitude to the Established Church. From the outset the Wesleyans fell ambiguously between Dissent and the Establishment, and did their utmost to make the worst of both worlds, serving as apologists for an authority in whose eyes they were an object of ridicule or condescension, but never of trust. After the French Revolution, successive Annual Conferences were forever professing their submission and their zeal in combating the enemies of established order; drawing attention to their activity ‘in raising the standard of public morals, and in promoting loyalty in the middle ranks as well as subordination and industry in the lower orders of society’.1 But Methodists were seldom admitted by the Establishment to audience – and then only by the back door: never decorated with any of the honours of status: and if they had been mentioned in despatches it would probably have hindered the kind of moral espionage which they were most fitted to undertake.
The Wars saw a remarkable increase in the Methodist following.2 They witnessed also (Halévy tells us) ‘an uninterrupted decline of the revolutionary spirit’ among all the Nonconformist sects. Methodism is most remarkable during the War years for two things: first, its gains were greatest among the new industrial working class: second, the years after Wesley’s death see the consolidation of a new bureaucracy of ministers who regarded it as their duty to manipulate the submissiveness of their followers and to discipline all deviant growths within the Church which could give offence to authority.
In this they were very effective. For centuries the Established Church had preached to the poor the duties of obedience. But it was so distanced from them – and its distance was rarely greater than in this time of absenteeism and plural livings – that its homilies had ceased to have much effect. The deference of the countryside was rooted in bitter experience of the power of the squire rather than in any inward conviction. And there is little evidence that the evangelical movement within the Church met with much greater success: many of Hannah More’s halfpenny tracts were left to litter the servants’ quarters of the great houses. But the Methodists – or many of them – were the poor. Many of their tracts were confessions of redeemed sinners from among the poor; many of their local preachers were humble men who found their figures of speech (as one said) ‘behind my spinning-jenny’. And the great expansion after 1790 was in mining and manufacturing districts. Alongside older Salems and Bethels, new-brick Brunswick and Hanover chapels proclaimed the Methodist loyalty. ‘I hear great things of your amphitheatre in Liverpool,’ one minister wrote to the Reverend Jabez Bunting in 1811:
A man will need strong lungs to blow his words from one end of it to the other. In Bradford and in Keighley they are building chapels nearly as large as Carver Street Chapel in Sheffield. To what will Methodism come in a few years? 1
Jabez Bunting, whose active ministery covers the full half-century, was the dominant figure of orthodox Wesleyanism from the time of Luddism to the last years of the Chartist movement. His father, a Manchester tailor, had been a ‘thorough Radical’ who ‘warmly espoused the cause of the first French revolutionists’, but who was not the less a Methodist for that.2 But in the late 1790s, and after the secession of the Kilhamite New Connexion, a group of younger ministers emerged, of whom Bunting was one, who were above all concerned to remove from Methodism the Jacobin taint. In 1812 Bunting earned distinction by disowning Methodist Luddites; the next year, in Leeds, he counted ‘several Tory magistrates of the old school, Church and King people, who, probably, never crossed the threshold of a conventicle before, among his constant hearers’.3 He and his fellow-ministers – one of the more obnoxious of whom was called the Reverend Edmund Grindrod – were above all organizers and administrators, busied with endless Connexional intrigues and a surfeit of disciplinary zeal. Wesley’s dislike of the self-governing anarchy of Old Dissent was continued by his successors, with authority vested in the Annual Conference (weighted down with ministers designated by Wesley himself) and its Committee of Privileges (1803). The Primitive Methodists were driven out because it was feared that their camp meetings might result in ‘tumults’ and serve as political precedents (as they did); the ‘Tent Methodists’ and Bible Christians, or Bryanites, were similarly disciplined; female preaching was prohibited; the powers of Conference and of circuit superintendents were strengthened. Espionage into each other’s moral failings was encouraged; discipline tightened up within the classes; and, after 1815, as many local preachers were expelled or struck off the ‘plan’ for political as for religious ‘back-slidings’. Here we find an entry in the Halifax Local Preacher’s Minute Book: ‘Bro. M. charged with attending a political meeting when he should have been at his class’ (16 December 1816): there we find a correspondent writing in alarm from Newcastle to Bunting:
… a subject of painful and distressing concern that two of our local preachers (from North Shields) have attended the tremendous Radical Reform Meeting… I hope no considerable portion of our brethren is found among the Radicals; but a small number of our leaders are among the most determined friends to their spirit and design… and some of the really pious, misguided sisterhood have helped to make their colours. On expostulation, I am glad to say, several members have quitted their classes (for they have adopted almost the whole Methodist economy, the terms ‘Class Leaders’, ‘District Meetings’, etc., etc., being perfectly current among them). If men are to be drilled at Missionary and Bible meetings to face a multitude with recollection, and acquire facilities of address, and then begin to employ the mighty moral weapon thus gained to the endangering the very existence of the Government of the country, we may certainly begin to tremble…
This was in 1819, the year of Peterloo. The response of the Methodist Committee of Privileges to the events of this year was to issue a circular which ‘bears clear traces’ of Bunting’s composition; expressing –
strong and decided disapprobation of certain tumultuous assemblies which have lately been witnessed in several parts of the country; in which large masses of people have been irregularly collected (often under banners bearing the most shocking and impious inscriptions)… calculated, both from the infidel principles, the wild and delusive political theories, and the violent and inflammatory declamations… to bring all government into contempt, and to introduce universal discontent, insubordination, and anarchy.1
Wesley at least had been a great-hearted warhorse; he had never spared himself; he was an enthusiast who had stood up at the market-cross to be pelted. Bunting, with his ‘solid, mathematical way of speaking’, is a less admirable character. It was his own advice to ‘adapt your principles to your exigencies’. ‘In our family intercourse,’ a friend of his youthful ministry informed his son:
his conversation was uniformly serious and instructive. Like his ministry in the pulpit, every word had its proper place, and every sentence might have been digested previously…. Sometimes your dear mother’s uncontrollable wit suddenly disturbed our gravity; but he was never seen otherwise than in his own proper character as a minister of the gospel of Christ.
Bunting’s uncompromising Sabbatarianism stopped just short at the point of his own convenience: ‘he did not hesitate, in the necessary prosecution of his ministerial work, to employ beasts; though always with a self-imposed reserve…’ With children it was another matter. We are often tempted to forgive Methodism some of its sins when we recollect that at least it gave to children and adults rudimentary education in its Sunday schools; and Bamford’s happy picture is sometimes recalled, of the Middleton school in the late 1790s, attended by ‘big collier lads and their sisters’, and the children of weavers and labourers from Whittle, Bowlee, Jumbo and the White Moss. But it is exactly this picture, of the laxness of the early Methodists, which Bunting was unable to forgive. When, in his ministry at Sheffield in 1808, his eye fell upon children in Sunday school being taught to write, his indignation knew no bounds. Here was ‘an awful abuse of the Sabbath’. There could be no question as to its theological impropriety – for children to learn to read the Scriptures was a ‘spiritual good’, whereas writing was a ‘secular art’ from which ‘temporal advantage’ might accrue. Battle commenced in Sheffield (with the former ‘Jacobin’, James Montgomery, defending the children’s cause in the Sheffield Iris), from which Bunting emerged victorious; it was renewed at Liverpool in the next year (1809) with the same result; and Bunting was in the forefront of a movement which succeeded, very largely, in extirpating this insidious ‘violation’ of the Lord’s Day until the 1840s. This was, indeed, one of the ways in which Bunting won his national spurs.1
The spurs were needed, perhaps, to stick into the children’s sides during the six days of the week. In Bunting and his fellows we seem to touch upon a deformity of the sensibility complementary to the deformities of the factory children whose labour they condoned. In all the copious correspondence of his early ministries in the industrial heartlands (Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Halifax and Leeds, 1804–15), among endless petty Connexional disputes, moralistic humbug, and prurient inquiries into the private conduct of young women, neither he nor his colleagues appear to have suffered a single qualm as to the consequences of industrialism.2 But the younger leaders of Methodism were not only guilty of complicity in the fact of child labour by default. They weakened the poor from within, by adding to them the active ingredient of submission; and they fostered within the Methodist Church those elements most suited to make up the psychic component of the work-discipline of which the manufacturers stood most in need.
As early as 1787, the first Robert Peel wrote: ‘I have left most of my works in Lancashire under the management of Methodists, and they serve me excellently well.’3 Weber and Tawney have so thoroughly anatomized the interpenetration of the capitalist mode of production and the Puritan ethic that it would seem that there can be little to add. Methodism may be seen as a simple extension of this ethic in a changing social milieu; and an ‘economist’ argument lies to hand, in the fact that Methodism, in Bunting’s day, proved to be exceptionally well adapted, by virtue of its elevation of the values of discipline and of order as well as its moral opacity, both to self-made mill-owners and manufacturers and to foremen, overlookers, and sub-managerial groups. And this argument – that Methodism served as ideological self-justification for the master-manufacturers and for their satellites – contains an important part of the truth. So much John Wesley – in an often-quoted passage – both foresaw and deplored:
… religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world…. How then is it possible that Methodism, that is, a religion of the heart, though it flourishes now as a green bay tree, should continue in this state? For the Methodists in every place grow diligent and frugal; consequently they increase in goods. Hence they proportionately increase in pride, in anger, in the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life. So, although the form of religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.
Many a Methodist mill-owner – and, indeed, Bunting himself – might serve as confirmation of this in the early nineteenth century.1 And yet the argument falters at a critical point. For it is exactly at this time that Methodism obtained its greatest success in serving simultaneously as the religion of the industrial bourgeoisie (although here it shared the field with other Nonconformist sects) and of wide sections of the proletariat. Nor can there be any doubt as to the deep-rooted allegiance of many working-class communities (equally among miners, weavers, factory workers, seamen, potters and rural labourers) to the Methodist Church. How was it possible for Methodism to perform, with such remarkable vigour, this double service?
This is a problem to which neither Weber nor Tawney addressed themselves. Both were mainly preoccupied with Puritanism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and with the genesis of commercial capitalism; both addressed themselves, in the main, to the psychic and social development of the middle class, the former stressing the Puritan concept of a ‘calling’, the latter the values of freedom, self-discipline, individualism and acquisitiveness. But it is intrinsic to both arguments that puritanism contributed to the psychic energy and social coherence of middle-class groups which felt themselves to be ‘called’ or ‘elected’ and which were engaged (with some success) in acquisitive pursuits. How then should such a religion appeal to the forming proletariat in a period of exceptional hardship, whose multitudes did not dispose them to any sense of group calling, whose experiences at work and in their communities favoured collectivist rather than individualist values, and whose frugality, discipline or acquisitive virtues brought profit to their masters rather than success to themselves?
Both Weber and Tawney, it is true, adduce powerful reasons as to the utility, from the point of view of the employers, of the extension of Puritan or pseudo-Puritan values to the working class. Tawney anatomized the ‘New Medicine for Poverty’, with its denunciation of sloth and improvidence in the labourer, and its convenient belief that – if success was a sign of election – poverty was itself evidence of spiritual turpitude.1 Weber placed more emphasis on the question which, for the working class, is crucial: work-discipline. ‘Wherever modern capitalism has begun its work of increasing the productivity of human labour by increasing its intensity,’ wrote Weber, ‘it has encountered the immensely stubborn resistance of… pre-capitalistic labour.’
