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Chapter 2

Loosening the Bonds of Family and Society

In the eighteenth century, the ideal Methodist convert was a young individual, someone who used her youthful energy to further evangelical growth. In Dee Andrews’s meticulous survey of membership records in the Middle Atlantic region of America, she discovered a “prototype” for Methodist laity in the late eighteenth century: a woman who was sixteen to twentyfour years old, unmarried, and still living at home or making her living as a servant.¹ Reaching young men was also necessary for sustaining evangelical growth; the grueling pace and sacrifice of the preachers’ circuit was seen as a young man’s job. The prototypical circuit preacher Freeborn Garrettson joined the preaching ranks at the age of twenty-four, covering much of the Middle Atlantic and upper South, traveling over 100,000 miles from 1776 to 1793.² As young as many converts were, they had to consider their ties to their blood families when they joined the evangelical family.

Alienation from one’s birth family was often a necessary preliminary step toward becoming a Methodist, especially from the late 1730s to the second decade of the nineteenth century. In their letters and journals, young Methodists regularly recorded the scorn and disapprobation of their families. Evangelical literature and fellowship helped these young converts through the pangs of separation from their previous lives, families, and friends. At the same time, anti-Methodist literature stoked the idea that there were two competing cultures in a young convert’s life, one belonging to their natal family and tradition and the other to the strange ways of the Methodists. Early converts heard gossip and read pamphlets that characterized evangelicals as low class, deranged, self-serving, and false. As the first generations of evangelicals joined this group, they encountered social and familial opposition based on these negative characterizations of Methodism. Most Methodists did not become orphans in the literal sense, but many experienced profound distancing from their natural families as they joined a larger family of believers.

The erosion of familial bonds was both a stereotypical anti-Methodist critique and an accurate description of reality. In multiple pamphlets and journals, Methodists were charged with being antifamily, leading young, impressionable minds away from their normal dispositions.³ In reality, Methodism did provide an impetus for separation from one’s given family, and evangelical narratives illustrate the details of this separation. In these narratives, Methodists described their new religious ideas as a source of conflict in their families, and they further described real and symbolic ruptures between evangelicals and society as a whole. New converts changed their ways by dressing differently, associating with different people, and generally holding different values, many of which transgressed gender and class norms. Methodists encouraged one another to take up the cross, to suffer in seriousness against the obstacles of family and friends. In 1792, American preacher Stith Mead encouraged young converts to avoid their old irreligious friends, writing that a truly religious convert would

not take pleasure in Company profane

Who wishes to Adulterate and alter her name …

Declaring she never her God will offend

To be the Companion of a wicked friend.⁴

Dissent into Madness

One signal that others saw Methodists as a distinct and disturbing family was the regularity of association between madness and Methodism in the eighteenth century. This was not simply a fictional caricature, because some Methodists described themselves as truly consumed by the psychological trials of conversion. The first step in conversion was conviction of sin, which made some evangelicals merely melancholy. In others, awareness of their sinfulness caused them to act in ways that would seem insane—crying, trembling, groaning, talking to God, and displaying severe emotional swings. After attending a Methodist sermon, the young English convert Mary Maddern was awakened to her sinfulness, and she became convinced that she would go to hell. When Maddern discovered Methodism, she was a teenager. Soon after she attended her first meetings, her parents forbid her to go to any more, arguing that the Wesley brothers “had drove Many to dispare through [their pernicious] Doctrine.”⁵ She seemed to confirm these rumors, when she left the Methodist meeting, “crying out what shall I do to be saved.” She felt worse, not better, after successive sermons, and experienced several months of deepening depression. She went through several more months of feeling alternately at peace and in despair, which continued until she joined a band and felt some spiritual stability after a few months with that group.⁶ Her inconsistency and her attraction to a society that seemed to make her lose her senses alienated her parents and friends. The behaviors of evangelical children made their parents fear for their children’s sanity, as parents saw firsthand the sort of depression that many Methodists described as the beginning stages of their conversion. This made Methodists seem dangerous and further produced an insider/outsider mentality that separated the believer from friends and family by a chasm of language, belief, custom, and culture that must have seemed unbridgeable at times.

Yet, American and British Methodists purposefully sought this suspension of the rational mind. If the believer truly felt the weight of his or her sinfulness, evangelical melancholy was a convincing sign of a convert’s conviction. Benjamin Abbott, who was a farmer in New Jersey, became part of a Methodist revival in 1772. He wrote that traveling home one day he was suddenly struck with the idea that “as I was one of the reprobates and there was no mercy for me, I had better hang myself and know the worst of it.” He denied himself all earthly pleasures, shunned his wife, avoided food, and had visions of the devil; he generally looked and felt awful. When he was born again after several days of being at the bottom, physically and mentally, it was a great relief to his family and friends as well as himself.⁷ This spiritual journey into darkness, visions, anxiety, and depression was part of a common stage in conversions. This period of conviction required the believer to wallow in his or her state of inherent sinfulness. For many, this meant reliving past sins as well as becoming acutely, painfully aware of the ways in which those sins were increasing daily. In fact, many Methodists never felt entirely free of this stage, since there were usually multiple backslidings in any Methodist’s life.

