5 - A Third-Party View of Early Primitive Methodism

Summary

Nonconformity as a whole attracted relatively little attention from the political and social establishment in the first half of the nineteenth century; Arnold's characterisation of the Nonconformist world as one of disputatious and provincial philistinism was both common and long-lasting. In the case of the PMC the dismissiveness was almost total, because the rest of Nonconformity tended to ignore it, too. In consequence the written record has been effectively restricted to an insider view of the connexion during its first three or four decades. That in turn may have influenced the rare glimpses obtainable from passing references, such as those by Horace Mann, who was in no doubt that this was a ‘community whose operations penetrate most deeply through the lower sections of the people’. A contemporary reader of The Times would certainly have agreed: even though the PMC was the fifth-largest Protestant denomination in England when Victoria ascended to the throne, electronic searches of the newspaper's contents threw up no reference to Hugh Bourne, William Clowes, Lorenzo Dow or Mow Cop in the movement's first thirty years of existence. Indeed, most of the few stories that emerged seemed to have been plucked from local newspapers during the ‘silly season’, and they usually accorded with Arnold's view. Yet at local level the PMC was newsworthy during the other nine months of the year, too. The problem, until recently at any rate, was the impossibility of recovering the evidence, buried away in the regional newspapers that flowered around the same time. The British Library's digitisation of a sample of nineteenth-century publications makes it possible to measure how the movement was seen by others in a less biased perspective. The coverage was planned to reflect all regions, and erred towards publications that spanned all or substantially all of the nineteenth century. Even though the early tranches included no publication from the Potteries, South Cheshire or Shropshire, coverage of the heartland areas is otherwise extensive; in addition, the common practice of relaying stories between regions meant that newsworthy ones might surface anywhere.

The resulting database makes it possible to compare PM legends with third-party reports, and two aspects stand out: the claimed hostility encountered by the movement; and its reliance on inspired, rather than tutored, preachers who were often young boys or women. It also offers some sense of how typical these were of Nonconformity as a whole.