The capitalistic economy of the present day is an immense cosmos into which the individual is born, and which presents itself to him… as an unalterable order of things in which he must live. It forces the individual, in so far as he is involved in the system of market relationships, to conform to capitalistic rules of action.
But, as industrial capitalism emerged, these rules of action appeared as unnatural and hateful restraints: the peasant, the rural labourer in the unenclosed village, even the urban artisan or apprentice, did not measure the return of labour exclusively in money-earnings, and they rebelled against the notion of week after week of disciplined labour. In the way of life which Weber describes (unsatisfactorily) as ‘traditionalism’, ‘a man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose’. Even piece-rates and other incentives lose effectiveness at a certain point if there is no inner compulsion; when enough is earned the peasant leaves industry and returns to his village, the artisan goes on a drunken spree. But at the same time, the opposite discipline of low wages is ineffective in work where skill, attentiveness or responsibility is required. What is required – here Fromm amplifies Weber’s argument – is an ‘inner compulsion’ which would prove ‘more effective in harnessing all energies to work than any outer compulsion can ever be’:
Against external compulsion there is always a certain amount of rebelliousness which hampers the effectiveness of work or makes people unfit for any differentiated task requiring intelligence, initiative and responsibility…. Undoubtedly capitalism could not have been developed had not the greatest part of man’s energy been channelled in the direction of work.
The labourer must be turned ‘into his own slave driver’.1
The ingredients of this compulsion were not new.2 Weber has noted the difficulties experienced by employers in the ‘putting-out’ industries – notably weaving – in the seventeenth century, as a result of the irregular working habits (drunkenness, embezzlement of yarn and so on) of the workers. It was in the West of England woollen industry – at Kidderminster – that the Presbyterian divine, Richard Baxter, effected by his ministry a notable change in labour relations; and many elements of the Methodist work-discipline may be found fully-formed in his Christian Directory of 1673.3 Similar difficulties were encountered by mine-owners and northern woollen and cotton manufacturers throughout the eighteenth century. Colliers generally received a monthly pay; it was complained that ‘they are naturally turbulent, passionate, and rude in manners and character’:
Their gains are large and uncertain, and their employment is a species of task work, the profit of which can very rarely be previously ascertained. This circumstance gives them the wasteful habits of a gamester….
Another trait in the character of a collier, is his predilection to change of situation…. Annual changes are almost as common with the pitman as the return of the seasons…. Whatever favours he may have received, he is disposed to consider them all cancelled by the refusal of a single request.1
The weaver-smallholder was notorious for dropping his work in the event of any farming emergency; most eighteenth-century workers gladly exchanged their employments for a month of harvesting; many of the adult operatives in the early cotton mills were ‘of loose and wandering habits, and seldom remained long in the establishment’.2 A few of the managerial problems in early enterprises are suggested by the list of fines at Wedgwood’s Etruria works:
… Any workman striking or likewise abusing an overlooker to lose his place.
Any workman conveying ale or liquor into the manufactory in working hours, forfeit 2/-.
Any person playing at fives against any of the walls where there are windows, forfeit 2/-…3
Whether his workers were employed in a factory or in their own homes, the master-manufacturer of the Industrial Revolution was obsessed with these problems of discipline. The outworkers required (from the employers’ point of view) education in ‘methodical’ habits, punctilious attention to instructions, fulfilment of contracts to time, and in the sinfulness of embezzling materials. By the 1820s (we are told by a contemporary) ‘the great mass of Weavers’ were ‘deeply imbued with the doctrines of Methodism’. Some of the self-made men, who were now their employers, were Methodists or Dissenters whose frugality – as Wesley had foreseen – had produced riches. They would tend to favour fellow-religionists, finding in them a ‘guarantee for good conduct’ and ‘a consciousness of the value of character’.1 The ‘artisan’ traditions of the weavers, with their emphasis on the values of independence, had already prepared them for some variant of Puritan faith.2 What of the factory operatives?
It is in Dr Andrew Ure’s Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) – a book which, with its Satanic advocacy, much influenced Engels and Marx – that we find a complete anticipation of the ‘economist’ case for the function of religion as a work-discipline. The term Factory, for Ure:
involves the idea of a vast automaton, composed of various mechanical and intellectual organs, acting in uninterrupted concert for the production of a common object, all of them being subordinated to a self-regulated moving force.
‘The main difficulty’ of the factory system was not so much technological but in the ‘distribution of the different members of the apparatus into one cooperative body’, and, above all, ‘in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work, and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton’:
To devise and administer a successful code of factory discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright. Even at the present day, when the system is perfectly organized, and its labour lightened to the utmost, it is found nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands. After struggling for a while to conquer their listless or restive habits, they either renounce the employment spontaneously, or are dismissed by the overlookers on account of inattention.
‘It required, in fact, a man of a Napoleonic nerve and ambition, to subdue the refractory tempers of work-people accustomed to irregular paroxysms of diligence…. Such was Arkwright.’ Moreover, the more skilled a workman, the more intractable to discipline he became, ‘the more self-willed and… the less fit a component of a mechanical system, in which, by occasional irregularities, he may do great damage to the whole’. Thus the manufacturers aimed at withdrawing any process which required ‘peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand… from the cunning workman’ and placing it in charge of a ‘mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it’. ‘The grand object therefore of the modern manufacturer is, through the union of capital and science, to reduce the task of his work-people to the exercise of vigilance and dexterity, – faculties… speedily brought to perfection in the young.’1
For the children, the discipline of the overlooker and of the machinery might suffice; but for those ‘past the age of puberty’ inner compulsions were required. Hence it followed that Ure devoted a section of his book to the ‘Moral Economy of the Factory System’, and a special chapter to religion. The unredeemed operative was a terrible creature in Ure’s sight; a prey to ‘artful demagogues’; chronically given to secret cabals and combinations; capable of any atrocity against his masters. The high wages of cotton-spinners enabled them ‘to pamper themselves into nervous ailments by a diet too rich and exciting for their indoor occupations’:
Manufactures naturally condense a vast population within a narrow circuit; they afford every facility for secret cabal…; they communicate intelligence and energy to the vulgar mind; they supply in their liberal wages the pecuniary sinews of contention…
In such circumstances, Sunday schools presented a ‘sublime spectacle’. The committee of a Stockport Sunday school, erected in 1805, congratulated itself upon the ‘decorum’ preserved in the town, in 1832, at a time of ‘political excitement’ elsewhere: ‘it is hardly possible to approach the town… without encountering one or more of these quiet fortresses, which a wise benevolence has erected against the encroachments of vice and ignorance’. And Ure drew from this a moral, not only as to general political subordination, but as to behaviour in the factory itself:
The neglect of moral discipline may be readily detected in any establishment by a practised eye, in the disorder of the general system, the irregularities of the individual machines, the waste of time and material…
Mere wage-payment could never secure ‘zealous services’. The employer who neglected moral considerations and was himself ‘a stranger to the self-denying graces of the Gospel’ –
knows himself to be entitled to nothing but eye-service, and will therefore exercise the most irksome vigilance, but in vain, to prevent his being overreached by his operatives – the whole of whom, by natural instinct as it were, conspire against such a master. Whatever pains he may take, he can never command superior workmanship….
It is, therefore, excessively the interest of every mill-owner to organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles with his mechanical, for otherwise he will never command the steady hands, watchful eyes, and prompt cooperation, essential to excellence of product…. There is, in fact, no case to which the Gospel truth, ‘Godliness is great gain,’ is more applicable than to the administration of an extensive factory.1
The argument is thus complete. The factory system demands a transformation of human nature, the ‘working paroxysms’ of the artisan or outworker must be methodized until the man is adapted to the discipline of the machine.1 But how are these disciplinary virtues to be inculcated in those whose Godliness (unless they become overlookers) is unlikely to bring any temporal gain? It can only be by inculcating ‘the first and great lesson… that man must expect his chief happiness, not in the present, but in a future state’. Work must be undertaken as a ‘pure act of virtue… inspired by the love of a transcendent Being, operating… on our will and affections’:
Where then shall mankind find this transforming power? – in the cross of Christ. It is the sacrifice which removes the guilt of sin: it is the motive which removes love of sin: it mortifies sin by showing its turpitude to be indelible except by such an awful expiation; it atones for disobedience; it excites to obedience; it purchases strength for obedience; it makes obedience practicable; it makes it acceptable; it makes it in a manner unavoidable, for it constrains to it; it is, finally, not only the motive to obedience, but the pattern of it.2
Ure, then, is the Richard Baxter of Cottonopolis. But we may descend, at this point, from his transcendental heights to consider, more briefly, mundane matters of theology. It is evident that there was, in 1800, casuistry enough in the theology of all the available English churches to reinforce the manufacturer’s own sense of moral self-esteem. Whether he held an hierarchic faith, or felt himself to be elected, or saw in his success the evidence of grace or godliness, he felt few promptings to exchange his residence beside the mill at Bradford for a monastic cell on Bardsey Island. But Methodist theology, by virtue of its promiscuous opportunism, was better suited than any other to serve as the religion of a proletariat whose members had not the least reason, in social experience, to feel themselves to be ‘elected’. In his theology, Wesley appears to have dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worse elements of Puritanism: if in class terms Methodism was hermaphroditic, in doctrinal terms it was a mule. We have already noted Methodism’s rupture with the intellectual and democratic traditions of Old Dissent. But Luther’s doctrines of submission to authority might have served as the text for any Wesleyan Conference in the years after 1789:
Even if those in authority are evil or without faith, nevertheless the authority and its power is good and from God….
God would prefer to suffer the government to exist, no matter how evil, rather than allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so…
(Jabez Bunting, however, unlike Luther, could never have admitted the notion that the rabble could ever be ‘justified’.) The general Lutheran bias of Wesleyanism has often been noted.1 Wesley’s espousal of the doctrine of the universality of grace was incompatible with the Calvinist notion of ‘election’. If grace was universal, sin was universal too. Any man who came to a conviction of sin might be visited by grace and know himself to be ransomed by Christ’s blood. Thus far it is a doctrine of spiritual egalitarianism: there is at least equality of opportunity in sin and grace for rich and poor. And as a religion of ‘the heart’ rather than of the intellect, the simplest and least educated might hope to attain towards grace. In this sense, Methodism dropped all doctrinal and social barriers and opened its doors wide to the working class. And this reminds us that Lutheranism was also a religion of the poor; and that, as Munzer proclaimed and as Luther learned to his cost, spiritual egalitarianism had a tendency to break its banks and flow into temporal channels, bringing thereby a perpetual tension into Lutheran creeds which Methodism also reproduced.
