Sally Wesley, the Evangelical Bluestockings, and the Regulation of Enthusiasm

Chapter Six considers the networks surrounding Sally Wesley, John Wesley’s niece and Charles Wesley’s only daughter. Wesley was at the center of a network of latter day Bluestockings who produced and circulated material around the turn of the nineteenth century. Of particular interest to this diverse group was the nature and influence of evangelical feeling and enthusiasm on British life and letters. Analysis of Wesley’s network reveals members from all social and religious backgrounds debating and discussing the proper role of religious enthusiasm—arguing for the importance of a well-regulated enthusiasm to the creation and distribution of literary work. Specifically, it explores how other women in Wesley’s circle, particularly Mary Tighe, Elizabeth Hamilton, and Maria Spilsbury, addressed the issue of religious enthusiasm. Based on this evidence it considers the question of how religion and theology helped women like Sally Wesley structure and inform their artistic production in conversation with the shifting roles for women in Regency society and artistic movements like Romanticism.

The Shifting Discourse Culture of Methodism, 1791–1832

This chapter lays out some of the shifts in Methodist discourse culture that occurred during the early nineteenth century and suggests that, in response to these changes, Methodist women found new ways to reach their audiences and work around the Methodist hierarchy. In particular, it focuses on the lives and writings of Sarah Crosby, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Mary Tooth, and other members of their circle in order to illustrate how they adapted earlier Methodist discourse practices for new and potentially subversive purposes. It then turns to the work of evangelical Anglican Hannah More in the 1790’s and early 1800’s to consider how a very well-known female evangelical within the Church of England negotiated a shifting discursive terrain, especially in her Cheap Repository Tracts and her work with the Mendip Hills Sunday Schools which led to the Blagdon Controversy.

Mary Wollstonecraft, Hester Ann Rogers, and the Textual/Sexual Enthusiasms of Women’s Life-Writing

Chapter Four examines women’s life-writing and the formation of an “erotic imagination” within life-writing as a genre. It begins by examining the Account of the Experience of Hester Ann Rogers (1793), one of the most influential works of Methodist life-writing, and reads it as against her earlier manuscript versions of the work. This reading reveals some of the ways and reasons Methodist women navigated different publication platforms and life-writing genres (private diary, semi-public scribal publication, print publication) in order to reach different audiences. Specifically, it examines Rogers’ status as a Methodist “mystic” who, in her diaries and manuscript works, represents a deeply erotic female mysticism that is edited out of her print publications. The chapter then turns to Rogers’ contemporary, Mary Wollstonecraft, to consider how both women use the life-writing genre to re-write the terms and conditions of female desire while textually re-orienting this desire away from the male gaze.

Hunting the Methodist Vixen

Chapter One lays out the broad conceptual stakes of the book’s argument, reviews the existing literature on Methodism, Romanticism, and women’s writing, and points to some of the modes of analysis that are pursued in the rest of the book. Furthermore, it lays out the rationale for examining women like Mary Wollstonecraft and Felicia Hemans, who would not have identified as evangelicals, in the context of evangelical women. The goal is not to trace influence, necessarily, but instead to examine how evangelical discourse came to permeate many different aspects of British culture. More broadly speaking this chapter explores of the stakes of the volume and lays out a conceptual framework for understanding how specific changes to the protocols of mediation that Methodists in general, and Methodist women in particular, pioneered can be mapped onto women’s writing more broadly during the long eighteenth-century.

Evangelicalism, Mediation, and Social Change

This chapter briefly synthesizes the findings of the volume, considering how evangelical media affected British life and letters more broadly during the long eighteenth century. While evangelicalism itself was, and continues to be, a contested category—reading evangelicalism primarily as part of the history of mediation allows us for a better understanding of the enduring power and influence of the movement. It also troubles narratives of secularization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and better explains the continuing influence of evangelical religion and evangelical media practices today. This chapter reveals that, once a discursive space has been opened up and the outsiders invited in, it can be very difficult to comprehensively close it again.

Agnes Bulmer, Felicia Hemans, and Poetry as Theology

This chapter examines how women used theological poetry to enter into public space during the 1820’s and 30’s through its consideration of the works of Agnes Bulmer and Felicia Hemans. In particular, the chapter focuses on changing definitions of Christian womanhood in Methodism and how Bulmer negotiated them as a poet, scholar, wife, and faithful Methodist. It then turns to Bulmer’s epic poem, Messiah’s Kingdom, to explore how she develops her epic theology—accessing a tradition of women acting as prophets and priests to forward a unique systematic theology that places sense experience, of both the natural and spiritual worlds, at the center of evangelical hermeneutics. Finally, the chapter turn to Hemans’ religious poetry, and particularly the Songs and Hymns of Life, to witness how Hemans at the end of her life uses poetry to advocate for a public religious role for women. In essence she “takes a text” in the Methodist sense and licenses poetic preaching in a world that was rapidly revolving away from these types of roles for women.

The Secret Textual History of Pamela, Methodist

Chapter Three explores how the manuscript practices of early Methodism, and particularly the writing and circulation of familiar and spiritual letters can be mapped onto the discourse culture that brought about the publication of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and the media storm it engendered. In particular, it focuses on a collection of letters that were sent to Charles Wesley by female converts during the early years of the revival. Analysis of the form, content, and circulation of these types of spiritual letters helps make clear some of the links between the discourse of evangelicalism and the discourse of the early novel, most notably in the shared textual histories and similar protocols of mediation that define early works in each field.

An Overview of Methodist Discourse Culture, 1738–1791

This chapter introduces and provides and overview of the unique discourse structures, like the class meeting, that Methodism pioneered. Specifically, it traces the development of Methodist discourse from the wild and raucous beginning of the movement in 1738 until the death of John Wesley in 1791, after which the fundamental character of Methodism and its discourse structures changed. The emphasis in this chapter is especially on how early Methodists combined oral, manuscript, and print mediation practices to create a diverse, diffuse, and fundamentally unstable and uncontrollable discourse culture which had impacts on literary developments like the rise of the novel and the literature of sensibility. In particular it argues that early Methodism should be read in terms of what William Warner calls a “media event,” which made possible new means and protocols of mediation within a space of contestation and debate over what Methodism was and how dangerous its effects could be.