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