Parents’ worries were justified, according to anti-Methodist pamphlets that circulated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1809, Leigh Hunt proclaimed that liberal British society agreed that evangelical conversion was the first step toward the madhouse: “The Arminian and Evangelical Magazines are full of the dying comforts of their disciples, but why do they not give us a candid account of those who die in wretchedness of mind? Why do they not give us a list of the Methodist lunatics throughout the hospitals of England? If they wish to terrify sinners, it is strange they should conceal that most alarming fact in their church-history. I returned a short time since from a large manufacturing town in the North, where I had an opportunity of inspecting the godly a little more closely than in the mazy multitude of London.… Those who were more seriously affected became either melancholy or mad.”⁸ Parents had reason to fear for their children’s mental health, anti-Methodists maintained, if they became unmoored from their traditional religion and blood families to join with these dangerous fanatics. This widespread belief in Methodist-induced madness was so persistently circulated that Wesley felt it necessary to defensively claim the rationality of Methodists in the inaugural issue of the Arminian Magazine in 1778.⁹ This magazine was published in London originally, and then in Philadelphia as well, beginning in the 1780s. The association between ardent religiosity and insanity was already fully developed in eighteenth-century Anglo-American society, drawing upon a deep well of associative images from the Puritan ascendancy and the explosion in enthusiastic dissenting religions of the seventeenth-century interregnum period.¹⁰

In the late seventeenth century, medical authorities declared “religious melancholy” a category of mental illness, alongside the more serious category of “religious madness” with its symptoms of delusions and hallucinations. Eighteenth-century physicians took the visions and dreams of evangelicals as proofs of insanity, committing people under the diagnosis of “Methodically mad.”¹¹ Whereas early seventeenth-century dissenters risked being labeled as heretics and being legally persecuted, in the eighteenth century, dissenters risked being treated as mental patients. Anglican elites promoted this anti-Methodist view of mental health, in order to discredit evangelical religions.¹² This was not mere propaganda, because evidently doctors and parents took this association to heart. In the American South, some parents and spouses called for doctors when they saw the distressing effects of conviction on their loved ones.¹³ English Methodists were disproportionately committed to insane asylums in the eighteenth century, counting for as much as 25 percent of Bedlam’s inmates.¹⁴

While some concerned relatives deterred budding evangelicals with commitment to asylums and painful treatments, other parents expected the children to cure themselves, seeing religious melancholy as a self-inflicted state. Two young English converts faced similar responses from their parents in the face of their evangelical madness. Mary Bosanquet’s parents told her to “rouse [her] Self out of that Low state.”¹⁵ Likewise, Hester Roe’s mother described her daughter’s madness as a prison of her own making. In some cases, parents and others used madness more as a metaphor than as a real diagnosis of young Methodists.

This supposed separation from sanity actually described a separation from families and their religious, social, and cultural traditions. The symptoms of the sickness, the insane grief and obsession of conversion, were also symptoms of disengagement from the moderate ways of a convert’s familial faith. It had to be madness that forced sons and daughters to reject their upbringing and to prefer the company of Methodists to their birth families.

Dissent from Family and Society

Methodism was a religion of dissent during the eighteenth century, and this alone made it seem frightening to many people who were devoted to the Church of England. Despite the fact that John Wesley repeatedly avowed his allegiance to the Church of England and stated a desire to only supplement, not supplant, traditional worship, Methodism had all the markings of a dangerous sect. Its followers adopted a strange new language, one that had specific codes of discourse for addressing each other, for describing their leadership, and for shaping their emotions and religious fervor. At a profound level, Methodism seemed to provide young people with the tools to reject society and all of its customs. One of the persistent themes of anti-Methodist literature and everyday gossip in the eighteenth century was that Methodists simply did not know how to enjoy themselves. In their stringent adherence to austere moral and social codes, evangelicals rejected the commonplace joys of mainstream culture, according to their critics.

As diversions and entertainments increased in number, in theaters, novels, gambling houses, coffeehouses, and public houses, Methodists asked their members to abstain from these sorts of enjoyments. Methodists repudiated the normative social activities for young adults: dancing, gossiping, going to theater, dressing up, or being concerned with “trifling” things. Sometimes, in the accounts of young men, these behaviors included more serious sins, such as sexual indiscretions. For Virginian Stith Mead, who was twenty-two years old when he converted to Methodism in 1789, his religiosity flew in the face of his family’s beliefs and practices. He had enjoyed dancing, fencing, card playing, and fine clothes prior to his conversion, but denounced them afterward. To his family members, these were innocent pursuits, sanctioned by society and culture. Yet Methodists, alongside Baptists, had specific rules about how members should behave, and these rules dictated strict ideas about moral behavior. Evangelical rules for behavior often involved a denial of gender-specific roles of masculine sociability, feminine socialization, or engagement in the fashionable world.¹⁶ In 1738, John Wesley first set down the guidelines for Methodists in his Rules of the Band-Societies, and he went on to revise and republish these rules regularly during his lifetime; these rules became more commonly known as the Discipline.¹⁷

Alongside gender prescriptions, these rules also emphasized a plain way of life, wherein Methodists renounced much of the trappings of fashionable, excessive living and thereby any privileges of their class. As a broad directive, Methodists were enjoined to live as simply as possible and to help those in need. The Methodist Discipline emphasized the directive that its members practice frugality, spend their money only on necessities, and give the rest to charity. Wesley emphasized in various writings that holding money was not a problem, as long as it was not misspent. Followers were expected to give excess income to charity for the support of less fortunate Methodist members.¹⁸ Upper- and middle-class Methodists, like Stith Mead, Mary Bosanquet, and Hester Roe, emphasized the differences from their familial culture, by dressing more plainly, working harder, and avoiding social occasions.

