In an early entry (17 according to the system used in this edition) Susanna Wesley gives her rationale for keeping a diary and hints at her method.
Keep the mind in a temper for recollection, and often in the day call it in from outward objects, lest it wander into forbidden paths. Make an examination of your conscience at least three times a day and omit no opportunity of retirement from the world.
Setting aside three periods of meditation at the beginning, middle, and end of a busy day was a typically Puritan approach. So, too, was the recording of spiritual questions and insights in a devotional diary, a custom followed by various members of the Annesley and Wesley families, both Anglican and Nonconformist. Her emphasis on the sabbath (see entries 165–168) also exemplified her Puritan background.1 However, her spirituality was eclectic enough (paralleling English spirituality in general at the time) to draw also on method and content from other strands of Christianity. The devotional journal may have been a Puritan substitute for the confessional, but Anglicans also kept them.2 There was a rigorous devotional tradition among the Nonjurors she so admired, as well as among the Caroline divines, whose spirituality has been described as the “disciplined response to the leading of the Spirit.” 3 In places her diary becomes a virtual commonplace book of excerpts from and/or responses to such diverse non-Puritan sources as the French historian Lewis Maimbourg and his compatriot the philospher Nicolas Malebranch; Anglican divines William Beveridge, Richard Lucas, Gilbert Burnet, and possibly George Rust; not to mention figures with a more enduring reputation, Blaise Pascal, John Locke, and George Herbert. The Book of Common Prayer claims her attention in two instances, there are hints of Platonic language in at least one place, and the whole is suffused with biblical quotations and allusions.
Whatever the genre’s origin, the diary functions for Susanna Wesley as a “means of grace,” as well as a spiritual account book. It is first and foremost an explicit and important part of her spiritual life.
However, there is more to Susanna Wesley’s journal than personal piety (and the fleeting revelations it gives about her family and home life). After all, diaries were, in addition to letters, the main mode of written self-expression open to early eighteenth-century women. As recent examinations of this genre have shown,4 women’s diaries in the early modern period not only provide a previously overlooked women’s-eye view of their lives but also give us evidence, in the very act of writing to, for, and about themselves, that women could wrest a sense of self apart from the male-dominated assumptions of church and society.5
Religious diaries predominated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: three-quarters of the Stuart women’s diaries that Sara Heller Mendelson studied had substantial sections devoted to piety, and more than half were initiated, like Susanna Wesley’s, for religious reasons.6 The devotional journal (in Harriet Blodgett’s terms, “the formulaic diary of conscience”) did emerge under Puritan auspices as a way of searching the individual soul, recounting the ups and downs of the spiritual life, and thus supporting the “lifelong struggle with the enemy.” 7
One notable characterstic that Susanna Wesley’s devotional journal shares with other women’s diaries is a certain reticence, a discomfort about writing with complete openness and spontaneity. Women’s diaries were often inhibited—whether by the fear of a husband or other family member finding and reading the diary or by the power of one’s own internalized censor, for instance, the feeling that self-expression, even in a private diary, might contravene the ideal of female modesty. For such reasons Blodgett finds many diaries to be “neither self-reflective nor selfrevealing, except minimally and inadvertently,” and the epigraph on the flyleaf of Susanna Wesley’s first journal notebook could have been taken directly from one of the popular conduct books that inculcated modest expression among women: “Think much and speak little.” 8
Susanna Wesley’s older sister, Elizabeth, was avoiding the appearance of prideful and inappropriate self-expression when she tried to prevent others from reading the diary she kept over a period of some 20 years. According to the preface to her funeral sermon,
she was so far from Vain-Glory, or Affectation of being talkt of after Death, that she desired that all those large Papers might be burnt, though even much of what she writ was in a Short-hand of her own Invention.9
The literal coding of thoughts in private shorthand (and there are several brief and indecipherable instances of this in Susanna Wesley’s journal), suggests that a more figurative “encoding” may have taken place, as well.10 Thus, while most Englishwomen diarists have accepted their male-dominated lot without complaint, there have always been some who “show conscious and unconscious defiance of that arrangement of power and its ramifications.” 11 Paradoxically, the acceptance and the defiance seem not to be mutually exclusive.
All of this is to say that Susanna Wesley’s private devotional diaries may be read on at least two levels. There is, first, a more conventional reading, which emphasizes her traditional spirituality, her submission to God and to the divinely ordered scheme of things. Then there is a second, less obvious approach, which requires a certain amount of decoding and reading between the lines but ultimately reveals a woman attempting to define herself over against the established powers. This second reading will help us make sense of the questioning, the bold resolutions, the exploration, and the wrestling with contemporary ideas that are woven into the fabric of Susanna Wesley’s diaries.
