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Reactions to Robert Southey's Life of Wesley (1820) Reconsidered
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2011
Abstract
This article analyses the varying contemporary and later responses to Robert Southey's Life of Wesley (1820). Acclaimed for its literary qualities, its appearance in the shadow of the Evangelical Revival and the growing Methodist movement meant that its biographical perspective was long obscured by the nineteenth-century ‘Wesley legend’. Methodist reviewers such as Henry Moore and Richard Watson, repelled by his critique of ‘enthusiasm’ as well as his claim that Wesley was motivated by power and ‘ambition’, questioned Southey's theological credentials and religious orthodoxy. A more nuanced view of Southey's biography was provided by Anglican commentators such as Reginald Heber and Alexander Knox who, while sympathetic to Wesley and the Evangelical Revival, supported many of Southey's judgements from a High Church Anglican standpoint. This article sets Southey's biography within the context of his own theological and political evolution, exploring the issues of authorial motivation and the longer-term literary and historical impact and legacy of his biography.
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References
1 J. H. Newman to Mrs J. Mozley, 19 Jan. 1837, in Letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, vi, ed. G. Tracey, Oxford 1984, 16.
2 An earlier version of part of Southey's text had first appeared in The Correspondent in 1817. See The Correspondent; consisting of letters, moral, political, and literary, between certain writers in France and England (London 1817), nos 1–2, pp. 26–47, 157–86. I am grateful to Professor Speck for this reference. Recent scholarship has contested the old stereotype of Wesley as ‘the founder of Methodism’. Southey himself (Life of Wesley, i. 113) argued that ‘though the Wesleys should never have existed, Whitefield would have given birth to Methodism’.
3 Newman included poems by Southey in a poetry anthology edited by his sister-in-law Anne Mozley: [A. Mozley], Days and seasons, or church poetry for the year, Derby 1845. In his article, ‘The state of religious parties’, published in the British Critic in April 1839, Newman had singled out Southey as well as Wordsworth as prophets in their day akin to other harbingers of the Catholic Revival, who had, ‘addressed themselves to the same high principles and feelings, and carried their readers in the same direction’: Apologia pro vita sua, London 1864, 186.
4 Newman to Mrs Mozley, 19 Jan. 1837, Letters and diaries, vi. 16.
5 For a brief comparison of the affinities and yet vast differences between Wesley and Newman see R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm: a chapter in the history of religion, Oxford 1950, 422–3.
6 See P. B. Nockles, ‘Alexander Knox’, ODNB.
7 For Newman's preference for the leaders of the eighteenth-century Evangelical Revival over the sixteenth-century Reformers see [Newman], J. H., ‘Selina countess of Huntingdon’, British Critic xxviii (Oct. 1840), 264Google Scholar.
8 Sally Wesley to Lady Penelope Maitland, n. d. [1791], Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Eng Misc c. 652, fo. 69.
9 For John Hampson, Jr.(1753–1819) see J. A. Vickers (ed.), A dictionary of Methodism in Britain and Ireland, Peterborough 2000, 148. Hampson's three-volume biography of John Wesley (1791) was the first to appear after Wesley's death but proved to be too candid to be acceptable to Methodist contemporaries. However, it was not highly regarded on other grounds too, ‘as the author had no original documents in his hands’: E. D. Urlin, The churchman's Life of Wesley, ‘appendix 1: the biographers’, London 1886, 257.
10 John Whitehead (?1740–1804) was John Wesley's personal physician and one of his literary executors who was appointed to write the official biography but he lost this right after a dispute with Conference after Wesley's death. His two-volume biography appeared in 1793 and 1796: Dictionary of Methodism, 393.
11 S. Wesley to Lady Maitland, Aug. 1791, Bodl. Lib., ms Eng Misc 652, fo. 75.
12 This was published as The Life of … John Wesley, including an account of the great revival of religion, in Europe and America, of which he was the first and chief instrument: by Dr Coke and Mr Moore, London 1792. A new edition was published in 1822 in the wake of Southey's Life of Wesley. For Henry Moore (1751–1844), ordained by John Wesley in 1789 and one of Wesley's literary executors, see Dictionary of Methodism, 244. For Thomas Coke (1747–1814), see Dictionary of Methodism, 72–3.
13 R. Southey to G. Bedford, 26 Mar. 1820, in The life and correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, London 1849–50, v. 34.
14 R. Southey, The Life of Wesley; and the rise and progress of Methodism, London 1820, ii. 563–4.
15 W. A. Speck, Robert Southey: entire man of letters, London 2006, 181.
16 W. Okely, A letter to Robert Southey, Esq. poet laureate, etc. on his Life of the late John Wesley, and specially that part in which he treats of the Moravians, Bristol [1820], 4–5.
17 R. Watson, Observations on Southey's Life of Wesley: being a defence of the character, labour, and opinions, of Mr Wesley against the misrepresentations of that publication, London 1820, 2. For Watson (1781–1833), Wesleyan Methodism's first outstanding systematic theologian, see Dictionary of Methodism, 374–5.