By adopting the specific codes found in the Methodist Discipline, Methodists seemed to abruptly discard the values and activities of their birth families. Evangelicals countered the traditions with which they were raised, and they sent waves of disapprobation toward their unconverted parents, siblings, and friends. An anti-Methodist pamphlet charged: “It is not only the pomp and vanity of the world which [Methodist preachers] denounce, but the whole world itself, abstractedly considered, with all its enjoyments and attachments, from dancing, song-singing, and spectacle, to the happy frolic of youth.”¹⁹ As this writer describes, evangelicals’ antisocial behavior looked like a rejection of humanity altogether. In the accounts of young Methodists, they commonly voiced the need to dissociate from their peers, either because of their friends’ explicit anti-Methodist sentiments or their irreligious activities.²⁰

In the 1790s, Stith Mead often separated himself from his family in order to conduct prayers in secret, and this was a point of derision for his family members. He did not always pray alone, though, and made repeated efforts to convert the rest of his family. He was successful with one brother, Samuel, but the rest remained unconvinced. His uncle Nicholas Mead announced that “he would have no more praying,” after Nicholas’s wife started to respond to Stith’s efforts. Despite his labors, the Mead family continued their enjoyable social practices, and as one sister remarked, she “did not see the necessity of giving up all the pleasures of the world.”²¹ Later, Stith Mead wrote a series of letters to his father aimed at awakening his father and siblings. His brother Samuel, who had been on the path of conversion, had recently died, and Stith Mead was afraid that his father had led him spiritually astray before his death. Stith wrote his father a scathing letter: “Father, the Indulgeance of Fidling and Dancing, has ever been your beseting Sin, and I fear will be your final and Eternal Ruin; do you Continue to Send your Children to the dancing Schools or Indulge them to attend the balls? If so you are training them up for the DEVIL to make them an heir of Hell-fire.”²² Mead declared he was not afraid of the threat of disinheritance, weakening this incentive for filial obedience. Yet, even while telling his father he would burn in hell, Stith Mead signed his letters “Your dutiful Son in Jesus Christ.”²³ Mead’s father continued to resist his call for conversion, but he did leave his son a sizable inheritance.²⁴

Narratives of Separation

The personal sense of psychological transformation shared by Methodist converts appears in their autobiographical narratives. The conversion narrative was the central genre in the rise of evangelical print culture. The spread of Methodism relied on its models, which were transmitted through conversion narratives. These narratives exemplified the ways in which conversion changed individual lives and showed the extent to which entering the Methodist family was transformative, socially and culturally.

The importance of autobiographies and biographies to evangelical culture cannot be overemphasized. Building on the Puritan tradition of commonplace books, daybooks, and spiritual memoirs, eighteenth-century English and American evangelicals actively promoted the accounting and recounting of one’s spiritual life.²⁵ Privately, many Methodists recorded their daily experiences in journals and diaries that were later published or used for biographical sketches. Private reflection was the cornerstone of evangelical experience, and Methodists were ceaselessly contributing to narrative production as a group. These autobiographies became exemplars, which individual evangelicals would apply to their own lives.²⁶ Converts treated published and epistolary religious narratives much like personal advice from a family member. They wrote about these spiritual paragons in their letters and journals, and they condemned themselves for not living up to their examples. These autobiographies bound the culture together, across many miles, to produce translatable models of behavior and modes of religiosity that bound the transatlantic family.

As models of experience, evangelical narratives were particularly helpful in leading converts through the periods of transition, from their unawakened self to their converted self. Often these autobiographies were clearly organized around the (re)production of religious experience, framing the key moments of one’s life in terms of religious awakenings and transgressions. As the genre of conversion narratives developed through the eighteenth century, certainly the replication of language and emotional accounts became evident; by the middle of the nineteenth century, these narratives were obviously mimetic.²⁷ Yet, while the genre was still in its infancy in the eighteenth century, conversion narratives tended to include autobiographical detail that made the accounts highly individualized. These life stories were recounted in numerous journals and daybooks and through individual conversion narratives, which were written originally in letters and then published in pamphlets and magazines. Charles Wesley, in particular, was a great solicitor of conversion narratives. Laywomen responded volubly to his requests, and many noted the particular time and care it took them to write this sort of account, some demonstrating a painful lack of familiarity with writing altogether. Through these apertures, one can see the common patterns of language and custom in early Methodism and the emergence of a new sort of family.²⁸

Methodist conversion narratives followed similar stages in describing converts’ steps toward the Methodist family and away from their birth families. In these narratives, women and men went through the initial religious pangs of alienation from their old ways as they felt the conviction of their sins. In the next stage, they individuated, by separating from their old friends and family and more securely forming their own sense of spiritual expression. In the final stage, they rejoined a family, which was their evangelical family. These stages of alienation and individuation were similar to anthropological notions of separation, liminality, and reintegration.²⁹ Conversion narratives were central components in the formation of modern religious identity. As the eighteenth century witnessed an unprecedented expansion of mobility that loosened individuals from the traditional strictures in many ways, the conversion narrative was a way to reconstitute their sense of self and their new identities as religious converts. Religious historian Bruce Hindmarsh asserts, “Religious experience became, therefore, far more voluntary and self-conscious, and far less a matter of custom or givenness, as women and men were presented with alternatives. In this context the turn to spiritual autobiography played a crucial role by allowing believers to negotiate an identity that could no longer be merely assumed.”³⁰

