Bosanquet had made a deeper peace with her parents before their deaths in 1767. While her father had left her a diminished inheritance because of her refusal to marry when she was younger, her mother increased this on her deathbed. Bosanquet and her mother spoke of those “formal trials” in an affectionate manner, and Bosanquet recalls, “I found much love to her of consequence much pain, She Exprest a tender kindness towards me in her illness.”56 But even as her parents were facing their final moments, Bosanquet admitted her mind was often elsewhere. She was thinking of her new family circle: the religious orphanage she had begun, and the woman she called her “Spiritual Mother,” Sarah Ryan, who lay close to her own death in the bed and home they shared. Eighteenth-century people shared beds with friends of the same sex when necessary, but their sleeping arrangements may have been part of their choice to live plainly, claiming no more space than necessary. Sharing a bed also most certainly marked the intimacy of their chosen relationship; they were inseparable until Ryan’s death in 1768.57
Bosanquet’s narrative reveals the ways in which converting to Methodism created rifts in many families during the eighteenth century. Bosanquet found connections, extended family, and friends, who drew her toward her new spiritual life and into a new family. She found a new sense of belonging in a very different kind of family that allowed her to remain single throughout her young adult life, when her primary bonds were with fellow Methodist women.
Hester Ann Roe’s Narrative
Hester Roe (1756–93) was also an English Methodist, but her entrance into the Methodist family was very different from Bosanquet’s, and, by her account, included an extended period of separation from her birth family before she was free to become a full member of the Methodist family. Like Bosanquet, Roe was a prominent Methodist layperson whose piety was renowned in Wesleyan Methodist circles. In the nineteenth century, her autobiography became a sensation, in both the secular and religious print realms in England and America, going into multiple printings and versions.58 She compiled the autobiography from personal journals, to tell the story of her early years and the beginning of her attraction to Methodism. Her writings served as a model for many nineteenth-century American women; she was well known and beloved to nineteenth-century readers who admired her story of piety overcoming temptations and family pressures, an autobiography that was as dramatic as a romantic novel.
Roe grew up in Macclesfield, a small town near Manchester, England, in a small, close-knit family with only one other sibling who survived to adulthood, a brother who left home in his early teens. Her father, an Anglican minister, had died when she was young, and Hester was left to take care of her mother, who was frequently ill. Roe’s family had a servant and was never particularly troubled financially, but her family was simply comfortable in comparison to the upper-class stratum of the Bosanquets. Just as the familial situations of these two women were very different, their cultural situations were also dissimilar. Bosanquet’s world revolved around southern England’s fashionable arenas and the sheltered estate of Leytonstone, while Roe’s world was the provincial town of Macclesfield in the North of England. North England became an increasingly important arena for the Methodists in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Manchester was the capital of the industrial North and the engine for England’s launch into the industrial age, with factories and mines springing up throughout the North. As well, Methodists were able to capitalize on the population growth and lack of institutionalized religion by drawing up new itinerant circuits as these industrial centers became ripe fields for new converts.59
Roe described her childhood as one marked by unremitting filial duty and, like Bosanquet, precocious spirituality. She highlighted her moments of spiritual awakenings: when she was visited by the devil as a child one night after forgetting to pray, and when she had a dream, during her frivolous teenage years, that she had died and saw the awfulness of the hell that awaited her, only to be forgiven by God.60 As a teenager, Roe realized she was different when she began to exhibit an innate seriousness, despite her teenage flirtation with dancing and parties. In her autobiography, much as in Bosanquet’s, her path to Methodism was marked by inevitability and the isolation of this individualized calling. Like Bosanquet, she risked much in converting to Methodism. In her journal, she highlighted the gulf that existed between her birth family and the Methodist family; the former was familiar and safe, but the latter was fairly exotic and dangerous. As a teenager, Roe heard others compare Methodism to Catholicism. The word on the street confirmed that both religions produced false piety and imitations of prophecy. She heard that “they deceived the illiterate and were little better than common pick-pockets.”61 Echoing the themes of anti-Methodist literature, her friends warned her that Methodism perverted people’s minds; it made some presumptuous and unbearable, others insane. She also heard that they were incredibly antisocial, caring only for their own members.62
Figure 4. Hester Roe Rogers, engraving by John Chester Buttre, ca. 1871. Courtesy of the Drew University Methodist Collection.
All of these voices of public and private condemnation followed her to her first Methodist meeting in the early 1770s, when she heard Reverend David Simpson preach on the sinfulness of dancing and other diversions. For Roe, unlike Bosanquet, the stages of discovering this alternate religiosity and discord with her family were greatly compressed. Upon hearing Simpson, she immediately set about to shred all her “fine caps and clothes,” cut her hair, and commit herself to rooting out her intrinsic sinfulness. Her friends were stunned and her mother, horrified. Her mother told Hester that she “thought I was losing my Senses.”63 Like Bosanquet’s mother, Mrs. Roe likewise saw madness in her daughter’s behavior.64 Mrs. Roe’s initial response was even stronger than Bosanquet’s parental censure. Hester Roe wrote in her autobiography, “I knew if I persisted in hearing the Methodists I must litterally give up all. My mother had already threatened, if ever she knew me to hear them—She would disown me—Every friend and Relation I had in the World—I had reason to believe would do so also—I had no acquaintance even among the Methodists to take me in—nor knew any refuge to fly to but my God.”65 Roe felt estranged from her family’s ways almost immediately, and she started going to prayer groups and reading evangelical literature in secrecy. Her mother insisted that converting to Methodism meant losing her blood family, but she had no new family yet, so she felt the need to keep her evangelical life hidden from her mother for some time. When her mother discovered her daughter’s clandestine life, “a flood of persecution opened upon me—but in that time of need, God raised me up a friend in my Uncle Roe which kept my mother from turning me out of doors. Yet what I suffered, sometimes thro’ her tears and entreaties, and at other times her severity, is known only to God.”66
Though Roe did have a sympathetic uncle, she became increasingly isolated within her family. Her relatives coordinated a campaign to turn her away from Methodism, but Roe outtalked them all. Her mother resorted to subtler means of pressuring her to leave Methodism; she tried taking her daughter out of town for an extended trip. Instead of joining in the social outings, Hester literally refused to dress the part and insisted on staying home to pray several times a day. “[I]n a little time finding all their Efforts in vain, they began to let me Alone—only I was made to understand, I had now nothing to expect from my Godmother as to temporal things, this however weighed nothing with me.”67 Roe emphasized that economic pressure was an ineffective tool on