18 Watson, Observations, 2.
19 Southey, Life of Wesley, ii. 564.
20 Ibid. i. 281–304.
21 Ibid. ii. 508.
22 Ibid. ii. 83.
23 See ibid. ii. 494–537.
24 Ibid. ii. 520. Southey also commented (Life of Wesley, ii. 521) that ‘If Wesley had been a father himself, he would have known that children are more easily governed by love than by fear.’
25 H. Moore, The Life of the Rev. John Wesley, London 1824, i, p. xiii.
26 Southey himself did not use the term ‘Radical’, though he admitted to once having been a ‘Jacobin’. However, one of Southey's leading modern biographers suggests that ‘until perhaps 1808 or 1809 he liked to think of himself as a Jacobin’: G. C. Carnall, ‘Southey, Robert ‘, ODNB.
27 See, for example, R. Hole, Pulpits, politics and public order in England, 1760–1832, Cambridge 1989, 180.
28 Southey to William Taylor, 23 June 1803, in Speck, Robert Southey, 95.
29 As late as 1808 Southey privately confided to his friend Grosvenor Bedford that ‘I am a friend to the Church establishment – not as a Churchman, for I am almost a Quaker – but because an establishment is now and long will be necessary’: Southey to Bedford, 9 Nov. 1808, Bodl. Lib., ms Eng. Lett. c. 24, fo. 82. Southey's private admission would embarrass his later Anglican devotees. William Speck has drawn attention to Southey's clergyman son Cuthbert censoring out the words given in italics in his edition of his father's correspondence: Life and correspondence of Robert Southey, iii. 183–4; Speck, Robert Southey, 275 n. 38. For a fuller discussion of Southey's shift from radicalism to conservatism see G. C. Carnall, Robert Southey and his age, London 1960.
30 As late as 1812 Southey privately declared his inability to subscribe to ‘the Church Articles and even denied the plenary inspiration of Scripture’. As he put it this ‘established tenet of every Church except the modern Socinian I decidedly disbelieve and this is a gulph between me and the Establishment which can never be past’: Southey to Bedford, 16 May 1812, Bodl. Lib., ms Eng. Lett. c. 24, fo. 203. Speck notes that Cuthbert Southey omitted this sentence too in his edition of his father's letters: Speck, Robert Southey, 277 n. 63.
31 Speck, Robert Southey, 89.
32 Ibid. p. xiv.
33 Annual Review ii (1802), 212.
34 Speck, Robert Southey, 106.
35 Quarterly Review ii (Aug. 1809), 54.
36 Ibid. 122.
37 [Robert Southey], ‘History of Dissenters, etc.’, Quarterly Review x (Oct. 1813), 90–139.
38 Speck, Robert Southey, 181.
39 Ibid. 170.
40 S. Wesley to J. Benson, 14 Apr. (1817), JRUL, MARC, DDWES 7/104.
41 Sally Wesley's comments on Southey's Life of Wesley, n.d., ibid. DDWF 14/58.
42 Moore, Life of Rev John Wesley, i, p. xi.
43 Watson, Observations, 2–3.
44 Ibid. 4.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid. 5.
47 Ibid. 2.
48 Moore, Life of Rev John Wesley, p. xiv. Significantly, Monsignor Ronald Knox, though a critic of Wesley, states that ‘Southey, indeed, was a fool to describe him as ambitious’: Enthusiasm, 456.
49 Moore, Life of Rev John Wesley, i, p. xv.
50 Ibid. i, p. xvi. Southey had made this link as early as 1813: ‘The papal establishment … provided ample employment for all those spirits that disturb the peace of the Protestant churches. The Wesley of a Catholic country founded a new order; the Whitefield reformed one; the James Naylor was encouraged in his delirium, received the stigmata, and became a saint’: ‘History of Dissenters’, 102–3. Southey toned down such rhetoric in his Life of Wesley.
51 Moore, Life of Rev John Wesley, i, pp. xvi–xvii.
52 Watson, Observations, 11.
53 Ibid. 17.
54 Southey, Life of Wesley, ii. 532.
55 Ibid. ii. 565.
56 See [Southey], ‘History of Dissenters’, 90–139.
57 S. Gilley, ‘Nationality and liberty: Robert Southey's Book of the Church’, in S. Mews (ed.), Religion and national identity (Studies in Church History xviii, 1982), 418.
58 R. Southey, The book of the Church, London 1824, ii. 564.
59 Watson, Observations, 6. In the advertisement for his own Life, Watson observed that ‘the most approved accounts of Mr Wesley, have been carried out to a length which obstructs their circulation, by the intermixture of details comparatively uninteresting beyond the immediate circle of Wesleyan Methodism’: The Life of the Rev. John Wesley, A.M, London 1831, p. iii.
60 Ibid. 7.
61 Urlin, Churchman's Life of Wesley, 262.
62 Okely, Letter to Robert Southey, 8.
63 [Reginald Heber], ‘Southey's Life of Wesley’, Quarterly Review xxiv (Oct. 1820), 5.