In the primary stage of alienation, Methodists valorized the image of the lone saint struggling through multiple obstacles to realize his or her religious life. There is a strong theme in early Methodist literature that associates patient, Christ-like suffering with increasing godliness. Many early Methodist narratives feature the figures of the stalwart individual and the precocious child saint. The journals of Methodist women in particular reveal the difficulties that many early converts faced when attempting to join this group. Methodist women, more so than their male counterparts, tended to focus on this departure from their birth families. Their accounts make clear that the spiritual calling of Methodism tended to be individualized, which not only alienated relatives, but also transgressed the gender codes of eighteenth-century England and America. Women’s entry into Methodism was a phenomenon of particular concern to English and Anglo-American society.³¹

Some women framed their journey toward Methodism as a continuation of their moral upbringing, but more often the call to religiosity was ignited by an impulse from within. This heightened the individuality of spiritualism within the account and made each woman the central actor in her own conversion. Men were expected to take distinct paths for themselves in young adulthood, but women had to justify this individuation. In the surviving literature of conversion narratives, Methodist women were more likely to root their spiritual lives within their childhoods than their male counterparts were. In these portraits, women describe themselves as following their own, particular callings of religiosity, which often pitted their wills against their parents’. As young women, they described this disobedience as always balanced by their desires to be dutiful daughters. Yet, Methodists, who felt that their callings had divine origins, could justify even the most flagrant filial disobedience.

Separation from one’s parents was not a requirement for becoming a Methodist, but this was a persistent theme in autobiographical accounts of childhood. In some cases, the convert phrased this separation as a necessary weighing and shifting of priorities, the inevitable realization that the divine authority had superseded earthly ones. Hester Roe, for example, framed her conflicts with her mother as instances in which God permitted and encouraged her to disagree with her mother’s wishes. Methodists referred to the multiple passages in the Bible that state that a Christian’s devotion to God should supersede any concerns about family and friends. At a turning point in Mary Bosanquet’s individuation, she proclaimed that loving her parents more than God was now inconceivable and that she had to accept their disapproval. Bosanquet cited the example of Jesus, who asked his disciples to give up the ties of family, saying “he that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.”³² Eighteenth-century biblical commentator Matthew Henry interpreted this passage as an acknowledgment that disciples should expect persecution and avoid the concerns of the world. This directive is similar to the commandment to worship no other idols before God, and Methodists interpreted this commandment as a caution against idolizing people by allowing them to become more important than God. In Elizabeth Hayden’s narrative, she wrote that she had worshipped her mother. In 1789, she recounted, “Neithr of my Parents were in the narrow Way, and my Mother whom I idolized, was very tender and Affectionate (and many Years I had to wean me from my Idol).”³³

Through exposure to religious literature and practice, children garnered the right to be spiritual authorities over their parents, inverting the parentchild relationship.³⁴ In a letter to Charles Wesley in 1738, Mrs. Clagget wrote about her experience of being converted by her daughter, who had been secretly attending Methodist meetings. At first, she opposed her daughter’s evangelicalism, until the mother was converted by the combination of seeing Charles Wesley preach and listening to her daughter. She admitted to the curious inversion of finding her daughter spiritually wiser than herself. Clagget wrote, “[A]t about 13 [she] seemed utterly to have renounced the World and gave her Selfe wholy to God. I know See what before I had no notion off how far she has been made Instrumental to the bringing about my own Salvation, She everyday watched for opportunities of Shewing me the Danger I was in by being too Anxious about Temporal things whilst I neglected the one thing needfull, telling me that she desired not to be Rich or great, at the Hazard of my Eternal happiness.”³⁵

This story of a mother’s eventually joyful conversion under her daughter’s spiritual leadership was rare. More commonly, parents strenuously objected to their children’s evangelical conversion. As a result, young evangelical converts struggled with how to frame their relationships to their birth families. Converts could justify their seemingly rebellious behavior toward their parents by claiming that they owed their ultimate obedience to a higher spiritual authority. The theme of obedient disobedience within conversion narratives marked the sense that Methodists grappled with the conflict between the rules and customs of their birth family and the alternate codes and behaviors of their religious family.

The narratives of three young Methodist women, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Hester Ann Roe Rogers, and Catherine Livingston Garrettson, recount a common theme of alienation from their birth families, as they joined in the mores and customs peculiar to their new evangelical family. These women were educated enough to create coherent narratives of considerable length and were prominent lay leaders of the eighteenth-century Methodist movement. They represented the exemplars of aspiration so precious to the wider family of transatlantic evangelicals. Mary Bosanquet became a leader within Methodism, influential in her control of a major Methodist center and known for her power as an exhorter and preacher. Hester Roe and Catherine Livingston were never as prominent as Bosanquet, and never as close to the Wesley brothers. Yet, in their own way, they were also extremely important. Livingston encouraged the establishment of Methodism in upstate New York, an arena that would become more important to Methodists as the nineteenth century progressed. Roe’s published narrative became exemplary of the struggle of evangelical women and circulated throughout the English Atlantic world.