But Christ’s ransom was only provisional. Wesley’s doctrine here was not settled. He toyed with the notion of grace being perpetual, once it had visited the penitent; and thus a dejected form of Calvinism (the ‘elected’ being now the ‘saved’) re-entered by the back door. But as the eighteenth century wore on the doctrine of justification by faith hardened – perhaps because it was so evident that multitudes of those ‘saved’ in the revivalist campaigns slid back to their old ways after years or only months. Thus it became doctrine that forgiveness of sin lasted only so long as the penitent went and sinned no more. The brotherhood and sisterhood who were ‘saved’ were in a state of conditional, provisory election. It was always possible to ‘backslide’; and in view of human frailty this was, in the eyes of God and of Jabez Bunting, more than likely. Moreover, Bunting was at pains to point out God’s view that –
Sin… is not changed in its nature, so as to be made less ‘exceedingly sinful’… by the pardon of the sinner. The penalty is remitted; and the obligation to suffer that penalty is dissolved; but it is still naturally due, though graciously remitted. Hence appears the propriety and the duty of continuing to confess and lament even pardoned sin. Though released from its penal consequences by an act of divine clemency, we should still remember, that the dust of self-abasement is our proper place before God…1
But there are further complexities to the doctrine. It would be presumptuous to suppose that a man might save himself by an act of his own will. The saving was the prerogative of God, and all that a man could do was to prepare himself, by utter abasement, for redemption. Once convinced of grace, however; and once thoroughly introduced to the Methodist brotherhood, ‘backsliding’ was no light matter to a working man or woman. It might mean expulsion from the only community-group which they knew in the industrial wilderness; and it meant the ever-present fear as to an eternity of lurid punishment to come:
There is a dreadful hell
And everlasting pains,
Where sinners must with devils dwell
In darkness, fire and chains.
How, then, to keep grace? Not by good works, since Wesley had elevated faith above works: ‘You have nothing to do but save souls.’ Works were the snares of pride and the best works were mingled with the dross of sin; although – by another opportunist feint – works might be a sign of grace. (A vestigial Calvinism here for the mill-owners and shopkeepers.) Since this world is the ante-room to eternity, such temporal things as wealth and poverty matter very little: the rich might show the evidence of grace by serving the Church (notably, by building chapels for their own work-people). The poor were fortunate in being less tempted by ‘the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, and the pride of life’. They were more likely to remain graced, not because of their ‘calling’, but because they faced fewer temptations to backslide.
Three obvious means of maintaining grace presented themselves. First, through service to the Church itself, as a class leader, local preacher, or in more humble capacities. Second, through the cultivation of one’s own soul, in religious exercises, tract-reading, but – above all – in attempts to reproduce the emotional convulsions of conversion, conviction of sin, penitence, and visitation by grace. Third, through a methodical discipline in every aspect of life. Above all, in labour itself (which, being humble and unpleasant, should not be confused with good works), undertaken for no ulterior motives but (as Dr Ure has it) as ‘a pure act of virtue’ there is an evident sign of grace. Moreover, God’s curse over Adam, when expelled from the Garden of Eden, provided irrefutable doctrinal support as to the blessedness of hard labour, poverty, and sorrow ‘all the days of thy life’.
We can now see the extraordinary correspondence between the virtues which Methodism inculcated in the working class and the desiderata of middle-class Utilitarianism.1 Dr Ure indicates the point of junction, in his advice to the mill-owner ‘to organize his moral machinery on equally sound principles with his mechanical’. From this aspect, Methodism was the desolate inner landscape of Utilitarianism in an era of transition to the work-discipline of industrial capitalism. As the ‘working paroxysms’ of the hand-worker are methodized and his unworkful impulses are brought under control, so his emotional and spiritual paroxysms increase. The abject confessional tracts are the other side of the dehumanized prose style of Edwin Chadwick and Dr Kay. The ‘march of intellect’ and the repression of the heart go together.
But it was Wesley’s claim that Methodism was, above all things, a ‘religion of the heart’. It was in its ‘enthusiasm’ and emotional transports that it differed most evidently from the older Puritan sects.1 We might note some of the approved stages in religious experience, taken from a characteristic tract which describes the conversion of a sailor, Joshua Marsden, in the 1790s. These tracts normally follow a conventional pattern. First, there are descriptions of a sinful youth: swearing, gaming, drunkenness, idleness, sexual looseness or merely ‘desire of the flesh’.2 There follows either some dramatic experience which makes the sinner mindful of death (miraculous cure in mortal illness, shipwreck or death of wife or children); or some chance-hap encounter with God’s word, where the sinner comes to jeer but remains to learn the way to salvation. Our sailor had all these experiences. A shipwreck left him ‘trembling with horror upon the verge both of the watery and the fiery gulph… the ghosts of his past sins stalked before him in ghastly forms’. A severe illness ‘sent him often weeping and broken-hearted to a throne of grace’, ‘consumed and burned up sensual desires’, and ‘showed the awfulness of dying without an interest in Christ’. Invited by a friend to a Methodist class meeting, ‘his heart was melted into a child-like weeping frame…. Tears trickled down his cheeks like rivulets.’ There follows the long ordeal of intercession for forgiveness and of wrestling with temptations to relapse into the former life of sin. Only grace can unloose ‘the seven seals with which ignorance, pride, unbelief, enmity, self-will, lust and covetousness bind the sinner’s heart’. Again and again the penitent in his ‘novitiate’ succumbs to obscurely-indicated ‘temptations’:1
In spite of all, he was sometimes borne away by the violence and impetuosity of temptation, which brought upon him all the anguish of a broken spirit. After being overtaken with sin he would redouble his prayers…. Sometimes the fear of dying in an unpardoned state greatly agitated his mind, and prevented his falling asleep for fear of awakening in the eternal world.
When the ‘desire of the flesh’ is to some degree humbled, the ‘Enemy’ places more subtle spiritual temptations in the penitent’s path. Chief among these are any disposition which leads to ‘hardness of the heart’ – levity, pride, but above all the temptation to ‘buy salvation’ by good works rather than waiting with patience to ‘receive it as the free gift of God, through the infinite merits of the bleeding Reconciler’. The doctrine of good works is ‘this Hebrew, this Popish doctrine of human merit’. Thus ‘hardness of the heart’ consists in any character-trait which resists utter submission:
God… before he can justify us freely… must wither our gourd, blast the flower of proud hope, take away the prop of self-dependence, strip us of the gaudy covering of christless righteousness, stop the boasting of pharasaical self-sufficiency, and bring the guilty, abased, ashamed, blushing, self-despairing sinner, to the foot of the Cross.
At this point of abasement, ‘all his prospects appeared like a waste howling wilderness’. But ‘the time of deliverance was now at hand’. At a love-feast in the Methodist chapel, the penitent knelt in the pew ‘and, in an agony of soul, began to wrestle with God’. Although ‘the enemy raged and rolled upon him like a flood’,
Some of the leaders, with some pious females, came into the gallery, and united in interceding for him at a throne of grace: the more they prayed, the more his distress and burthen increased, till finally he was nearly spent; and sweat ran off him… and he lay on the floor of the pew with little power to move. This, however, was the moment of deliverance…. He felt what no tongue can ever describe; a something seemed to rest upon him like the presence of God that went through his whole frame; he sprang on his feet, and felt he could lay upon Christ by faith.
From this time forward the ‘burthen of sin fell off’. ‘The new creation was manifested by new moral beauties – love, joy, hope, peace, filial fear, delight in Jesus, tender confidence, desire after closer communion, and fuller conformity…. A new kingdom of righteousness was planted in the heart.’ God’s glory became ‘the end of each action’. But salvation was conditional; the conviction of grace coexisted with the knowledge that man ‘is a poor, blind, fallen, wretched, miserable and (without divine grace) helpless sinner’.1
Our sinner has now been ‘translated from the power of Satan to the kingdom and image of God’s dear Son’. And we may see here in its lurid figurative expression the psychic ordeal in which the character-structure of the rebellious pre-industrial labourer or artisan was violently recast into that of the submissive industrial worker. Here, indeed, is Ure’s ‘transforming power’. It is a phenomenon, almost diabolic in its penetration into the very sources of human personality, directed towards the repression of emotional and spiritual energies. But ‘repression’ is a misleading word; these energies were not so much inhibited as displaced from expression in personal and in social life, and confiscated for the service of the Church. The box-like, blackening chapels stood in the industrial districts like great traps for the human psyche. Within the Church itself there was a constant emotional drama of backsliders, confessions, forays against Satan, lost sheep; one suspects that the pious sisterhood, in particular, found in this one of the great ‘consolations’ of religion. For the more intellectual there was the spiritual drama of:
trials, temptations, heart sinkings, doubts, struggles, heaviness, manifestations, victories, coldnesses, wanderings, besetments, deliverances, helps, hopes, answers to prayer, interpositions, reliefs, complaints… workings of the heart, actings of faith, leadings through the mazes of dark dispensations… fiery trials, and succour in the sinking moment.1
But what must be stressed is the intermittent character of Wesleyan emotionalism. Nothing was more often remarked by contemporaries of the workaday Methodist character, or of Methodist home-life, than its methodical, disciplined and repressed disposition. It is the paradox of a ‘religion of the heart’ that it should be notorious for the inhibition of all spontaneity. Methodism sanctioned ‘workings of the heart’ only upon the occasions of the Church; Methodists wrote hymns but no secular poetry of note; the idea of a passionate Methodist lover in these years is ludicrous. (‘Avoid all manner of passions’, advised Wesley.) The word is unpleasant; but it is difficult not to see in Methodism in these years a ritualized form of psychic masturbation. Energies and emotions which were dangerous to social order, or which were merely unproductive (in Dr Ure’s sense) were released in the harmless form of sporadic love-feasts, watch-nights, band-meetings or revivalist campaigns. At these love-feasts, after hymns and the ceremonial breaking of cake or water-biscuit, the preacher then spoke, in a raw emotional manner, of his spiritual experiences, temptations and contests with sin:
While the preacher is thus engaged, sighs, groans, devout aspirations, and… ejaculations of prayer or praise, are issuing from the audience in every direction.
In the tension which succeeded, individual members of the congregation then rose to their feet and made their intimate confessions of sin or temptation, often of a sexual implication. An observer noted the ‘bashfulness, and evident signs of inward agitation, which some of the younger part of the females have betrayed, just before they have risen to speak’.2
The Methodists made of religion (wrote Southey) ‘a thing of sensation and passion, craving perpetually for sympathy and stimulants’.1 These Sabbath orgasms of feeling made more possible the single-minded weekday direction of these energies to the consummation of productive labour. Moreover, since salvation was never assured, and temptations lurked on every side, there was a constant inner goading to ‘sober and industrious’ behaviour – the visible sign of grace – every hour of the day and every day of the year. Not only ‘the sack’ but also the flames of hell might be the consequence of indiscipline at work. God was the most vigilant overlooker of all. Even above the chimney breast ‘Thou God Seest Me’ was hung. The Methodist was taught not only to ‘bear his Cross’ of poverty and humiliation; the crucifixion was (as Ure saw) the very pattern of his obedience: ‘True followers of our bleeding Lamb, Now on Thy daily cross we die…’2 Work was the Cross from which the ‘transformed’ industrial worker hung.