64 Ibid. 9.
65 Ibid. 52.
66 Ibid. 55.
67 ‘Remarks on the life and character of John Wesley by the late Alexander Knox, Esq.’, [appended to] Southey's Life of Wesley, 3rd edn, London 1846, 308. However, in a letter to Hannah More, while conceding that Wesley ‘had a certain love of power’, Knox argued that there ‘was no more moral evil in this natural relish, than in a healthy person's liking to take his food’. Knox was more critical than he was in his published ‘Remarks’ of Southey for making the charge of ambition, insisting that Wesley ‘was as free from all really ambitious designs, contrivances, solicitudes, and chagrins, as the child in the Gospel whom our Redeemer placed in the midst of his disciples as a model of humility’: ‘Letter to Mrs Hannah More on Mr Southey's Life of John Wesley’, Remains of Alexander Knox, 3rd edn, London 1844, iii. 462.
68 Knox, ‘Remarks’, 309.
69 Ibid. 306.
70 Ibid. 326.
71 J. Walsh to C. Wesley, 11 Aug. 1762, JRUL, MARC, ‘Early Methodist volume’, iii, no. 134.
72 Knox, , ‘Letter to Hannah More’, Remains, iii. 468Google Scholar. The letter is dated 2 October 1820.
73 Idem, ‘Remarks’, 336.
74 Ibid. 312.
75 Ibid. 331.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid. 348.
78 [Heber], Southey's Life of Wesley, 53.
79 Knox, ‘Remarks’, 339.
80 Ibid. 305.
81 Ibid. 306.
82 Southey to R. Watson, 17 Aug. 1835, in The Life of Wesley and the rise and progress of Methodism: by Robert Southey, ed. J. A. Atkinson, London 1889, p. viii.
83 R. Hattersley, A brand from the burning: the life of John Wesley, London 2002, 379.
84 Knox, , ‘Letter to Hannah More’, Remains, iii. 457–80Google Scholar.
85 Ibid. iii. 463.
86 Idem, ‘Letter to Mrs Hannah More on the character of John Wesley’, ibid. iii. 472. The letter is dated 10 October 1824.
87 Ibid, iii. 473.
88 W. B. Barter, Observations on a work by Mr Bickersteth, entitled ‘Remarks on the progress of popery’, and an answer to his attack on the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, London 1836, 29.
89 A characteristic, it is claimed, that has dogged religious biography until recent times: W. Gibson and R. Ingram (eds), Religious identities in Britain, 1660–1832, Aldershot 2005, 6.
90 Hattersley, A brand from the burning, 132.
91 B. Hilton, ‘Politics of anatomy and an anatomy of politics, c. 1825–50’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (eds), History, religion, and culture: British intellectual history, 1750–1950, Cambridge 1996, 194. Southey's providentialism found full scope in his anti-Catholic Book of the Church: Gilley, ‘Robert Southey's Book of the Church’, esp. pp. 418–19.
92 Southey, Life of Wesley, i. 2.
93 It should be recognised that Southey devoted at least a whole chapter (ii.166–96) to an analysis of Wesley's ‘Doctrines and opinions’, and theological commentary was not lacking elsewhere in his biography. None the less, while the Life was clearly based on very wide reading of sources, it is interesting that a sixteen-volume set of John Wesley's Works (1809 edn) and a three-volume set of the Minutes of the Methodist Conferences from 1744 (1812 edn) remained uncut in Southey's personal library: Catalogue of the valuable library of the late Robert Southey, Esq., LL.D. poet laureate: which will be sold by auction by order of the executors, by Messrs. S. Leigh Sotheby & Co … May 8th, 1844, London [1844], 150.
94 Lord Macaulay, ‘Commendatory’, in Southey's Life of John Wesley: edited by Arthur Reynolds, (Hutchinson's Standard Lives), London n.d.
95 Urlin, Churchman's Life of Wesley, 260.
96 A. C. Outler (ed.), John Wesley, New York 1964, 18n.
97 [Heber], ‘Southey's Life of Wesley’, 5.
98 Urlin, Churchman's Life of Wesley, 259–61.
99 Moore, Life of the Rev. John Wesley, i, p. xxii.
100 L.Tyerman, The Life and times of John Wesley, M.A. founder of the Methodists, 2nd edn, London 1871, i. 265.
101 Ibid, iii. 356.
102 J. Telford, The Life of John Wesley (1886), rev. edn, London 1899, 361.
103 See J. R. Gregory, A history of Methodism chiefly for the use of students, London 1911, ii. 216. For comment on the Methodist historian James Harrison Rigg's critique of Southey as ‘a semi-rationalistically-orthodox Anglican’ see F. Hockin, John Wesley and modern Methodism, 4th edn, London 1887, 145n.
104 For discussion of issues of historical distance in biographical writing see M. S. Phillips, ‘Historical distance and the historiography of eighteenth-century Britain’, in Collini, Whatmore and Young, History, religion, and culture, 31–47.
105 Southey, Life of Wesley, i. 3.