2 - The Historiography Problem

Summary

The historiography problem arose in two distinct phases: what the PMC and later Methodists wrote, mainly retrospectively, up to 1952; and – in the absence of good contemporaneous sources – what post-war historians have made of that. In the opening chapter, examples were given of how important PM figures, in the 1870s and 1920s, represented past events within a template of heroic adversity in which their faith had enabled them and others to triumph over otherwise insuperable odds. This chapter will trace how that template evolved, and how it has been followed, either faithfully or accidentally.

The man who created it was Hugh Bourne. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, his character predisposed him to see the world in terms of adversity, and he wrote a ‘history’ of the movement's origins in 1819 while recovering from a nervous breakdown. In his account, he cast himself and his brother as lonely and humble pioneers taking the Word to those abandoned by gentrifying churches, in a process that had its roots in his own 1799 conversion, his first conversion of someone else in 1800, his informal ministry to the miners of Harriseahead over the next seven years, the first camp-meeting on Mow Cop and its aftermath. It was then part-published in the denominational magazine, of which he was the founding editor, before being issued as a separate work, and re-issued in 1835.

Bourne used the Primitive Methodist Magazine to characterise the movement as a latter-day gospel, with emphasis on the themes of hardship, humbleness and outdoor gatherings. Thus, nearly every edition of the 1822 magazine contained either an article on the incarceration of a PM preacher, or the scriptural justification for outdoor preaching, or both. Yet this was not a response to generalised judicial hostility to the movement's street-preachers. True, the PMC had suffered the first substantive jailing of a preacher in Manchester the previous year, but in the only detected case of detention in 1822, an itinerant named Bonsor was held on remand pending trial. When he appeared in court, the magistrates dismissed the case. As discussed in Chapter 5, this was the pattern encountered over the period from 1817 to 1843: cases were infrequent and any initial hard-line approach usually gave way to soft-pedalling on later occasions.