But so drastic a redirection of impulses could not be effected without a central disorganization of the human personality. We can see why Hazlitt described the Methodists as ‘a collection of religious invalids’.3 If Wesley took from Luther his authoritarianism, from Calvinism and from the English Puritan divines of the seventeenth century Methodism took over the joylessness: a methodical discipline of life ‘combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyments’.4 From both it took over the almost-Manichaean sense of guilt at man’s depravity. And, as gratuitous additions, the Wesleys absorbed and passed on through their hymns and writings the strange phenomenon of early eighteenth-century necrophily and the perverse imagery which is the least pleasant side of the Moravian tradition. Weber has noted the connexion between sexual repression and work-discipline in the teachings of such divines as Baxter:
The sexual asceticism of Puritanism differs only in degree, not in fundamental principle, from that of monasticism; and on account of the Puritan conception of marriage, its practical influence is more far-reaching than that of the latter. For sexual intercourse is permitted, even within marriage, only as the means willed by God for the increase of His glory according to the commandment, ‘Be fruitful and multiply.’ Along with a moderate vegetable diet and cold baths, the same prescription is given for all sexual temptations as is used against religious doubts and a sense of moral unworthiness: ‘Work hard in your calling.’ 1
Methodism is permeated with teaching as to the sinfulness of sexuality, and as to the extreme sinfulness of the sexual organs. These – and especially the male sexual organs (since it became increasingly the convention that women could not feel the ‘lust of the flesh’) – were the visible fleshly citadels of Satan, the source of perpetual temptation and of countless highly unmethodical and (unless for deliberate and Godly procreation) unproductive impulses.2 But the obsessional Methodist concern with sexuality reveals itself in the perverted eroticism of Methodist imagery. We have already noted, in John Nelson’s conversion, the identification of Satan with the phallus. God is usually a simple father image, vengeful, authoritarian and prohibitive, to whom Christ must intercede, the sacrificial Lamb ‘still bleeding and imploring Grace/For every Soul of Man’. But the association of feminine – or, more frequently, ambivalent – sexual imagery with Christ is more perplexing and unpleasant.
Here we are faced with layer upon layer of conflicting symbolism. Christ, the personification of ‘Love’ to whom the great bulk of Wesleyan hymns are addressed, is by turns maternal, Oedipal, sexual and sado-masochistic. The extraordinary assimilation of wounds and sexual imagery in the Moravian tradition has often been noted. Man as a sinful ‘worm’ must find ‘Lodging, Bed and Board in the Lamb’s Wounds’. But the sexual imagery is easily transferred to imagery of the womb. The ‘dearest little opening of the sacred, precious and thousand times beautiful little side’ is also the refuge from sin in which ‘the Regenerate rests and breathes’:
O precious Side-hole’s cavity
I want to spend my life in thee….
There in one Side-hole’s joy divine,
I’ll spend all future Days of mine.
Yes, yes, I will for ever sit
There, where thy Side was split.1
Sexual and ‘womb-regressive’ imagery appears here to be assimilated. But, after the Wesleys broke with the Moravian brethren, the language of their hymns and the persistent accusation of Antinomian heresy among Moravian communities had become a public scandal. In the hymns of John and Charles Wesley overt sexual imagery was consciously repressed, and gave way to imagery of the womb and the bowels:
Come, O my guilty brethren, come,
Groaning beneath your load of sin!
His bleeding heart shall make you room,
His open side shall take you in…
This imagery, however, is subordinated to the overpowering sacrificial imagery of blood, as if the underground traditions of Mithraic blood-sacrifice which troubled the early Christian Church suddenly gushed up in the language of eighteenth-century Methodist hymnody. Here is Christ’s ‘bleeding love’, the blood of the sacrificial Lamb in which sinners must bathe, the association of sacrifice with the penitent’s guilt. Here is the ‘fountain’ that ‘gushes from His side,/Open’d that all may enter in’:
Still the fountain of Thy blood
Stands for sinners open’d wide;
Now, even now, my Lord and God,
I wash me in Thy side.
And sacrificial, masochistic, and erotic language all find a common nexus in the same blood-symbolism:
We thirst to drink Thy precious blood,
We languish in Thy wounds to rest,
And hunger for immortal food,
And long on all Thy love to feast.
The union with Christ’s love, especially in the eucharistic ‘marriage-feast’ (which the Church collectively ‘offers herself to God’ by ‘offering to God the Body of Christ’),1 unites the feelings of self-mortification, the yearning for the oblivion of the womb, and tormented sexual desire, ‘harbour’d in the Saviour’s breast’:
’Tis there I would always abide,
And never a moment depart,
Conceal’d in the cleft of Thy side,
Eternally held in Thy heart.2
It is difficult to conceive of a more essential disorganization of human life, a pollution of the sources of spontaneity bound to reflect itself in every aspect of personality. Since joy was associated with sin and guilt, and pain (Christ’s wounds) with goodness and love, so every impulse became twisted into the reverse, and it became natural to suppose that man or child only found grace in God’s eyes when performing painful, laborious or self-denying tasks. To labour and to sorrow was to find pleasure, and masochism was ‘Love’.
This strange imagery was perpetuated during the years of the Industrial Revolution, not only in Methodist hymnody but also in the rhetoric of sermons and confessions. Nor did it pass unnoticed. ‘The Deity is personified and embodied in the grossest of images,’ Leigh Hunt commented in an essay ‘On the Indecencies and Profane Rapture of Methodism’. ‘If God must be addressed in the language of earthly affection, why not address him as a parent rather than a lover?’1 But by the end of the eighteenth century, the Methodist tradition was undergoing a desolate change. The negation or sublimation of love was tending towards the cult of its opposite: death. Charles Wesley himself had written more than one hymn which presages this change:
Ah, lovely Appearance of Death!
No Sight upon Earth is so fair.
Not all the gay Pageants that breathe
Can with a dead Body compare.
The Methodist tradition here is ambivalent. On the one hand, Methodist preachers perfected techniques to arouse paroxysms of fear of death and of the unlimited pains of Hell. Children, from the age that they could speak, were terrified with images of everlasting punishment for the slightest misbehaviour. Their nights were made lurid by Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and similar reading.2 But at the same time, those who could read were deluged throughout the early nineteenth century, with the tracts which celebrated ‘Holy Dying’. No Methodist or evangelical magazine, for the mature or for children, was complete without its death-bed scene in which (as Leigh Hunt also noted) death was often anticipated in the language of bride or bridegroom impatient for the wedding-night. Death was the only goal which might be desired without guilt, the reward of peace after a lifetime of suffering and labour.
So much of the history of Methodism has, in recent years, been written by apologists or by fair-minded secularists trying to make allowances for a movement which they cannot understand, that one notes with a sense of shock Lecky’s judgement at the end of the nineteenth century:
A more appalling system of religious terrorism, one more fitted to unhinge a tottering intellect and to darken and embitter a sensitive nature, has seldom existed.1
Over the Industrial Revolution there brooded the figure of the Reverend Jabez Branderham (almost certainly modelled upon Jabez Bunting) who appears in Lockwood’s grim nightmare at the opening of Wuthering Heights: ‘good God! what a sermon; divided into four hundred and ninety parts… and each discussing a separate sin!’ It is against this all-enveloping ‘Thou Shalt Not!’, which permeated all religious persuasions in varying degree in these years, that we can appreciate at its full height the stature of William Blake. It was in 1818 that he emerged from his densely allegorical prophetic books into a last phase of gnomic clarity in The Everlasting Gospel. Here he reasserted the values, the almost-Antinomian affirmation of the joy of sexuality, and the affirmation of innocence, which were present in his earlier songs. Almost every line may be seen as a declaration of ‘mental war’ against Methodism and Evangelicalism.2 Their ‘Vision of Christ’ was his vision’s ‘greatest Enemy’. Above all, Blake drew his bow at the teaching of humility and submission. It was this nay-saying humility which ‘does the Sun & Moon blot out’, ‘Distorts the Heavens from Pole to Pole’,
Rooting over with thorns & stems
The buried Soul & all its Gems.
II. THE CHILIASM OF DESPAIR
The utility of Methodism as a work-discipline is evident. What is less easy to understand is why so many working people were willing to submit to this form of psychic exploitation. How was it that Methodism could perform with such success this dual rôle as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited?
During the years 1790–18301 three reasons may be adduced: direct indoctrination, the Methodist community-sense, and the psychic consequences of the counter-revolution.
The first reason – indoctrination – cannot be overstated. The evangelical Sunday schools were ever-active, although it is difficult to know how far their activities may be rightly designated as ‘educational’. The Wesleyans had inherited from their founder a peculiarly strong conviction as to the aboriginal sinfulness of the child; and this expressed – in Wesley’s case – with a force which might have made some Jesuits blench:
Break their wills betimes. Begin this work before they can run alone, before they can speak plain, perhaps before they can speak at all. Whatever pains it costs, break the will if you would not damn the child. Let a child from a year old be taught to fear the rod and to cry softly; from that age make him do as he is bid, if you whip him ten times running to effect it…. Break his will now, and his soul shall live, and he will probably bless you to all eternity.2
At Wesley’s Kingswood School only severely workful ‘recreations’ were allowed – chopping wood, digging and the like – since games and play were ‘unworthy of a Christian child’. (‘I will kill or cure,’ said Wesley, who rarely said things he did not mean: ‘I will have one or the other – a Christian school, or none at all.’) A brief glance at the ‘educational’ materials in common use in Sunday schools in the first decades of the nineteenth century exposes their true purpose. The Wesley’s lurid hymns, employed in the adult services, were replaced by Isaac Watts’ Divine Songs of Children, or moralistic variants by later writers. Toddlers were taught to sing that they were ‘By nature and by practice too, A wretched slave to sin.’ The All-seeing God’s ‘piercing eye’ looked upon their most ‘secret actions’:
There’s not a sin that we commit,
Nor wicked word we say,
But in thy dreadful book ’tis writ,
Against the judgement-day.
A characteristic moral story of the time exemplifies the general tendency of this ‘teaching’.1 John Wise is the son of ‘a very poor man, who had many children, and could scarce get bread for them all by hard labour. He had to work with all his might each day in the week, and lived on oatcake, and oatmeal boiled up with water.’ His father, notwithstanding, was a good ‘prayerful’ man, repeatedly giving thanks for his blessings: for example, ‘Some of us might have died, but we are all in the land of the living.’ John’s mother taught him Watts’ hymn of the work-disciplined sun:
When from the chambers of the east
His morning race begins,
He never tires, nor stops to rest,
But round the world he shines,
So, like the sun, would I fulfil
The duties of this day,
Begin my work betimes, and still
March on my heavenly way.