These narratives establish common stages that new converts would experience when joining Methodism in the eighteenth century. Their narratives follow a process of deconstructing the old codes of the birth families and joining a new family as a convert through their “new birth.” With slight variations, these narratives trace a common path to the new family: (1) a realization of difference, which can begin at an early age or in the teenage years; (2) recognition of an alternate religious life, resulting in conversion; (3) conflict and alienation from the ways of their birth family; (4) isolation within their birth family (becoming the lone, suffering saint); and (5) leaving their old family to join with the new family.

Figure 3. Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, engraving by John Chester Buttre, ca. 1855–85. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.

Mary Bosanquet’s Narrative

Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (1739–1815) wrote in her manuscript autobiography that she had felt, as a precocious four-year-old, that “god heard prayer.”³⁶ By the time she was five years old, she began to distinguish between sinful and good behavior and wondered about the fate of her soul.³⁷ From the beginning, Bosanquet felt different from other members of her family, who attended the Church of England but had little zeal.³⁸ In 1746, she discovered Methodism through her sister and their servant, and Bosanquet dramatically recalled the moment of recognizing the alternative to her natural family’s religious practices: “I well remember the very Spot we stood on, and the words She Spake, which tho we were but a few minutes together sunk so deeply into my heart they were never after Erase. My reflections were suited to a child not 7 years old. I thought if I became a Methodist I was sure to be saved and determined if Ever I could get at this people whatever it cost I would be one of them.”³⁹

Later in her childhood, she set about to conform her life to evangelical norms. This behavior marked her as different from her three siblings, and her parents were often perplexed by her strangeness and disobedience.⁴⁰ She recalled her mother’s chastising words: “that girl is the most preverse creature that ever lived, I cant think what is come into her.”⁴¹ Bosanquet continued to frame her childhood journey as a rebellious and isolating process, separating her even from the sister who had introduced her to Methodism. Her elder sister never converted; instead she married in 1754, leaving Bosanquet without a religious ally in the family.

Throughout her teenage years, Bosanquet sustained her evangelical ambitions. Her parents fired the Methodist servant and hid religious tracts from Bosanquet, who began to feel like a lone, suffering saint. In 1755, Bosanquet continued to glean evangelical ideas from family friends and literature, and she abstained from going to the theater, a frequent family activity. Her father attempted to dissuade her, remarking that she acted as if “all dress and company, nay, all agreeable liveliness, and the whole spirit of the world, is sinful.”⁴² The family was based on a large estate in Leytonstone, Essex, and they frequently traveled in a fashionable circuit of bucolic resorts and urban entertainments.⁴³ They had asked her to endure public entertainments quietly, “to do as they did and not bring reproach upon them in a Strange place. This seemed a very reasonable request—but alas, I could not comply; for the Spirit of the worlds was contrary that of Christ.”⁴⁴ She wrote that she was afraid of “snares,” which in Methodist code refers to both the public traps of entertainment and trifling diversions, as well as the more intimate traps of romantic love.

Methodists often felt the tension between obedience to their blood family and the demands of the new family. This tension was particularly difficult, because Christianity promoted filial obedience as a central commandment yet also encouraged following individual conscience in spiritual matters. Bosanquet reflected on this central quandary between individual religious yearnings and filial obedience, when she wrote about conforming to the dress required of her class, despite her desires to dress more simply for religious reasons. “I plainly saw the throwing of dress would be to my relations a great trial—I loved my parents, and it hurt me to disoblige them—I sought for arguments to quench that little Spark of Light wich was kindling in my Soul. Conscious they could not see in me my Light—and knowing that obedience to parents was one of the first dutys—I did so far quench it that I put on again many of the things that I had thrown off.—my acquaintance took much notice of me, and I was so afraid of Losing their good opinion that I had no power to reprove Sin, or even to refrain from joining in Light or trifling conversation when in company.”⁴⁵ It is clear from Bosanquet’s narrative that there was much more at stake than outward conformity to familial culture. Bosanquet equated this small acquiescence to losing her religious sense of self.

Bosanquet’s writings also confirm that evangelicals sought their new family as the final step into a new life. When she was with her old friends, it was harder for her to be religiously authentic. Thus, instead of partaking in the usual fashionable pursuits of her age, she searched for a religious life and family of like-minded souls. In 1758, Bosanquet found her new family when she began boarding in London with a company of single Methodist women, including Sarah Ryan and Sarah Crosby.⁴⁶ She wrote about the London Methodists: “The more I saw of that family the more I was convinced Christ had get his pure Church below … whenever I was from home this was the place of my residence and truly I found it to be a little Bethel.”⁴⁷ Taking these friends as her real family signified the point in the narrative where she experienced significant dissonance between her old family ways and the new family. The new family members prided themselves on simplicity, not finery and elaboration, and fiery religiosity over conformity. And these new friends were both from lower classes than the Bosanquets; Sarah Ryan and Sarah Crosby simply subsisted in their roles as housekeepers and secretaries for Methodist preachers.

