8 - John Wesley as editor and publisher

Summary

The importance and extent of John Wesley's career as an editor and publisher have long been known to historians of Methodism, although not perhaps to historians of literature. Three key individuals, two in the nineteenth century and one in the mid twentieth, established the main facts. Thomas Jackson edited and published the extended second edition of Wesley's Christian Library (1819-27), as well as the third edition of Wesley's Works (1829-31). Richard Green compiled the first chronologically ordered bibliography of The Works of John and Charles Wesley (1896; 2nd ed., rev., 1906). Building on Green, Frank Baker compiled A Union Catalogue of the Publications of John and Charles Wesley (1966), which provisionally - and very ambitiously in the pre-electronic age - listed all known editions and the whereabouts of surviving copies. The second edition of Baker's Union Catalogue (1991) added some additional materials that had been located and finalized the numbering system for Wesley's publications being used in The Bicentennial Edition of the Works of John Wesley. The two-volume bibliography for this edition will include Baker's extended descriptions of the text history of many of these items. In the early twenty-first century, thanks to the online English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC),we have a much clearer idea both of the numbers of religious books published in the eighteenth century in relation to the whole field of publications, and of the sheer size of Wesley's output as editor and publisher.