John’s parents teach him the sanctity of the Sabbath, and deliver various homilies on duty, obedience and industry. Then comes the awful story of Betty, John’s wicked sister, who goes for a walk on Sunday, and comes back wet and muddy, having lost a shoe. Her father rebukes her, and reads to the family Moses’ decree that the man who gathered sticks on the Sabbath should be stoned to death. Betty’s sin is much worse than this man’s, but this time she is pardoned. But worse sins follow: some children play truant from Sunday school and play foot-ball instead! The next Sunday the children are admonished, and told the story of the forty-two children who mocked the aged Elisha and who were torn in pieces, at the behest of a merciful God. The infants then carol another of Watts’ hymns:
When children in their wanton play,
Serv’d old Elisha so;
And bid the prophet go his way,
‘Go up, thou bald-head, go:’
GOD quickly stopt their wicked breath,
And sent two raging bears,
That tore them limb from limb to death,
With blood, and groans, and tears.
In the end, the piety of John and of his father are rewarded by an inheritance from a stranger, deeply moved by their patience and submission to poverty.
One might laugh; but the psychological atrocities committed upon children were terribly real to them. One may doubt the emphasis placed by a recent writer upon the repressive effect of Puritan infant-binding (in tight swaddling clothes) and anal training, although the point cannot be dismissed.1 But despite all the platitudes repeated in most textbooks as to the ‘educational initiatives’ of the Churches at this time, the Sunday schools were a dreadful exchange even for village dame’s schools. Eighteenth-century provision for the education of the poor – inadequate and patchy as it was – was nevertheless provision for education, in some sort, even if (as with Shen-stone’s schoolmistress) it was little more than naming the flowers and herbs. In the counter-revolutionary years this was poisoned by the dominant attitude of the Evangelicals, that the function of education began and ended with the ‘moral rescue’ of the children of the poor.2 Not only was the teaching of writing discouraged, but very many Sunday school scholars left the schools unable to read, and in view of the parts of the Old Testament thought most edifying this at least was a blessing. Others gained little more than the little girl who told one of the Commissioners on Child Labour in the Mines: ‘if I died a good girl I should go to heaven – if I were bad I should have to be burned in brimstone and fire: they told me that at school yesterday, I did not know it before’.1 Long before the age of puberty the child was subject at Sunday school and at home (if his parents were pious) to the worst kind of emotional bullying to confess his sins and come to a sense of salvation; and many, like young Thomas Cooper, went ‘into secret places twenty times in a day, to pray for pardon…’2
Lecky’s epithet, ‘religious terrorism’, is in fact by no means an excessive term to apply to a society which provided no alternative educational arrangements for the children of the poor – at least until the Lancastrian charity school movement, in which the notion of ‘moral rescue’ was modified by genuine educational intentions and by the utilitarian concern for equipping children for industrial occupations.3 But – and here we come to our second reason – we should beware of giving too bleak and too unqualified a picture of the evangelical churches from the evidence of Sunday school primers, or from the dogmas of such men as Bunting. What the orthodox Methodist minister intended is one thing; what actually happened in many communities may be another. The old ‘Arminian’ Methodists had a more humane attitude to Sunday school teaching; the Methodists of the New Connexion were always more intellectual in their approach than those of the Wesleyan orthodoxy; we have noted that James Montgomery (of the Sheffield Iris) led the fight among the Sheffield Nonconformists to retain the teaching of writing in the Sunday school syllabus. The lay teachers, who volunteered their services, were less likely to be doctrinaire; and there was a continuous tension which could at times produce unlikely results. ‘Even our Sunday Schools’, a Bolton minister wrote to the Duke of Portland in 1798:
may become in some Instances the Seminaries of Faction. We have discovered one if not two who have taken the Oaths of United Englishmen, who are acting in the capacity of S. Schoolmasters gratis…1
The ‘quiet fortresses’ of the Stockport Sunday schools, which Dr Ure so commended in the 1830s, nevertheless had been besieged with a vengeance (and to some degree actually displaced) between 1817 and 1820, when the Reverend Joseph Harrison and the Stockport Political Union sponsored a Radical Sunday School movement which must have been staffed, in part, by former teachers and scholars of the orthodox schools.2
And this should be seen, not only in the schools, but also in relation to the general influence of the Methodist churches. As a dogma Methodism appears as a pitiless ideology of work. In practice, this dogma was in varying degrees softened, humanized, or modified by the needs, values, and patterns of social relationship of the community within which it was placed. The Church, after all, was more than a building, and more than the sermons and instructions of its minister. It was embodied also in the class meetings: the sewing groups: the money-raising activities: the local preachers who tramped several miles after work to attend small functions at outlying hamlets which the minister might rarely visit. The picture of the fellowship of the Methodists which is commonly presented is too euphoric; it has been emphasized to the point where all other characteristics of the Church have been forgotten.3 But it remains both true and important that Methodism, with its open chapel doors, did offer to the uprooted and abandoned people of the Industrial Revolution some kind of community to replace the older community-patterns which were being displaced. As an unestablished (although undemocratic) Church, there was a sense in which working people could make it their own; and the more closely knit the community in which Methodism took root (the mining, fishing or weaving village) the more this was so.
Indeed, for many people in these years the Methodist ‘ticket’ of church-membership acquired a fetishistic importance; for the migrant worker it could be the ticket of entry into a new community when he moved from town to town. Within this religious community there was (as we have seen) its own drama, its own degrees of status and importance, its own gossip, and a good deal of mutual aid. There was even a slight degree of social mobility, although few of the clergy came from proletarian homes. Men and women felt themselves to have some place in an otherwise hostile world when within the Church. They obtained recognition, perhaps for their sobriety, or chastity, or piety. And there were other positives, such as the contribution to the stability of the family and the home, to which we shall return. The Puritan character-structure, moreover, was not something which could be confiscated solely for the service of the Church and the employer. Once the transference was made, the same dedication which enabled men to serve in these rôles, will be seen in the men who officered trade unions and Hampden Clubs, educated themselves far into the night, and had the responsibility to conduct working-class organizations. In analysing the ideology of Methodism, we have presented an intellectualized picture. In the fluency of social life, plain common sense, compassion, the obstinate vitality of older community traditions, all mingle to soften its forbidding outlines.
There is a third reason, however, why working people were exceptionally exposed to the penetration of Methodism during the years of the Napoleonic Wars. It is, perhaps, the most interesting reason of all, but it has been scarcely noticed. It may best be approached by recalling the hysterical aspect of Methodist and Baptist revivalism, and of the smaller sects. During the worst years of the Industrial Revolution, real opiates were used quite widely in the manufacturing districts. And Charles Kingsley’s epithet, ‘the opium of the masses’, reminds us that many working people turned to religion as a ‘consolation’, even though the dreams inspired by Methodist doctrine were scarcely happy. The methods of the revivalist preachers were noted for their emotional violence; the tense opening, the vivid descriptions of sudden death and catastrophe, the unspecific rhetoric on the enormity of sin, the dramatic offer of redemption. And the open-air crowds and early congregations of Methodism were also noted for the violence of their ‘enthusiasm’ – swooning, groaning, crying out, weeping and falling into paroxysms. Southey, indeed, suggested that revivalism was akin to Mesmerism: Wesley ‘had produced a new disease, and he accounted for it by a theological theory instead of a physical one’.1 Sometimes these symptoms took the form of violent mass hysteria, as in the incident at Bristol recorded in Wesley’s Journal in March 1788 when a ‘vehement noise… shot like lightning through the whole congregation’:
The terror and confusion was inexpressible. You might have imagined it was a city taken by storm. The people rushed upon each other with the utmost violence, the benches were broken in pieces, and nine tenths of the congregation appeared to be struck with the same panic.
At Chapel-en-le-Frith, he recorded in 1786, this hysteria had already become habit-forming:
Some of them, perhaps many, scream all together as loud as they possibly can. Some of them use improper, yea, indecent expressions in prayer. Several drop down as dead, and are as still as a corpse; but in a while they start up and cry, Glory, glory…
Such excesses of hysteria Wesley condemned, as ‘bringing the real work into contempt’.2 But throughout the Industrial Revolution more muted forms of hysteria were intrinsic to Methodist revivalism. Tight communities, miners, hill-farmers or weavers, might at first resist the campaign of field-preaching and prayer-meetings among them; then there might be ‘a little moving among the dry bones’; and then ‘the fire broke out; and it was just as when the whins on a common are set on fire, – it blazed gloriously’.1
The example is taken from propaganda in West Riding weaving villages in 1799–1801, when whole communities declared themselves – at least temporarily – ‘saved’. And it is rarely noted that not only did the war years see the greatest expansion of Methodism, notably in the northern working class, but that this was also accompanied by renewed evidence of hysteria. For example, in the years 1805–6, when numbers flocked to the Methodists in Bradford, ‘no sooner, in many cases, was the text announced, than the cries of persons in distress so interrupted the preacher, that the service… was at once exchanged for one of general and earnest intercession’.2 ‘Three fell while I was speaking,’ a preacher of the Bible Christians in Devon noted complacently in his diary in 1816: ‘we prayed, and soon some more fell; I think six found peace.’ The ministrations of this sect among the moorland farmers and labourers were often accompanied by agonies, prostrations, ‘shouts of praise’, and ‘loud and piteous cries of penitents’.3
Methodism may have inhibited revolution; but we can affirm with certainty that its rapid growth during the Wars was a component of the psychic processes of counter-revolution. There is a sense in which any religion which places great emphasis on the after-life is the chiliasm of the defeated and the hopeless. ‘The utopian vision aroused a contrary vision. The chiliastic optimism of the revolutionaries ultimately gave birth to the formation of the conservative attitude of resignation…’ – the words of Karl Mannheim’s describing another movement. And he also gives us a clue to the nature of the psychic process:
Chiliasm has always accompanied revolutionary outbursts and given them their spirit. When this spirit ebbs and deserts these movements, there remains behind in the world a naked mass-frenzy and a despiritualized fury.4
Since, in England of the 1790s, the revolutionary impulse was stifled before it reached the point of ‘outburst’, so also when the spirit ebbed, the reaction does not fall to the point of frenzy. And yet there are many phenomena in these decades which can scarcely be explained in any other way. Authentic millennarialism ends in the late-1790s, with the defeat of English Jacobinism, the onset of the Wars, and the confining of Richard Brothers in a mad-house. But a number of sects of ‘New Jerusalemites’ prospered in the next fifteen years.1 Prophet after prophet arose, like Ebenezer Aldred, a Unitarian minister in an isolated village in the Derbyshire Peak (Huck-low):
There he lived in a kind of solitude, became dreamy and wild; laid hold on the prophecies; saw Napoleon in the Book of Revelation: at last fancied himself the Prophet who, standing neither on land nor water, was to proclaim the destruction of a great city…
and, clothed in a white garment, his grey hair flowing down his shoulders, sailed in a boat on the Thames, distributing booklets and prophesying doom.2 Radical, mystic and militarist contested for the robes of Revelation: the lost tribes of Israel were discovered in Birmingham and Wapping: and ‘evidence’ was found that ‘the British Empire is the peculiar possession of Messiah, and his promised naval dominion’.3
But the most startling evidence of a ‘despiritualized fury’ is to be found in the movements surrounding – and outliving – the greatest Prophetess of all, Joanna Southcott. It was in 1801 that her first cranky prophetic booklet was published, The Strange Effects of Faith. And the general climate of expectant frenzy is shown by the rapidity with which the reputation of the Devon farmer’s daughter and domestic servant swept the country. Her appeal was curiously compounded of many elements. There was the vivid superstitious imagination of the older England, especially tenacious in her own West Country. ‘The belief in supernatural agency’, wrote the Taunton Courier in 1811,
is universally prevalent throughout the Western Counties, and very few villages there are who cannot reckon upon at least one who is versed in ‘Hell’s Black Grammar’. The Samford Ghost, for a while, gained its thousands of votaries…1
There was the lurid imagery and fervour of the Methodist communion, to which (according to Southey) Joanna had been ‘zealously attached’.2 There was the strange amalgam of Joanna’s own style, in which mystic doggerel was thrown down side by side with shrewd or literal-minded autobiographical prose – accounts of childhood memories, unhappy love affairs, and encounters between the stubborn peasant’s daughter and disbelieving parsons and gentry. There was, above all, the misery and war-weariness of these years, and the millennarial expectancy, of a time when the followers of Brothers still lived daily in the hope of fresh revelation – a time when:
One madman printed his dreams, another his day-visions; one had seen an angel come out of the sun with a drawn sword in his hand, another had seen fiery dragons in the air, and hosts of angels in battle array…. The lower classes… began to believe that the Seven Seals were about to be opened…3
Joanna was no Joan of Arc, but she shared one of Joan’s appeals to the poor: the sense that revelation might fall upon a peasant’s daughter as easily as upon a king. She was acclaimed as the true successor to Brothers, and she gathered around her an entourage which included several educated men and women. (If Blake’s prophetic books may be seen, in part, as an idiosyncratic essay in the margin of the prevailing prophetic mood, his acquaintance William Sharp, also an engraver and former ‘Jacobin’, gave to Joanna his complete allegiance.) But Joanna’s appeal was felt most strongly among working people of the west and north – Bristol, south Lancashire, the West Riding, Stockton-on-Tees.