Part II of this volume is based on some 255 entries or meditations that survive in three notebooks and two fragments in her handwriting and in two nineteenthcentury printed sources. Only a handful of the entries are dated, but they do give us some sense of the historical context in which Susanna Wesley was writing. The earliest journal entries are from 1709 and the latest date is 1727, with the bulk of the work probably belonging to the first half of that period.’12
Thus we are granted a fairly close look at the inner life of Susanna Wesley beginning at age 40, with all of her childbearing done but a good deal of her child rearing still before her. Though according to an early source she started keeping her diary nearly a decade earlier,13 the 1709 date at least represents a new beginning, all of the family’s books and papers having been destroyed by the rectory fire early that year.
Extracts of the journals have appeared from the time of Whitehead’s biography up to the present day. In good Victorian fashion, they have often been excerpted and/or heavily edited for reasons of theology or taste; a twentieth-century English edition has even turned some of them into prayers for the Methodist faithful. Though scholars have had access to many of the entries at various points in the past, this volume is the first time they have been assembled, annotated, and introduced in one place.14
To facilitate reference and ease of reading, I have prefixed my own bracketed number and title to each of the journal entries. The consecutive numbers are a fairly reliable guide to chronological order within each manuscript but do not necessarily indicate priority among entries in different manuscripts.
1. See John Newton, Susanna Wesley and the Puritan Tradition in Methodism (London: Epworth, 1968), pp. 136 and 140, especially his entire chapter, “Serious Godliness,” pp. 131–158, in which he connects S. W with her birthright tradition through her father, Samuel Annesley, as well as through other prominent Puritans like Richard Baxter. On the sabbath, see Gordon S. Wakefield, “The Puritans,” in Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold, S. J., eds., The Study of Spirituality (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 442. S. W.’s sister Elizabeth Dunton kept a diary, as did at least one of her daughters, Martha Hall. On the former, see the preface to her funeral sermon by Timothy Rogers, The Character of a Good Woman … (London: John Harris, 1697), and John Dunton’s The Life and Errors … , 2 vols. (London: J. Nichols, Son, and Bentley, 1818), 1:277–278; original ed. (London: S. Malthus, 1705). For the latter, see Adam Clarke, Memoirs of the Wesley Family; Collected Principally from Original Documents, 2nd ed. (London: Thomas Tegg, 1843–1844), 2:361–369. Her two most famous sons also kept diaries and/or journals, though of considerably wider scope than their mother’s. John Wesley’s journal, currently being edited in seven volumes by W Reginald Ward and Richard Hcitzcnratcr as part of the bicentennial edition of Wesley’s works, continues to be one of the classics of the genre.
2. The provocative insight is William Haller’s in The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), pp. 38, 96–97; reprint ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984); it is taken up approvingly in Newton, Susanna Wesley, p. 140, and Owen C. Watkins, The Puritan Experience: Studies in Spiritual Autobiography (New York: Schocken, 1972), p. 18. However, Wakefield, in Jones et al, Study of Spirituality p. 439, claims that Haller is “not wholly justified” in making that assertion. Haller himself notes, pp. 229–230, that Archbishop Laud, archfoe of the Puritans, kept a diary.
3. Martin Thornton, “The Caroline Divines and the Cambridge Platonists,” in Jones et al., Study of Spriituality, p. 436.
4. Sara Heller Mendelson, “Stuart Women’s Diaries and Occasional Memoirs,” in Mary Prior, ed., Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London and New York: Methuen, 198S), pp. 181–210, nicely sets the stage for Susanna Wesley’s earliest diaries. Harriet Blodgett, Centuries of Female Days: Englishwomen’s Private Diaries (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), puts the genre into a wider historical perspective. Both provide helpful suggestions for further reading on diaries in general and Englishwomen’s diaries in particular.
5. Mendelson looks to diaries for “women’s own sensibilities or the minutiae of their daily lives” (“Diaries,” p. 181, elaborated on at some length, pp. 189–200) and hints only occasionally at their role in developing a new sense of female identity (e.g., pp. 194, 201). Blodgett, using her larger canvas, can paint a more detailed picture of how the genre functioned in changing women’s lives, though she, too, is interested in what diaries can tell us about their lives. Not only are diaries “confidants” and “consciences,” they also “support and reinforce the female sense of self.” (Female Days, pp. 63ff, her second chapter, “Personal Time: Motivations and Justifications for Diary Keeping.”) The theme recurs throughout the book.
