Susanna Wesley’s letters give us a better view of the whole person than do her larger theological and educational writings and her devotional journal. Theological and spiritual concerns are never far from the surface in her correspondence (indeed, word for word, they predominate) and so are moments of introspection, but family news and relationships also frequently come up in interesting, though not always explicit, ways. The everyday world at least frames the theological and devotional content of the letters and enables the reader to fill in the life details and sketch more fully the worldview of this remarkable woman.
The collection presented in this part consists of 72 letters—74, if we count the second parts of two double letters. Because of their length and intentional composition, three additional letters have been grouped in part III as theological treatises. The first extant letter dates from 1702, when Susanna was a young wife of 33, and the last, from 1741, when she was a 72-year-old widow, a year before her death. Unfortunately, we have no writing of any kind from the period before her marriage. However, each decade of the century, up to and including that of the 1740s, is represented, though some better and more consistently than others.
Most of the letters were written to family members. Not surprisingly, we have 36 letters to John, whose fame would ensure the saving and eventual archiving of a voluminous correspondence. Beginning with his time at Oxford, they focus intensely on issues of “practical divinity,” imparting theological advice appropriate for the various early career stages he was going through.
Slightly less than half that amount, 17, are addressed to Susanna’s eldest son, Samuel Wesley Jr., owing in part to his keeping a letter book (his mother’s idea) full of copied correspondence that has otherwise disappeared. All but two of these were written before the end of 1710, and they mainly consist of moral and spiritual counsel during his years as a scholar at Westminster School. Two letters illustrate her conversation with him as an adult, one during his teaching career at Westminster School and one near the end of his life when he was headmaster of Blundell’s School in Tiverton.
Her youngest son, Charles, received at least nine, two of which were included in those double letters just mentioned that were sent as part of letters to John. She was writing Charles during and after his Oxford career, in part arguing against what she perceived to be theological exaggerations of her recently converted son.
Two letters are addressed to her husband, Samuel Wesley Sr., penned to defend her alleged liturgical irregularities while he was in London attending the Church of England convocation in early 1712. And her brother Samuel Annesley Jr., the East India merchant, is represented by a long letter that both justifies her husband’s lack of business acumen and pleads on behalf of her family, then as always in dire financial straits. Two of the three “letters” included in part III are addressed to Suky, her next to eldest daughter, and the third relegated to that part of this volume is the well-known letter to John recounting her child-rearing and educational approach.
Surviving letters to people outside the family number only nine. Two each were written to Lady Yarborough and the Rev. George Hickes, the earliest ones in this volume and four of the most interesting in the way they shed light on a political, religious, and marital quarrel between Susanna and her husband. Two were addressed to a neighboring clergyman, the Rev. Joseph Hoole, in 1710 and 1716; and one each was sent near the end of her life to two women friends or acquaintances, Mrs. Alice Peard and the countess of Huntingdon. There is also one letter to an unknown person, a young clergyman seeking advice on how best to obtain ecclesiastical preferment.
We may surmise that this collection represents only a sampling of her letters, those that for one reason or another have survived. It is particularly disappointing that we have so few letters written to women. Correspondence with her grown daughters, her sister Ann Annesley in London, and other women relatives and friends was probably discarded at an early stage. Apart from the two treatises in letter form addressed to her daughter Susanna (in part III of this volume), there are only four in the entire collection, those mentioned above: the two to Lady Yarborough, the one to Alice Peard, and the one to the countess of Huntingdon.
I have been able to work from original manuscripts in most cases. The Methodist Archives (MA) at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, owns a number of holographs and also both Samuel Jr.’s (SWJr) and John’s letter books (LB). An additional holograph each has surfaced at Wesley’s Chapel, London; at the Melbourne Public Library in Australia; and in a private collection in London, all of which I have been able to examine in photocopied form. The first four letters in this series (the Yarborough and Hickes correspondence) were carefully edited for publication in 19S3; as I judge these to be trustworthy, I have not sought out the originals. For a few, I necessarily depend on John Wesley’s editing when he prepared a number of his mother’s letters for publication in his Journal and in his Arminian Magazine (AM) later in the century. For one other, I am at the mercy of George Stevenson, the nineteenth-century Methodist historian whose editorial work on dozens of letters is not always reliable.1
The chronological arrangement I follow allows the reader to witness the unfolding of Susanna Wesley’s personality throughout a good portion of her life. Coin-cidentally this sequence also breaks fairly conveniently into thematic sections, or chapters, to which I have prefixed brief introductions that give a sense of the personal, family, and theological issues in each. Endnotes also help with the identification of unfamiliar names and terms.
We need not be detained here with details on letters and letter writing in the eighteenth century, though such knowledge obviously enriches one’s appreciation for Susanna’s output.2 More to the interpretive point and more helpful in the reading of these letters as literary texts is a recent perspective on the “strategies of deflection” used by women correspondents in that era.3 Patricia Meyer Spacks has argued, “Eighteenth-century letters by women reflect and elucidate the conflict between the desire for self-assertion and the need for self-suppression.”4 A reading of Susanna Wesley’s letters reveals a similar conflict and the development of a similar “rhetoric” to help in the process of self-definition. The self-deprecation that Spacks finds in her research5 echoes again and again in Susanna’s letters. However, that lip service to contemporary social convention is undercut by a deeply formed sense of self, a Puritan self-understanding that ultimately values the individual and empowers her when in conflict with “the world,” however that might be construed. That sense of self allows her not only to love and support her family but also to advise, teach, argue with, and sometimes stubbornly resist even her husband, brother, and sons.
1. Memorials of the Wesley Family … (London: S. W Patridge; New York: Nelson and Phillips, 1876), passim.
2. See Professor Frank Baker’s excellent, concise introduction to his first volume of John Wesley’s correspondence: The Works of John Wesley: Vol. 25. Letters I (1721–1739) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), especially pp. 11–28 (“An Age of Correspondence”).
3. Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Female Rhetorics,” in Shari Benstock, ed., The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 177–191. Her analysis focuses on the letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Mary Granville Delany (coincidentally, a sometime friend and correspondent of John Wesley).
4. Ibid., pp. 177–178.
5. Ibid., p. 188.