O England! O England! England! the axe is laid to the tree, and it must and will be cut down; ye know not the days of your visitation… The midnight-hour is coming for you all, and will burst upon you. I warn you of dangers that now stand before you, for the time is at hand for the fulfilment of all things. ‘Who is he that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah; that speaketh in righteousness, mighty to save all that trust in him; but of my enemies I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury; for the day of vengeance is in my heart, and the year of my redeemed is come.’
Most of Joanna’s prophecies convey little more than an apocalyptic mood, and auguries of catastrophe so vague that they were easily applied to the crises and upheavals of Napoleonic Europe, with Bonaparte himself figuring as THE BEAST. Her manner lacked the revolutionary specificity of Brothers; but her apocalypse was most certainly one in which the sheep were to be separated irrevocably from the goats. ‘The Earth shall be filled with My Goodness,’ the Lord spoke through Joanna, ‘and hell shall be filled with My Terrors…. My fury shall go forth – and My Loving-kindness shall save to the utmost all them that now come unto M E.’
Awake, awake, O Zion, put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem: for the day of the LORD is at hand… I will break down the pride of the Lofty, and I will exalt the Spirit of the Meek…
For the saved there was offered a shadowy Utopia:
When I my people do redeem
From every power of hell and sin,
Your houses I shall build anew,
And palaces bring to your view;
For golden mines I have in store:
The foaming seas shall send on shore
Millions of treasure hid therein,
And mines of diamonds shall be seen…
I’ve gold of Ophir, that shall come
To build Jerusalem up again,
And those that are the first redeem’d
May say, these promises we claim…
There was even an echo of Paine’s ‘Bastard and his armed banditti’, and a suggestion that the land would be returned to the labouring people:
But now the heirs I mean to free,
And all these bondmen I’ll cast out,
And the true heirs have nought to doubt;
For I’ll cut off the bastard race,
And in their stead the true heirs place
For to possess that very land…
It is probable that Joanna Southcott was by no means an impostor, but a simple and at times self-doubting woman, the victim of her own imbalance and credulity. (One’s judgement as to some members of the circus which ‘promoted’ her may be more harsh.) There is a pathos in her literal-minded transcriptions of her ‘Voices’. The long messages which the Lord instructed her to communicate were full of the highest testimonials to the ability of Joanna herself:
For on the earth there’s something new appears.
Since earth’s foundation plac’d I tell you here,
Such wondrous woman never was below…
So flattered by the best of all Referees, she was able to exert upon the credulous a form of psychic blackmail no less terrifying than that of the hell-fire preachers. One day, while sweeping out a house after a sale, ‘she was permitted by the Lord to find, as if by accident’, a commonplace seal. Thereafter her followers – the ‘Johannas’ or Southcottians – were able to obtain from her a special seal, a sort of promissory note that the bearer should ‘inherit the Tree of Life to be made Heirs of God & joint-heirs with Jesus Christ’. The promise of the millennium was available only to ‘THE SEALED PEOPLE’, while the scoffers received more dreadful threats:
And now if foes increase, I tell you here,
That every sorrow they shall fast increase,
The Wars, her tumults they shall never cease
Until the hearts of men will turn to me
And leave the rage of persecuting thee.
Thousands upon thousands (in one estimate, 100,000) were ‘sealed’ in this way. There was, indeed, a market in seals at one time comparable to the late medieval market in relics of the Cross. The emotional disequilibrium of the times is revealed not only in the enthusiasm of the ‘Johannas’ but also in the corresponding violence of feeling of the mobs which sometimes assaulted her under-prophets. Southcottianism was scarcely a form of revolutionary chiliasm; it did not inspire men to effective social action, and scarcely engaged with the real world; its apocalyptic fervour was closely akin to the fervours of Methodism – it brought to a point of hysterical intensity the desire for personal salvation. But it was certainly a cult of the poor. Joanna’s God cursed the false ‘shepherds’ of England (landowners and governors) who conspired to raise the price of bread:
My charges will come heavy against them, and my judgements must be great in the land, if they starve the poor in the midst of plenty…. What I said of Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah, what I said of Tyre and Sidon, what I said concerning the Galileans, are now charges against the shepherds of England.
The old imagery of the ‘Whore of Babylon’ was revived with luxuriating confusion, and all ‘the Clergy throughout the land’ were pointed out as the ‘Lovers and Adulterers’ with Jezebel, who ‘adulterate my Bible as an adulterous man would commit fornication with an adulterous woman’. As in all the cults of the poor, there was a direct identification between their plight and the tribulations of the Children of Israel: ‘as close as Pharaoh pursued the Children of Israel, so close will Satan pursue the Sealed People, by temptations within the persecutions without…’ At times all tissue of sense disappears beneath the riot of such imagery; in which the proper nouns of the Old Testament struggle with the rhythms of Ancient Pistol:
Come out! come out! let Sodom feel its doom. Where now is Lot? At Zoar safe! Where is his wife? Is she not salt all? The writing is on the wall – Thou lewdly revellest with the bowls of God…. Let Bel asunder burst!… The saints now judge the earth. The omnipotent is here, in power, and spirit in the word – The sword, white horse, and King of kings has drawn the flaming sword! Rejoice, ye saints, rejoice!… Great Og and Agag where are ye! The walls of Jericho are thou, fall flat! Joshua’s rams horns, the seven and twelve, pass Jordan’s stream…. The Lord’s anointed reigns – The rods or laws of Ephraim, ten unite in one, and hold by Judah’s skirt – The Son of Man o’er Israel reigns – The dry bones now arise…. The bride is come – The Bridegroom now receives the marriage seal. The law and gospel now unite – The moon and sun appear – Caleb and Joshua pass the stream in triumph to restore – Where now thou Canaanite art thou? Where all thy maddened crew? –
Hittites be gone! no more appear to hurt or to annoy;
Now Israel’s sons in peace succeed and Canaan’s land enjoy.
Behold, from Edom I appear, with garments dipt in blood:
My sons are freed, and sav’d and wash’d amidst the purple flood…1
The first frenzy of the cult was in 1801–4; but it achieved a second climax in 1814 when the ageing Joanna had an hysterical pregnancy and promised to give birth to ‘Shiloh’, the Son of God. In the West Riding ‘the whole district was infested with bearded prophets’, while Ashton, in Lancashire, later became a sort of ‘metropolis’ for the ‘Johannas’ of the north.2 When the Prophetess died in the last week of 1814, tragically disillusioned in her own ‘Voice’, the cult proved to be extraordinarily deep-rooted. Successive claimants appeared to inherit her prophetic mantle, the most notable of whom was a Bradford woolcomber, John Wroe. Southcottian derivatives passed through one aberration after another, showing themselves capable of sudden flare-ups of messianic vitality until the last years of the nineteenth century.1
There is no doubt that the Southcott cult wreaked great havoc in the Methodist camp, notably in Bristol, Lancashire and Yorkshire. Indeed, Joanna’s few essays in theological polemic were directed at the Methodists whom she accused of holding ‘Calvinistic’ tenets, thereby—
making the great Creator and Father of all a being of such cruelty, that no words can express, or pen describe – instead of a BEING whose LOVE is every where and whose MERCY is over all HIS WORKS.2
The Methodists, of course, had many advantages over the Southcottians: organizational stability, money, the benign attitude of the authorities. What members they lost to the cult were probably soon regained. But this does not mean that we can dismiss the cult as a mere ‘freak’, irrelevant to the stolid lines of social growth. On the contrary, we should see the ‘Johannas’ and the Methodist revival of these years as intimate relations. The Wars were the heyday of the itinerant lay preachers, with their ‘pious ejaculations, celestial groans, angelic swoonings’3 – the ‘downright balderdash’ which so much enraged Cobbett:
Their heavenly gifts, their calls, their inspirations, their feelings of grace at work within them, and the rest of their canting gibberish, are a gross and outrageous insult to common sense, and a great scandal to the country. It is in vain that we boast of our enlightened state, while a sect like this is increasing daily.4
As orthodox Wesleyanism throve, so also did breakaway groups of ‘Ranters’ – the Welsh ‘Jumpers’ (cousins to the American ‘Shakers’), the Primitive Methodists, the ‘Tent Methodists’, the ‘Magic Methodists’ of Delemere Forest, who fell into trances or ‘visions’, the Bryanites or Bible Christians, the ‘Quaker Methodists’ of Warrington and the ‘Independent Methodists’ of Macclesfield. Through the streets of war-time and post-war England went the revivalist missionaries, crying out: ‘Turn to the Lord and seek salvation!’
One is struck not only by the sense of disequilibrium, but also by the impermanence of the phenomenon of Methodist conversion. Rising graphs of Church membership are misleading; what we have, rather, is a revivalist pulsation, or an oscillation between periods of hope and periods of despair and spiritual anguish. After 1795 the poor had once again entered into the Valley of Humiliation. But they entered it unwillingly, with many backward looks; and whenever hope revived, religious revivalism was set aside, only to reappear with renewed fervour upon the ruins of the political messianism which had been overthrown. In this sense, the great Methodist recruitment between 1790 and 1830 may be seen as the chiliasm of despair.
