Thomas Wride and Wesley’s Methodist Connexion

Clive Murray Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367404727
• eBook ISBN: 9781000048438
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

This book highlights the life and writings of an itinerant preacher in John Wesley's Methodist Connexion, Thomas Wride (1733-1807). Detailed studies of such rank and file preachers are rare, as Methodist history has largely been written by and about its leadership. However, Wride's ministry shows us that the development of this worldwide movement was more complicated and uncertain than many accounts suggest.

Wride's attitude was distinctive. He was no respecter of persons, freely criticising almost everyone he came across, and in doing so exposing debates and tensions within both Methodism and wider society. However, being so combative also led him into conflict with the very movement he sought to promote. Wride is an authentic, self-educated, and non-élite voice that illuminates important features of Eighteenth-Century life well beyond his religious activities. He sheds light on his contemporaries' attitudes to issues such as the role of women, attitudes towards and the practice of medicine, and the experience and interpretation of dreams and supernatural occurrences.

This is a detailed insight into the everyday reality of being an Eighteenth-Century Methodist minister. As such, this text will be of interest to academics working in Methodist Studies and Religious History, as well as Eighteenth-Century History more generally.

1 The significance of Thomas Wride

Introduction

Thomas Wride, a travelling preacher in John Wesley’s Methodist Connexion, is not well known. There is no reference to him on the Methodist Church’s UK website, nor in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). He features in the Wesley Historical Society’s online Dictionary of Methodism and in the Encyclopedia of World Methodism¹ but not in either of the two classic works on Wesley’s preachers, Charles Atmore’s 1801 Methodist Memorial or Thomas Jackson’s 1871 Lives of the Preachers.² His correspondence with Wesley appeared in a series of articles on the ‘unpublished letters’ of Wesley in the short-lived weekly Wesleyan and Christian Record in the 1840s,³ and he was the subject of an article in the first edition of the Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society.⁴ But there is no biography or published memoir.⁵

Wride received only modest recognition within the Connexion in his lifetime. His portrait, aged 55, appeared in the Connexion’s Arminian Magazine in 1788,⁶ and he published a brief article in 1789.⁷ But when in 1784, Wesley picked 100 preachers to carry forward the work after his death, Wride was excluded.⁸

Wride’s reputation

Wride’s reputation has largely been one of eccentricity. An historian of Whitehaven Methodism, writing in the 1820s of Wride’s service there in the 1770s, apparently from memory, reported,

Mr. Wride a professed quack and an eccentric both in body and mind was twice stationed here.⁹ I think he neither profited the members nor added to their number.¹⁰

An account of Norwich Methodism claimed that when serving there in 1785–6, Wride ‘Unhappily indulged himself in eccentricities of the most ludicrous description—both in and out of the pulpit’.¹¹ A 1909 history called him ‘an original both in the pulpit and out of it’;¹² in a 1915 edition of Wesley’s letters, chapter six was headed ‘To Eccentric Thomas Wride …’;¹³ and Telford also saw him as odd, though adding that ‘He had gifts, and showed no lack of energy and zeal’.¹⁴

Other preachers had acknowledged imperfections, of course. In 1807, the death notice of the leading Irish preacher Samuel Wood—five times secretary of the Irish Conference—described him as

A man who, during a long life, sustained a high ministerial character…. During an unbroken succession of forty-eight years he was an esteemed and successful labourer in our Lord’s vineyard. He may have had defects; but they were few compared with his many excellencies.¹⁵

Indeed, John Wiltshaw’s contemporary reputation was almost uncannily similar to Wride’s—he was complained against when serving with Wride in the Whitehaven circuit in 1788–9,¹⁶ was warned against his ‘practice of Quackery’ in 1807,¹⁷ and was described as ‘eccentric’ in his death notice.¹⁸

In contrast, the Wesleyan and Christian Record (12 August 1846) offered a more balanced appreciation of Wride:

He was sincere, but eccentric; witty, and latterly subject to fault-finding, and strong personal prejudices…. He had, no doubt, much to do with himself, and he wore the worst side out. He seemed to think, that, in satire, the blow could never be dealt with too great a force, the point could never go too deep.

Another historian praised his efforts on the Isle of Man (then part of the Whitehaven circuit) in 1776–7 as ‘crowned with success’.¹⁹ An official history of Irish and American Methodism even named Wride as one of the better preachers amongst the Irish Palatine community.²⁰

The consensus of opinion has however been negative. Wride’s official death notice offered only a qualified endorsement:

He was a man of a comprehensive mind, and an able Preacher; but his singularities of spirit and manners prevented him from being acceptable and useful as he otherwise might have been.²¹

Wride’s communications style

There is no doubt that Wride was widely unpopular, largely because of his manner—he deployed direct and forceful language, especially when defending himself against criticism. He denounced one critic, a leading lay benefactor of the local Methodist society, in forthright terms to the clergyman William Dodwell:

I have often thought and sometimes said, that Mrs. Sellar was born on the north side of the dunghill; but being toward the evening of life, transplanted to the north-west. A little sunshine of prosperity is more than she has ability to bear, and it is well if that little prosperity do not prove her destruction.²²

This description of a fellow member of the York society is vitriolic. A Mr. Oliver had been briefed on a meeting which Wride felt should have remained confidential:

But, if you would tell of what passed in a District-meeting, yet, you might have avoided telling of it to such a wild, obscene, scoffing, lying, swearing, ranting sinner, as your friend Oliver who, although he calls himself of the Society & Church of Jerusalem, yet he is very fit to be an inhabitant of a solitary cell in the Hospital of Bedlam.²³

Wride’s letters sit uneasily within the emerging epistolary culture of the period:

The ideal letter was written in an easy natural style that was clear, direct, and simple to understand. This more succinct approach differed intentionally from extravagantly written letters associated with continental letter manuals.²⁴

His forceful language caused offence but was entirely ineffective—his correspondents often did not react, leaving him in isolated fury. In an exchange in 1800 with the preacher William Blagborne, who had left letters from Wride unanswered for 18 months and admitted burning at least one of them unread, Wride observed,

I have before these days found instances of persons, who found it more easy to burn my letters than to answer them; it was the case with Mr. Metcalfe of Bilsdale, Mr. Richardson of York & some others who may be passed by at present.²⁵

However, Wride never drew the obvious conclusion, that a more temperate approach might have had more impact.

James Everett noted that the preacher Daniel Isaac, an early custodian of Wride’s papers, was himself a witty controversialist:

It was when he had his pen in his hand, that he dealt the most freely in the wit which exposes to ridicule the absurdity or inconsistency of an adverse argument.

But he added that ‘The errors maintained, not the persons who held them, were the objects of indignation’.²⁶ Wesley also frequently used robust and colourful expressions, including in sermons and in letters to preachers.²⁷ There was at the time a well-developed ‘doctrine of ridicule’, associated with the Earl of Shaftesbury, which saw it as a test of truth in religion and other matters—‘ridicule will not prevail against what is true’.²⁸ Wesley had commended Joseph Addison and his Spectator magazine for using ridicule in this way,²⁹ b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 The significance of Thomas Wride
• 2 Thomas Wride’s story
• 3 Thomas Wride and John Wesley
• 4 Wride, women, and family life
• 5 Wride, preacher and physician
• 6 Wride’s personal and professional networks
• 7 Wride and the growing pains of John Wesley’s Connexion
• 8 Wesley, Wride, and the marketplace of ideas
• 9 Wesley’s Methodism and the supernatural
• 10 Conclusions
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index