10 - Conclusions and a Reinterpretation

Summary

The past no longer exists, waiting to be rediscovered by historians. Their trade relies upon the wise use of surviving sources, and so all history is provisional, because better sources may emerge later and wiser insights surely will. Sources, however, can never be complete, unbiased, and free from hindsight. The historian's job is to see beyond that, and to re-imagine that lost past in its terms, not ours. The student of Primitive Methodism therefore has a dual problem, because the sources are particularly dubious and the weight of previous re-imagining has, by and large, been undertaken in terms of other preoccupations.

Generally ignored by others for most of its existence, the PMC is today understood via insider accounts, and they in turn operated to a common agenda, which dictated that two things must be preserved: the reputations of the two men subsequently seen as the towering founding figures; and the movement's self-image. By discreet control of access to primary source materials relating to the pre-1843 era – in particular, the extensive censorship of the only set of contemporaneous diaries known to exist, and a policy of self-censorship first informal, but from 1854 explicit – the connexion ensured that the preferred version of the story reigned for 150 years. Yet this has not been exposed by more recent scholars, who have instead rejigged it from religious to class-based adversity. A sources problem that is manifest to any careful reader of the two seminal sets of manuscripts – Hugh Bourne's contemporaneous and retrospective writings – was not seen because the old story is just too good a fit for a modern one, for which the connexion's more accessible elderly secondary sources provided apparent substantiation.

The research agenda thus dictated a source-based and evidence-led process, yet one that was constantly alert to the impact of discourse on those sources and their subsequent interpretation. It was the precondition for a consistent and sceptical process of evidence-checking. The data sources for this included those used by others previously (baptismal records and the 1851 Religious Census), some hitherto by-passed or dealt with cursorily (trustee records and the physical evidence about chapels) and, crucially, new sources enabled by internet technology. Numerical sources, or those susceptible to numerical treatment, were generally less easily skewed by discourse, but that did not eliminate the problem.