This is not the customary reading of the period; and it is offered as an hypothesis, demanding closer investigation. On the eve of the French Revolution the Methodists claimed about 60,000 adherents in Great Britain. This indicated little more than footholds in all but a few of the industrial districts. Thereafter the figures claimed advance like this: 1800, 90,619; 1810, 137,997; 1820, 191,217; 1830, 248,592.1 Years especially notable for revivalist recruitment were 1797–1800, 1805–7, 1813–18, 1823–4, 1831–4. These years are so close to those of maximum political awareness and activity that Dr Hobsbawm is justified in directing attention to the ‘marked parallelism between the movements of religious, social and political consciousness’.2 But while the relationship between political and religious excitement is obviously intimate, the nature of the relationship remains obscure: the conclusion that ‘Methodism advanced when Radicalism advanced and not when it grew weaker’ does not necessarily follow.1 On the contrary, it is possible that religious revivalism took over just at the point where ‘political’ or temporal aspirations met with defeat. Thus we might almost offer a spiritual graph, commencing with the far-reaching emotional disturbances associated with the French Revolution and Rights of Man. In the early 1790s we find secular Jacobinism and the millennarial hopes of Richard Brothers: in the late 1790s and the 1800s, Methodist revivalism and the frenzy of the ‘Johannas’, which more than one contemporary witness saw as being part of the same stock, and appealing to the same audience;2 in the aftermath of Luddism (1811–12) a renewed wave of revivalism, giving way to the political revival of the winter of 1816–17. In the latter two years the Primitive Methodists broke through into the framework-knitters’ villages of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire, and the relationship between revivalism and political radicalism appears to have been especially close. On Whit Sunday 1816, 12,000 were claimed at a camp-meeting in Nottingham Forest. From the autumn of 1816 until the summer of 1817 popular energies appear to have been absorbed in radical agitation, culminating in the Pentridge ‘rising’ of June 1817 in which at least one local preacher took a leading part. But the great Primitive Methodist revival which took place in these counties in 1817 and 1818 (‘one of the most remarkable… ever experienced’) would seem to have taken fire after the Pentridge disaster.3 The year of maximum political activity in the post-war decade, 1819, is a year unremarkable for revivalism; while the revivalist fervour of 1831–4 may in part be attributed to the campaigns in the rural counties of the south and east, in the aftermath of the ‘Last Labourers’ Revolt’.1
The suggestion is tentative. To take it further, we should know more about, not the years of revivalism, but the months; not the counties, but the towns and villages. Moreover, the relationship of Primitive Methodists or Bible Christians to political agitation was very different from that of the orthodox Wesleyans. A close examination of all the churches which experienced revivals shows, however, that their progress was not marked by a steady upward movement, interspersed with occasional steep inclines when mass conversions were made. It was more in the nature of a pulsation, a forward surge followed by a withdrawal. Thomas Cooper’s account of his own conversion in the 1820s may be taken as characteristic: ‘the example was wondrously infectious. Hundreds in the town [Gainsborough] and circuit began to pray for holiness of heart…’ For weeks he felt transfigured, in a ‘heaven on earth of holiness’. Then at length he returned to earth, lost his temper with the children at school where he taught, and his sense of transfiguration was lost:
Similar to my experience was that of scores of our members in the town, and in the villages of the circuit. And such is the experience in all circuits of the connexion. Often, what is called a ‘Revival’ begins with some one or more striving for holiness. The theme kindles desire in others… and sometimes fills a circuit with glowing excitement for many months. But the decline invariably sets in…2
Cooper gives us the experience. But in terms of the social process we may suppose something like an oscillation, with religious revivalism at the negative, and radical politics (tinged with revolutionary millennarialism) at the positive pole. The connecting notion is always that of the ‘Children of Israel’. At one pole, the chiliasm of despair could reduce the Methodist working man to one of the most abject of human beings. He was constantly warned by his ministers against reformers, as ‘these sons of Belial’: ‘We… ought to wait in silence the salvation of the Lord. In due time he will deliver his own dear peculiar people.’1 As such a ‘peculiar person’ his tools were occasionally destroyed, or he was refused entry to trade unions, upon suspicion of being an employer’s ‘nark’. Cobbett pressed the attack upon the Methodists further: ‘Amongst the people of the north they have served as spies and blood-money men.’2
On the other hand, as if to baffle expectation, Methodist working men, and, indeed, local preachers, repeatedly emerged in the nineteenth century – in handfuls here and there – as active workers in different fields of working-class politics. There were a few Methodist Jacobins, more Methodist Luddites, many Methodist weavers demonstrating at Peterloo, Methodist trade unionists and Chartists. They were rarely (with the exception of trade unionism in the pits and, later, in agriculture) initiators; this rôle was more often filled by Owenites and free-thinkers who emerged from a different moral patters. But they were often to be found as devoted speakers and organizers, who carried with them – even after their expulsion from the Methodist Church – the confidence of their communities.
One reason for this lies in the many tensions at the heart of Wesleyanism. Just as the repressive inhibitions upon sexuality carried the continual danger of provoking the opposite – either in the form of the characteristic Puritan rebel (the forerunner of Lawrence) or in the form of Antinomianism; so the authoritarian doctrines of Methodism at times bred a libertarian antithesis. Methodism (and its evangelical counterparts) were highly politically conscious religions. For 100 years before 1789, Dissent, in its popular rhetoric, had two main enemies: Sin and the Pope. But in the 1790s there is a drastic redirection of hatred; the Pope was displaced from the seat of commination and in his place was elevated Tom Paine. ‘Methodism,’ Bunting declared, ‘hates democracy as much as it hates sin.’ But constant sermonizing against Jacobinism served also to keep the matter in the front of the public consciousness. In times of hardship or of mounting political excitement all the ‘pent-up hostility’1 in the mind of the Methodist working man might break out; and, with the rapidity of a revivalist campaign, Jacobin or Radical ideas might spread ‘like fire in the whins’.
Moreover, we should remember the tension between spiritual and temporal egalitarianism characteristic of Lutheranism. In the Old Testament working people found more than a vengeful authoritarian God; they also found an allegory of their own tribulations. It is this body of symbolism (together with Pilgrim’s Progress) which was held in common by chiliasts, ‘Johannas’, ‘Jumpers’ and orthodox Wesleyans. No ideology is wholly absorbed by its adherents: it breaks down in practice in a thousand ways under the criticism of impulse and of experience: the working-class community injected into the chapels its own values of mutual aid, neighbourliness and solidarity. Moreover, we must realize what incredible mumbo-jumbo those Hebrew genealogies, anathemas, and chronicles must have seemed when set beside the daily experience of weavers or miners. Here and there texts would spring to the eye, applicable to almost any context, and it was as likely that they should appear as figures of the class struggle as of the spiritual pilgrimage. This was the case of the ‘underground’ of 1801, when it was credibly reported that Lancashire conspirators took an oath based upon Ezekiel:
And thou, profane wicked prince of Israel, whose day is come, when iniquity shall have an end,
Thus saith the Lord God; Remove the diadem, and take off the crown: this shall not be the same: exalt him that is low, and abase him that is high.
I will overturn, overturn, overturn it: and it shall be no more, until he come whose right it is; and I will give it to him…
The sword, the sword is drawn: for the slaughter it is furbished, to consume because of the glittering.2
We see it also in the language of one of the unpaid Ministers of the Independent Methodists of the Newcastle district – a group which broke away after the expulsions of Radical lay preachers in 1819:
Unequal laws, and a partial administration, plant a thorn in every breast, and spread a gloom in every countenance…. It may be justly said of such rulers, Their vine is the vine of Sodom, and the fields of Gomorrah; their grapes are grapes of gall, their clusters are bitter; their wine is the poison of dragons, and the cruel venom of asps. But in the kingdom of the Messiah, peace flows as a river…. The rod of God’s strength, which comes out of Zion, is not a rod of oppression.1
In this way even the ‘fortresses’ of the Sunday schools might breed rebellion. A collecting sheet2 of the early nineteenth century from Todmorden, in which all subscribers to the strike fund are listed by their chosen pseudonyms, gives us the feel of this period, when the chapel and the pub made common cause in a moment of industrial crisis:
|
£ |
s. |
d. | |
|
One who is sorry to see a Man who is crowned with the Silver mantle of time, corroborate the truths of Solomon, Prov. 27th., verse 22nd. |
0 |
2 |
6 |
|
A Salt chap with an Ass |
0 |
0 |
2 |
|
Stand True |
0 |
0 |
6 |
|
Hare and Hounds Inn |
0 |
0 |
6 |
|
Love mercy, do justice |
0 |
0 |
4 |
|
Hang th’ old chap |
0 |
0 |
2 |
|
Jam a Tum’s wife |
0 |
0 |
2 |
|
Amicus |
0 |
1 |
0 |
|
Royal George Inn |
0 |
1 |
0 |
|
Tell Old Robertshaw to read the 13th verse in the 22nd chap. of Jeremiah |
0 |
0 |
6 |
|
Eastwood Weavers |
0 |
5 |
4 |
If Dick o’ Jos’s wife duzzant give ower burning the Reports, Old Thunderbout Clogs will tell about her wareing half a crown of a Sunday Bustle |
0 |
4 |
3½ |
|
A chap bout jacket |
0 |
0 |
2 |
|
Cut his tail off and sew it on again for punishment |
0 |
0 |
4 |
But in the years between 1790 and 1830 it would be as ridiculous to describe the participation of rebellious Methodist. lay preachers and others in extreme Radical agitations as a ‘Methodist contribution’ to the working-class movement, as it would be to describe the practice of free love among extreme Antinomians as a ‘Puritan contribution’ towards sexual liberation. Both are reactive cultural patterns; but just as the Puritan sexual rebel (like Lawrence) remains a ‘Puritan’ in his deep concern for ‘a right relation’ between men and women, so the Methodist political rebel carried through into his radical or revolutionary activity a profound moral earnestness, a sense of righteousness and of ‘calling’, a ‘Methodist’ capacity for sustained organizational dedication and (at its best) a high degree of personal responsibility. We see this in those Methodists who took part in the Pentridge rising – one of whom, executed at Derby for high treason, ‘had been the ablest local preacher in the Circuit’.1 We see it in the better qualities of Samuel Bamford, and in the self-discipline which he brought to the demonstrators of 1819. We see it in Loveless, the Dorchester labourer and ‘Tolpuddle Martyr’. Whenever popular agitation grew in intensity, this form of ‘heresy’ became evident. Indeed, by the 1830s – despite all the attempts of Bunting’s old guard to hold the position by anathemas and expulsions – whole communities, in particular of weavers and stockingers, had come to combine their Methodism and their Chartism.