This decision must have vexed her parents, who saw her deepening entanglement with the evangelical world as a sort of madness. Clearly her parents viewed her London evangelical society as more Bedlam than Bethel; they blamed Methodism for her “strong nervous fever—they thought it all arose from some trouble of mind I would not own—and told me one day if I did not rouse my Self out of that Low state my head sho[u]ld be blistered and I should be shut up in a dark room.” They also threatened to place her in an insane asylum.⁴⁸

Mary Bosanquet’s relationship to her parents became strained as she became more and more embedded in the culture and customs of her new Methodist family. Her parents worried that Bosanquet would be a bad influence on her brothers and convert them to Methodism.⁴⁹ When she came into a small, but adequate, inheritance of one hundred pounds per year at the age of twenty-one, she recognized this could support her new life. She already had plans in mind, then, when her father sat her down to discuss her future and told her, “there is a perticular promise I require of you, that is, will you never on any accation Either now or hearafter attempt to make your Brothers what you call Christian.” Her father clearly saw evangelicalism as a madness that could be contagious and hoped that his daughter would not infect her brothers. Bosanquet wrote that in her response, “I answered Looking to the Lord—‘I think Sir I dare not consent to that.’ He replyed then you fo[r]ce me to put [you] out of the house.”⁵⁰ In recalling this flagrant disobedience, Bosanquet emphasized that God’s ultimate authority superceded her parents’. Joining with Methodists allowed Bosanquet to challenge her father in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. In these conflicts between household and religious authority, Methodists felt that familial authority was secular and temporal, while divine authority was absolute. After many weeks of increasing familial tension, one day her mother ordered a coach to carry her daughter away from home.⁵¹

It was important to Bosanquet, in constructing this autobiography, to write about the ways in which her religious rebellion was justified within an alternative culture and code. Bosanquet reported that on her first night as an “orphan” (though she was twenty-one), she lay awake in her new bed, and “I looked on my Self as lying under a deep reproach—and was ready to tremble at the thought of being thrust out from under the Othority and protection of My father’s roof. But I remembered that word he that loveth father or mother more then me is not worthy of me.”⁵²

The tangled lines of affection and economics persisted between Bosanquet and her parents through her young adult life. In 1763, she thought about taking a vacant farmhouse on her property in Leytonstone, a mile from her family’s house, in order to hold Methodist meetings there.⁵³ As an adult, Bosanquet had struck a peace with her parents. She visited them, and they were satisfied with her life, as long as she was living her new life at a distance from them. She sought divine assistance as to how she could preserve this peace while drawing dozens of evangelicals to preach and pray near her parent’s house. “Those words again presented ‘he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’”⁵⁴ In 1763, when she decided to go through with her plans to live near them, her parents were surprisingly equanimous in their assent to this plan, but her father “added with a Smile ‘if a Mob Should pull your house about your ears I cant hinder them.’”⁵⁵

Bosanquet had made a deeper peace with her parents before their deaths in 1767. While her father had left her a diminished inheritance because of her refusal to marry when she was younger, her mother increased this on her deathbed. Bosanquet and her mother spoke of those “formal trials” in an affectionate manner, and Bosanquet recalls, “I found much love to her of consequence much pain, She Exprest a tender kindness towards me in her illness.”⁵⁶ But even as her parents were facing their final moments, Bosanquet admitted her mind was often elsewhere. She was thinking of her new family circle: the religious orphanage she had begun, and the woman she called her “Spiritual Mother,” Sarah Ryan, who lay close to her own death in the bed and home they shared. Eighteenth-century people shared beds with friends of the same sex when necessary, but their sleeping arrangements may have been part of their choice to live plainly, claiming no more space than necessary. Sharing a bed also most certainly marked the intimacy of their chosen relationship; they were inseparable until Ryan’s death in 1768.⁵⁷

Bosanquet’s narrative reveals the ways in which converting to Methodism created rifts in many families during the eighteenth century. Bosanquet found connections, extended family, and friends, who drew her toward her new spiritual life and into a new family. She found a new sense of belonging in a very different kind of family that allowed her to remain single throughout her young adult life, when her primary bonds were with fellow Methodist women.

Hester Ann Roe’s Narrative

Hester Roe (1756–93) was also an English Methodist, but her entrance into the Methodist family was very different from Bosanquet’s, and, by her account, included an extended period of separation from her birth family before she was free to become a full member of the Methodist family. Like Bosanquet, Roe was a prominent Methodist layperson whose piety was renowned in Wesleyan Methodist circles. In the nineteenth century, her autobiography became a sensation, in both the secular and religious print realms in England and America, going into multiple printings and versions.⁵⁸ She compiled the autobiography from personal journals, to tell the story of her early years and the beginning of her attraction to Methodism. Her writings served as a model for many nineteenth-century American women; she was well known and beloved to nineteenth-century readers who admired her story of piety overcoming temptations and family pressures, an autobiography that was as dramatic as a romantic novel.

Roe grew up in Macclesfield, a small town near Manchester, England, in a small, close-knit family with only one other sibling who survived to adulthood, a brother who left home in his early teens. Her father, an Anglican minister, had died when she was young, and Hester was left to take care of her mother, who was frequently ill. Roe’s family had a servant and was never particularly troubled financially, but her family was simply comfortable in comparison to the upper-class stratum of the Bosanquets. Just as the familial situations of these two women were very different, their cultural situations were also dissimilar. Bosanquet’s world revolved around southern England’s fashionable arenas and the sheltered estate of Leytonstone, while Roe’s world was the provincial town of Macclesfield in the North of England. North England became an increasingly important arena for the Methodists in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Manchester was the capital of the industrial North and the engine for England’s launch into the industrial age, with factories and mines springing up throughout the North. As well, Methodists were able to capitalize on the population growth and lack of institutionalized religion by drawing up new itinerant circuits as these industrial centers became ripe fields for new converts.⁵⁹

