Chapter Four - Re-visiting the rise of Methodism: Bedfordshire and the historiography of Methodist growth

Summary

Explaining the appeal of Methodism

This study of Methodism in one particular English county has been an attempt to meet a need, identified by several writers, to get beneath the national statistics and official reports, the pamphlets and correspondence of connexional leaders, and to reconstruct a bottom-up view of Methodism from the perspective of ordinary members and adherents. It aims to offer a response both to E. P. Thompson's call to ‘know more about, not the years of revivalism, but the months; not the counties, but the towns and villages’, and to David Hempton's for ‘more sophisticated local studies showing what the Methodist message was and how it was heard and appropriated.’

So how does an understanding of the rise of Methodism in Bedfordshire add to the understanding of the rise of Methodism more generally? Two questions have dominated the historical study of Methodism: why did it grow in the way that it did, and what was the impact of its growth on society? Answers to the first of those questions have generally focussed on the social and economic background to the rise of Methodism. Changes in society, it is argued, created a need that Methodism met. In his first book, Religion and Society in Industrial England (1976), Alan Gilbert argued that that need was for new communities in a society where traditional communities were being disrupted both by population movement and by changing economic relationships:

Why then did people value the benefits of participation in chapel communities highly enough to accept the stringency of a sectarian discipline? … perhaps the most important of the latent functions of Methodism and New Dissent involved the capacity for satisfying the profound associational and communal needs of people experiencing anomie and social insecurity in a period of rapid social change and dislocation.

In a refinement to this idea Gilbert later wrote about the appeal of Methodism for a class of people who felt themselves at odds with the existing establishment:

The labourers, artisans and tradespeople, the school teachers and other minor professionals, and even (albeit to a much lesser extent) the merchant and manufacturing groups who became Methodists in early industrial England, were the kinds of people who, in matters of politics, industrial relations or social status, often found themselves at odds, in one way or another, with the norms, values and institutions of the ruling classes.