Christian History Magazine Collection

by the editors of Christian History magazine from Christian History magazine no. 2

John Wesley grew up in a world of rapid change, very much like ours in some respects and very different in others. The whole way of work was changing in eighteenth-century England. Revolutions in smelting, spinning, and distilling created whole new industries. The world of science was unfolding— the first chemical tables, the first comprehensive biological classification system, the first experiments with the physics of electricity, of photographic materials, and of the steam engine, emerged during Wesley’s life.

Meanwhile, the cities collected the debris of society. Poverty, gin, and filthy living conditions in the city contrasted with the refined life of the new city gentry and the new country gentry, with their ample incomes or lands. The gentleman with his fixed income did not worry about work. He bought a military commission or spent his days with good friends and good literature, as did the young James Boswell. Very few Britishers were this fortunate.

When Wesley began his itinerant preaching in the seventeen thirties, there were no railroads, only a few coach lines, a network of notoriously bad dirt roads, no well-marked maps, no restaurants, and only occasional inns. Instead of welfare or any other relief for the poor, the government gave punishment for the crime of poverty—confinement to a work house. Churches helped some of the poor, but they were mainly the domain of the well-to-do. Still, only five or six members of Parliament even went to church!

Personal health and cleanliness were deplorable. The plague, smallpox, and countless diseases we call minor today had no cures. Rodent and insect control was minimal. Most dwellings had no running water, had chamber pots only for elimination, and had no soap as it was not yet in common use. Infant mortality was extremely high, and a person’s life expectancy was in the forties. Clothing was expensive, so many of the cities’ poor wore rags that were, like their bedding, full of lice. Even though the penalties for crimes today seem barbaric (hanging for petty thievery), no man was safe in the cities or on the highways or even on the high seas.

Imagine a world with no street lights, with no numbers on the doors of homes to tell addresses, with no television, no radio, no telephone, no telegraph, no efficient mail system, no frozen foods or even effective refrigeration, no cars, no vending machines, no electricity, no free libraries, and no aspirin. School of any kind was for the very few; therefore literacy was very rare. Corporal punishment was public—the stocks, the whip, the clipping of ears and nose, worse.

To us today even the terms of apprenticeship seem more like slavery than like work. Young boys and sometimes girls were bound over to a master for seven years of training. They worked six days a week, every day from dawn to dusk and often beyond. Finally they might gain their freedom and set up shop on their own. Or they would journey to work for whatever masters could use them for a while.

Those that migrated to the cities from rural areas neither had the proper skills nor could find many jobs. Perhaps you could sweep streets, run behind a man’s carriage, or sell yourself as a lowly servant. Perhaps you might drink with a group of good soldiers and awaken in camp with other forcibly recruited vagabonds, bound for the wars. If you were unlucky and starving, you might fall foul of the law and be packed off to the stench of Newgate Prison. From there you might have the chance to go to the New World in a boat loaded with prisoners of all sorts. Once you left the countryside, which was closing up, you did not return. Men took to theft, women to prostitution—whatever would feed them.

Samuel Johnson, the great doctor and creator of the great dictionary of English, wrote that if a man is tired of London, “he is tired of life.” Yet Johnson himself had to write with fury a book called Rasselas to make money to give his mother a decent burial; otherwise she would have been cast in a pauper’s grave. Johnson’s friend Oliver Goldsmith wrote The Vicar of Wakefield, a documentary view of poverty in the rural England of his day. In the city or in the country poverty was the norm.

Views of city and country life with a touch of romance are in Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, and Roderick Random, by Tobias Smollett. Fielding was a judge and Smollett was a medical doctor who retired to write and to live off his wealthy wife’s fortune. The Rev. Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, was so outraged by the injustice around him that he wrote “A Modest Proposal,” which ironically suggested that child abuse and infant mortality were so bad in Ireland that children there should be raised only to be cooked and eaten. Poor Swift died mad and in delirium.

One of the greatest indictments of the age was in William Hogarth’s prints about the conditions of life around him. Hogarth’s print series warn about promiscuity and idleness and extreme religiosity, particularly that strain of evangelism brought out by George Whitefield, Wesley’s friend. Gin Lane and Beer Street rival, and in some respects surpass, present-day city scenes. One ragged mother in Gin Lane is letting her crying baby fall to his death while she, oblivious, seeks her moment’s pleasure in a glass of gin. Gin was fed to the babies too, to keep them quiet, with blindness and often death as a result. The people’s love of tormenting animals at bull-baitings was equalled only by their delight in a public execution.

If a woman could find work in the slave-trading town of Bristol, Wesley’s base of operation, she could look forward to none of the privileges of modern workers. Stifling heat or bitter cold, no breaks, no benefits, no child—care, small wages, and firing for the least provocation were standard fare. Of course, there were no unions. Swearing and physical abuse set the tone of work. There was no variety, there were no vacations, there was no advancement.

If a man was able to find work in one of the coal mining towns (started when the iron works shifted from charcoal to coke), he was thankful to rise at three-thirty AM for breakfast, work in the mine shafts with poor ventilation all day, then creep into bed at nightfall to begin again the next day. On Sunday he was too dirty and too poor to find comfort in a church, and he was likely to be turned away by an Anglican beadle if he tried. He lived in a warehouse-like building in the same enormous room with other mining families and had no privacy. Yet he bred many children, and those who lived went back to work in the mines when they were old enough. It was the overseers’ policy to keep miners on the edge of starvation, and what were the miners to do? They could barely eat and there was nowhere else to work.

What we know of today as a social conscience was not a prevailing state of mind in Wesley’s day. Remember that the Declaration of Independence was written when Wesley was an old man and the Rousseau’s Social Contract was written when he was in middle age. Political guarantees were considered revolutionary. The Church of England preached that man’s station in life was a reflection of his state of grace. The monarch was God’s vicar, and the power descending down the chain of being from the throne reached to the gentry and perhaps the artisans and no further.

In this world of little hope and few options, John Wesley appeared on the scene. Where his brother Samuel followed the prescribed path for sons of the clergy—to become a stolid gentleman preacher in the Anglican Church, associating with the gentlemen and wits of the day, John and Charles Wesley took a path that was hazardous and requiring self-sacrifice. John decided to live on a stipend of 28 pounds annually (well below the poverty level by today’s standards), using any additional earnings to fund his various ministries. Charles turned down a fortune in inheritance from an Irish relative to do God’s work. What made such men? And why did they turn out so very different from their elder brother Samuel?