Roe described her childhood as one marked by unremitting filial duty and, like Bosanquet, precocious spirituality. She highlighted her moments of spiritual awakenings: when she was visited by the devil as a child one night after forgetting to pray, and when she had a dream, during her frivolous teenage years, that she had died and saw the awfulness of the hell that awaited her, only to be forgiven by God.⁶⁰ As a teenager, Roe realized she was different when she began to exhibit an innate seriousness, despite her teenage flirtation with dancing and parties. In her autobiography, much as in Bosanquet’s, her path to Methodism was marked by inevitability and the isolation of this individualized calling. Like Bosanquet, she risked much in converting to Methodism. In her journal, she highlighted the gulf that existed between her birth family and the Methodist family; the former was familiar and safe, but the latter was fairly exotic and dangerous. As a teenager, Roe heard others compare Methodism to Catholicism. The word on the street confirmed that both religions produced false piety and imitations of prophecy. She heard that “they deceived the illiterate and were little better than common pick-pockets.”⁶¹ Echoing the themes of anti-Methodist literature, her friends warned her that Methodism perverted people’s minds; it made some presumptuous and unbearable, others insane. She also heard that they were incredibly antisocial, caring only for their own members.⁶²

Figure 4. Hester Roe Rogers, engraving by John Chester Buttre, ca. 1871. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.

All of these voices of public and private condemnation followed her to her first Methodist meeting in the early 1770s, when she heard Reverend David Simpson preach on the sinfulness of dancing and other diversions. For Roe, unlike Bosanquet, the stages of discovering this alternate religiosity and discord with her family were greatly compressed. Upon hearing Simpson, she immediately set about to shred all her “fine caps and clothes,” cut her hair, and commit herself to rooting out her intrinsic sinfulness. Her friends were stunned and her mother, horrified. Her mother told Hester that she “thought I was losing my Senses.”⁶³ Like Bosanquet’s mother, Mrs. Roe likewise saw madness in her daughter’s behavior.⁶⁴ Mrs. Roe’s initial response was even stronger than Bosanquet’s parental censure. Hester Roe wrote in her autobiography, “I knew if I persisted in hearing the Methodists I must litterally give up all. My mother had already threatened, if ever she knew me to hear them—She would disown me—Every friend and Relation I had in the World—I had reason to believe would do so also—I had no acquaintance even among the Methodists to take me in—nor knew any refuge to fly to but my God.”⁶⁵ Roe felt estranged from her family’s ways almost immediately, and she started going to prayer groups and reading evangelical literature in secrecy. Her mother insisted that converting to Methodism meant losing her blood family, but she had no new family yet, so she felt the need to keep her evangelical life hidden from her mother for some time. When her mother discovered her daughter’s clandestine life, “a flood of persecution opened upon me—but in that time of need, God raised me up a friend in my Uncle Roe which kept my mother from turning me out of doors. Yet what I suffered, sometimes thro’ her tears and entreaties, and at other times her severity, is known only to God.”⁶⁶

Though Roe did have a sympathetic uncle, she became increasingly isolated within her family. Her relatives coordinated a campaign to turn her away from Methodism, but Roe outtalked them all. Her mother resorted to subtler means of pressuring her to leave Methodism; she tried taking her daughter out of town for an extended trip. Instead of joining in the social outings, Hester literally refused to dress the part and insisted on staying home to pray several times a day. “[I]n a little time finding all their Efforts in vain, they began to let me Alone—only I was made to understand, I had now nothing to expect from my Godmother as to temporal things, this however weighed nothing with me.”⁶⁷ Roe emphasized that economic pressure was an ineffective tool on her. In fact, in the ultimate act of obedient disobedience, she inverted this threat of economic sanction by offering herself as the house servant, much to her mother’s horror. Her mother allowed her to go to Methodist meetings in exchange for cleaning the house, “believing I who had never been Accustomed to Hard Labour, would soon be weary and give it up.”⁶⁸ Roe had less to gamble with than Bosanquet, but the stakes were still high in terms of comfort and familial support. Roe cited the large body of Methodist literature and John Wesley’s work on sanctification, in particular, as aids during this difficult period of isolation. It was this literature, she insisted, that helped her endure living and working as a servant, incurring her mother’s prolonged and pronounced displeasure.⁶⁹

In fact, the hardships she endured seem to have been incentives toward Methodism, because they fed her self-image as the lone, suffering saint. Roe wrote, “[S]he has been Sever with me—yet Glory be to god my Soul is at peace—I know these Crosses are for my good and the happiness I enjoy in God, more than repays my Soul.”⁷⁰ Even as her widowed mother attempted to enforce her social conformity, Roe insisted that her true self was inaccessible to her mother. She wrote, “My Mother insisted on my going with her to dine and drink Tea with her at an uncles—and I was not Suffered to attend Preaching Morning or Night—but I had secret intercourse with my God which none could hinder.”⁷¹ Roe began to grow further and further apart from her mother by beginning new friendships outside of her family’s social circles and taking up a spiritual life that she did not share with her mother.