6. Mendelson, “Diaries,” p. 185.
7. Blodgett, Female Days, is quoting Watkins, Puritan Experience, p. 18, on her p. 265, n. 16. She regards the religious diary as one of the ancestors of the modern diary (p. 23), but she tries (not always successfully, given the pervasiveness of religiosity in the early modern worldview) to exlude it from her study (p. 12). Even so, her analysis is often provocatively helpful in reading Susanna Wesley’s unapologetically devotional outpourings.
8. Blodgett, Female Days, p. 41; see also pp. 41–62 for her extended discussion on the various reasons for such reticence. Angeline Goreau makes a good case for the importance of a broadly defined modesty, a metaphorical extension of the virtue of chastity, in silencing women. As inculcated by seventeenth-century moralists in “conduct books,” modesty was not just a matter of avoiding ostentatious dress and flirtatious behavior but could extend to any perceived boldness of expression. As the anonymous author of The Whole Duty of a Woman puts it: “Your looks, your speech, and the course of your whole behaviour, should own an humble distrust of your selves; rather being willing to learn and observe, than to dictate and prescribe… . There is scarce any thing to be found that appears more indecent, than to be proud, or too forward in overmuch talk, or indecent behaviour.” Angeline Goreau, The Whole Duty of a Woman: Female Writers in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Dial, 1985), pp. 52–53. See also her introduction, pp. 1–20, and extended excerpts from other conduct books in the chapter “Education: ‘Modesty,’ “pp. 35–64. S. W’s epigraph is remarkably close to the complaint of a protofeminist tract, The Female Advocate: “… one great commendation of our sex is to know much and speak little …” (quoted in Goreau, p. 13). Of course, an even more egregious breach of modesty than keeping a diary would be writing for publication, an issue S. W faced only once (see part III of this volume).
9. Timothy Rogers, The Character of a Good Woman … in a Funeral Discourse … of Mrs. Elizabeth Dunton … (London: John Harris, 1697), quoted in Mendelson, “Diaries,” p. 184. Rogers was able, however, to coax some of her writings from her during her last illness and made excerpts of pious passages, which lie included in the sermon
10. Blodgett, Female Days, p. 59.
11. Ibid., p. 135. She further suggests the techniques employed in expressing such deliance: “grumbling, outright complaining, undercutting and manipulating of men, and even … outright insubordination.”
12. Headingley MS A ranges from 1709–1718 (seven dates, including one on the flyleaf and the others scattered among 165 entries); a second set, beginning at the back of the same notebook, dates from 1709 to 1727 (six dates in 19 entries). Headingley MS B contains no dates in 15 entries, as does Headingley MS C in 17 entries, though the latter is part of a notebook with draft letters from 1709, 1710, and possibly 1711. The fragments from archives in Baltimore and Manchester contain no dates in six entries; nor do any of the 26 additional entries in the Wesley Banner and the six entries in Clarke’s Wesley Family.
13. John Whitehead, The Life of the Rev. John Wesley … (New York: R. Worthington, 1881, p. 34; original ed. London, 1793 and 1796.
14. All subsequent publication until now seems to have come from one or more of the following three collections, (a) Ibid., pp. 34–36, selects those we have designated entries 191 (from Headingley MS B) and 250–255 (missing material), (b) Wesley Banner, 1852, includes the following: on pp. 201–205, 245–248 entries 219 (from the Baltimore fragment), missing material 220–228, 229–230 (Baltimore fragment), missing material 231–247; and on pp. 282–287, 323–326, 365–366, 404–406, 443–445 entries 4–21, 162, 22–27, 29–36, 164, 37–43 (somewhat oddly ordered) from MS A. (c) Clarke includes on pp. 257–263 entries 185–199 (from MS B) and on pp. 263–265 missing material entries 250–255. The remaining entries in MS A (1–3, 28, 44–161, 163, 165–184) have, as far as I can tell, never been published. In the twentieth century, W. L. Doughty, The Prayers of Susanna Wesley (London: Epworth, 1956), and following him, Donald I.,. Kline, Susanna Wesley: God’s Catalyst for Revival (Lima, Ohio: C. S. S, 1980), have heavily edited various entries for modern devotional purposes.