There were other factors which influenced this process. By the early nineteenth century there was a marked tension between the professionalized Wesleyanism of the stipendiary ministry and the voluntarism of the lay preachers. The secession of the Kilhamite New Connexion had by no means ended the feelings of resentment felt by many laymen at the vesting of the supreme government of orthodox Methodism in the hands of an arbitrarily nominated circle of ministers. Again and again Cobbett lampooned the Methodist Conference as the ‘CONCLAVE’. He presented it as a new bureaucracy, composed of ‘the most busy and persevering set of men on earth’, intent upon preserving their worldly interests, and in perpetuating a new hereditary priesthood, living in comfort off the tributary pennies of the poor. He saw in Wesley’s school, Kingswood, the machinery for perpetuating a new élite.1 It was the professional ministry, and not the local preachers, whom Cobbett accused of being ‘the bitterest foes of freedom in England’:
… hostile to freedom as the established clergy have been, their hostility has been nothing in point of virulence compared with that of these ruffian sectarians…. Books upon books they write. Tracts upon tracts. Villainous sermons upon villainous sermons they preach. Rail they do… against the West Indian slave-holders; but not a word do you ever hear from them against the slave-holders in Lancashire and in Ireland. On the contrary, they are continually telling the people here that they ought to thank the Lord… not for a bellyful and a warm back, but for that abundant grace of which they are the bearers, and for which they charge them only one penny per week each.2
Cobbett’s attacks were not wholly disinterested. He had attacked the Methodists, in the same unmeasured way, but for the opposite reasons, in his Tory days, when he discovered that several of Colonel Despard’s associates were Methodists.3 This was one of his consistent prejudices. And he was enraged, in the early 1820s, not only by the high Toryism of Bunting and the ‘CONCLAVE’ but also by the facility with which the Methodist Church tapped the pennies of the very same men who attended Radical demonstrations. But without doubt many of the lay preachers and class leaders shared his dislike of the full-time ministry, as well as of such practices as pew-rents and privileges for the wealthy. And this dislike Cobbett was at pains to foster. ‘A man who had been making shoes all the week,’ he wrote, ‘will not preach the worse for that on the Sunday.’
There are thousands upon thousands of labourers and artizans and manufacturers, who never yet attempted to preach, and who are better able to do it than the members of the Conference, who for the far greater part have been labourers and artizans, and who have become preachers, because it was pleasanter to preach than to work.
The ‘pious and disinterested’ unpaid local preachers (in Cobbett’s picture) were being ‘kept down’ by the ‘haughty oligarchy of the Conference:
The Dons of the Conference scowl upon them; treat them as interlopers; send them off into little villages to preach to half dozens, or half scores; while they themselves preach to thousands. Now, it ought to be a point with the Methodists all over the kingdom to go to hear none but these disinterested men; and, if the Conference shut them out of the chapels, they ought to hear them at their own houses, to follow them into barns or under trees.
The other ‘remedy’ which Cobbett proposed to the Methodists was to ‘withold their pennies’; or, at least, to withhold them from all ministers except reformers.1
It is not clear whether many Methodists followed Cobbett’s advice; or whether he gave the advice because it was already being taken. But he certainly helps us to understand the character of the many breakaway sects – notably the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians – in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Whereas the Kilhamite secession had displayed a vertical split within the Church, in which the more intellectual members had broken away, the secessions of this period were, above all, horizontal splits, in which lay preachers and their congregations severed themselves from the professional ministry. The Bible Christians arose because a zealous layman, William O’Bryan, found that the Methodist Establishment refused to recognize his calling. He took to free-lance preaching in north Devon, ignoring the disciplinary restraints of the society, and was excluded as a ‘walking beggar’. He took his groups of converted with him. To read the biography of Bunting beside that of Hugh Bourne, the earnest mill-wright and joiner (called in to improvise machinery, repair timbering, or do iron work at collieries or ‘mountain farms’ in Staffordshire) who founded the Primitive Methodists, is to pass between two different worlds. ‘Our chapels,’ Bourne recalled, ‘were the coal-pit banks, or any other place; and in our conversation way, we preached the Gospel to all, good or bad, rough or smooth.’1 The local Wesleyan Establishment was little interested in the converts whom Bourne and Clowes were making in the pits and pottery towns. The evangelistic zeal which led to the first camp-meetings at Mow Cop (1807 and 1808) was promptly disowned.
Bunting looked down upon the workers from the heights of connexional intrigue; Bourne and Clowes were of the working people. Bunting was intent upon ushering Methodism to a seat on the right hand of the Establishment; the Primitives still lived in the world of hardship and persecution of Wesleyanism’s origin. We can scarcely discuss the two Churches in the same terms. The preaching of the Primitives was as hard as the lives of their congregations; it required (Dr Hobsbawm has said) the sharpest contrast ‘between the gold of the redeemed and the flame-shot black of the damned’. But this was not preached at, but by, the poor. In this and other sects, the local preachers made the Church their own; and for this reason these sects contributed far more directly to the later history of trade unionism and political Radicalism than the orthodox Connexion.2
There was one other context in which Methodism of any variety necessarily assumed a more class-conscious form: in the rural areas. The chapel in the agricultural village was inevitably an affront to the vicar and the squire, and a centre in which the labourer gained independence and self-respect. Once again, it was the influence of the Primitive Methodists notably in East Anglia – which was to prove most remarkable. But we can see the logic in a pamphlet by an irate country parson of 1805 – several years before the Primitive Methodists were founded.1 The field labourers converted to Methodism were accused of all kinds of seditious intentions. They say, ‘That Corn and all other fruits of the earth, are grown and intended by Providence, as much for the poor as the rich.’ They were less content with their wages, less ready ‘to work extraordinary hours as the exigencies of their masters might require’. Worse, instead of recouping themselves for the next week’s labour, they exhausted themselves on Sundays walking several miles to hear a preacher. On week-nights instead of going straight to bed, they wasted fire and candles, singing hymns – a sight the parson had been horrified to see ‘in some of our poorest cottages at so late an hour as nine… of a winter’s evening’. Many years later George Howell emphasized the perpetuation of these attitudes among the gentry, when commenting on the case of the Dorchester labourers. Methodism was ‘a shocking offence in those days in many villages, especially in Dorset and other West counties. Indeed, next to poaching, it was the gravest of all offences.’
In all these ways, tensions were continually generated within the heart of a religion whose theological tenets were those of submissiveness and the sanctification of labour. The fullest development of this reactive dialectic belongs to the later history of trade unionism among the miners and rural workers, and to the history of Chartism. But it finds its origin in the decades 1810–30, when such Chartist leaders as Ben Rushton of Halifax and John Skevington of Loughborough went through their formative years. Rushton, a hand-loom weaver born in 1785, and local preacher with the Methodist New Connexion, was active in Radical politics at the time of Peterloo, was probably imprisoned, and either expelled or withdrew from the Connexion at the time of Cobbett’s appeal to Methodists to refuse to pay their dues. He was active again in the Poor Law agitation and on behalf of the hand-loom weavers in the early 1830s. In 1839, at one of the first of the great Chartist camp-meetings (themselves modelled upon the Primitive Methodists) several local preachers spoke along with Rushton. One of them, William Thornton, opened the proceedings with prayer – that ‘the wickedness of the wicked may come to an end’ – and Feargus O’Connor clapped him on the shoulder, saying: ‘Well done, Thornton, when we get the People’s Charter I will see that you are made Archbishop of York.’ Another moved a resolution binding the meeting ‘not to attend any place of worship where the administration of services is inimical to civil liberty… but to meet in such a way and manner in our separate localities in future as the circumstances of the case require’. Ben Rushton seconded the resolution, declaring: ‘For himself he had given nothing to the parsons since 1821, and the next penny they had from him would do them good.’ Another local preacher, Hanson, added his denunciations of the clergy:
They preached Christ and a crust, passive obedience and nonresistance. Let the people keep from those churches and chapels (‘We will!’). Let them go to those men who preached Christ and a full belly, Christ and a well-clothed back – Christ and a good house to live in – Christ and Universal Suffrage.1
Men like Rushton, Thornton and Hanson made a contribution to the Chartist movement it is impossible to overestimate. We see it in the character of the camp-meetings, and the fervour of the Chartist hymns, such as ‘Sons of Poverty Assemble’:
See the brave, ye spirit-broken,
Who uphold your righteous cause:
Who against them hath not spoken?
They are, just as Jesus was,
Persecuted
By bad men and wicked laws.
Rouse them from their silken slumbers,
Trouble them amidst their pride;
Swell your ranks, augment your numbers,
Spread the Charter far and wide:
Truth is with us,
God himself is on our side.1
We see it in the Plug Rioters who marched into Halifax singing the ‘Old Hundredth’. We see it in the slogans, such as the great banner carried at one Chartist demonstration by the weavers of Rushton’s village of Ovenden: ‘Be not ye afraid of them, remember the Lord, who is great and terrible, and fight for your brethren, your sons and your daughters, your wives and your houses.’2 We see it in the Chartist chapels; in the Spen Valley, where Deacon Priestley had given wheat to ‘Christ’s poor’, where John Nelson had seen Satan on Gomersal Hill-Top, where Southcottians, Antinomians and Methodist Luddites were to be found at the opening of the century, we now have such a chapel, in the 1840s, at which we have an account of Rushton preaching, from the text, ‘The poor ye have always with you.’ The poor he divided into three classes: the halt and the blind, who were ‘God’s poor’: the idle and reckless, who deserved to be left to look after themselves:
Then, thirdly, there were the poor who had striven and worked hard all their lives, but who had been made poor, or kept poor by the wrong-doing and oppressions of others…. With fiery eloquence he went on to denounce the men who refused political justice to their neighbours, and who held them down till their life was made one long desperate struggle for mere existence.
As his eloquence and indignation gathered force, ‘the feelings of the audience were manifested by fervid ejaculations… until at last one, carried away by Mr Rushton’s strong denunciation of oppressors, cried out, “Ay, damn ’em, damn ’em.” 3
While such men as Rushton brought exceptional moral fervour to the movement in many districts nothing would be more mistaken than to suppose that they were predisposed to favour the ‘moral force’ (as opposed to ‘physical force’) party within Chartism. On the contrary, they served a God of Battles whom the men of the New Model Army would have understood; and more than a few former lay preachers were willing to speak to the text, ‘He that hath no sword let him sell his garment and buy one.’ Rushton – described by a friend as ‘as steady, fearless, and honest a politician as ever stood upon an English platform’ – was willing to lead the Plug Rioters (and to incur another term of imprisonment); and, when in his sixties, he was still campaigning and speaking on behalf of Ernest Jones. The weaver-preacher was in demand until his death; now we find him preaching in worn clothing and clogs at an anniversary service in a weaving hamlet to a congregation in ‘their best clothes, namely, clogs and working clothes, including long brats or bishops’; now we find him tramping many miles every night, in an effort to keep the spirit alive in struggling Chartist branches. (Once a young colleague noted that Rushton’s clogs were worn through to the sock. ‘Ay,’ said the old man, pausing only a moment in his political discourse, ‘but think of the reward hereafter.’) His death, in 1853, was the occasion for a great Chartist funeral; since Rushton had stipulated that no paid priest should officiate, the orations were delivered by Gammage and Ernest Jones.1
But Jabez Bunting and Ben Rushton did not belong to the same worlds. It is only by doing violence to the imagination that we can conceive of the Chartist weaver and the authoritarian clergyman as ever having been connected in a common ‘movement’. For who was Rushton but the Adam whom Bunting’s God had cursed?