Eventually, Roe’s secret life won out, and her mother allowed her to become a member of the Methodist family, albeit grudgingly. Roe’s biography became a Methodist model for disobedience and refusal to participate in frivolous ungodly company at any cost. Her willingness to give up her class comforts, to become a servant rather than go against her spiritual calling, was a hallmark of the religious sacrifice necessary for converts. Roe marked her alienation from the norms of her family by upending them completely and becoming their servant. Persevering through suffering her mother’s persecution sealed Roe’s fate as a member of the Methodist family. She rejoiced, “I now am enrolled by Name among thy Dear People.”⁷²

Catherine Livingston’s Narrative

Although Catherine Livingston was across the ocean and living in a remarkably different setting from Roe or Bosanquet, Livingston’s narrative demonstrates the striking similarities between the conversion narratives of American and English Methodists. Livingston (1752–1849) was born into a large, prominent family in New York. The Livingstons were well established with extensive landholdings in upstate New York, where their name is still as prominent as the houses they built on the banks of the Hudson. Catherine Livingston’s mother brought a considerable landholding of her own into the Livingston clan, and Catherine’s father was a judge.⁷³ Catherine Livingston would become widely regarded as a leader of Methodism in New York State, a distinction her family could not have wished for her. Like Bosanquet and Roe, Livingston was well loved by her parents and reported a happy childhood. Her parents adhered to traditional churches; her mother was a Dutch Calvinist, her father an Anglican, and the children were raised in both traditions.⁷⁴ In 1775, her father died suddenly when she was twenty-three, and the family went through considerable upheaval during the Revolutionary War, when the British set fire to her family home of Clermont. However, the Revolution did not merit mention in her spiritual autobiography, which she wrote in 1817.

As a young woman in elite circles, Livingston had a full social calendar, reporting invitations to no fewer than five balls one week. Like Hester Roe, she realized her difference from others in her family when she was a teenager. Livingston, though, always had a sense that she lacked fulfillment in the circuits of her class: “If the smiles of the world and the pleasures of it could have bestowed happiness, I should certainly have enjoyed it, but no, there was something wanting, and a dear friend, who was also an inmate in the same dwelling, and myself would sit up after returning from brilliant balls, and gay parties, and moralize on their emptiness, till it became burdensome to accept of invitations.”⁷⁵ An awakening followed the death of her sister-in-law Margaret Livingston in 1785, when Catherine Livingston began to read the Bible more and socialize less. Livingston reported in her autobiography that she began to withdraw from her family as well, because she was not sure if they would understand her religious ardency. She was isolated, much like Bosanquet at times, because she had no Methodist circle to enter. As a result, she went back to the social realm of her family, attending balls, parties, theaters, and the Anglican church.⁷⁶

Figure 5. Catherine Livingston Garrettson, engraving by John Chester Buttre, ca. 1863. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.

In 1787, she felt a true conversion where “[a] song of praise and thanksgiving was put in my mouth—my sins were pardoned my state was changed; my soul was happy. In a transport of joy I sprang from my knees, and happening to see myself as I passed the glass I could not but look with surprise at the change in my countenance. All things were become new.” Livingston captured in her diary the sense of new birth, as she saw the world with different eyes and felt transformed. She shared her conversion with her mother who seemed happy for her.⁷⁷ Like Roe, she avoided all social gatherings in earnest, discarded her frivolous clothes and trimmings, and opted for only serious clothes and serious pursuits.

Much like Mary Bosanquet, one of Livingston’s key entries into Methodism was through a servant. A housekeeper gave her a copy of Wesley’s writings, “so that I ever claimed him for my spiritual father. And I often thought of writing, to let him know how much I was obligated to love and honor him. These books had opened to me the way to get religion and the only way to keep it when attained.”⁷⁸ Her true family, Livingston claimed, was not found in her family’s house, but in the books and narratives circulating through the transatlantic Methodist family. In 1787, Livingston sought increasing solitude, and she took to writing an account of her spiritual life. In the first pages she prays that she can “put on the whole ‘Armour of God,’ Having my loins girt about with Truth and having on the Breastplate of Righteousness.”⁷⁹ The imagery of war was significant. Not only did Livingston feel combative toward the omnipresent sinfulness and temptations of living in this world, but she also felt like a warrior who stood alone in this fight, because she was at odds with those nearest and dearest to her, her unconverted family and friends. Because she lived at a great distance from the nearest Methodist society, Livingston had no alternate family around her. Yet she entered into a virtual spiritual family by imbibing their literature and following their practices by praying, isolating herself, reflecting, and writing in her spiritual diary.

Like many Methodists, Livingston worried that her newfound religiosity and its deep psychological effects appeared as insanity to outsiders. She reported mood swings, alternating doubt and joyfulness in her spiritual state. One day in December of 1787, Livingston wrote of waking in a good mood as usual, thinking happily of her relationship to God. Then, after she took a walk and began some self-examination, she found some longestablished faults, vanity and selfishness. “Instead of praying to that Great power, Whose Hand is ever near to help those who confide in Him, I prayed that He would lay me low, low in the Dust, before Him, that He would shew me myself, and encrease my dependence upon Him. Presumtuous Wretch!”⁸⁰ Her happiness disintegrated over the course of the day until she felt herself at the very bottom, “deform’d with Sin, Naked, Helpless, Worthless, beyond the power of Language.” She wrote, “the terrors of the Law, and the Arm of a Just Judge; appeared to be lifted up to strike a Guilty Wretch…. Was it any wonder my poor Weak reason, was on the point of deserting its mansion forever!—My Actions, and language I knew were those of a Frantic Bedlamite.”⁸¹ In this passage, she wrote of feeling isolated, and she poignantly described the sensation of losing her reason. She wrote with surprising self-awareness of being on the edge of suicide.⁸²