Preachers’ Letters and Portraits (PLP) is one of the largest and richest archives of personal papers in the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC) collections: 25,000 items relating to nearly 4,000 individuals associated with the Methodist movement between the 1730s and the mid-twentieth century. The archive documents the lives of preachers, ministers, and lay people in the UK and overseas, and features material from correspondents of other denominations and from a range of professional fields — including politics, science, and the arts — as well as from those critical of Methodism. In the letters, we find fierce religious and political debates, personal struggles, family life, and vivid descriptions of the societies in which these writers lived. We are currently cataloguing this collection and over the coming months will be sharing some of the fascinating items discovered so far.
‘Was Mr John Wesley living do you think he would thank you, for your Zeal for, and Vindication of Dancing?’ (PLP 92/4)
In July 1791, the annual Methodist Conference, Methodism’s supreme decision-making body, feared that its people had become too worldly. The frivolous amusements of society could be harmful to an individual’s spiritual life and distract them from devoted religious practice. To help prevent this ‘advance towards conformity’, the Conference, which met in Manchester only a few months after the death of John Wesley on 2 March 1791, ruled that ‘Those school-masters and school-mistresses who receive dancing-masters into their schools, and those parents who employ dancing-masters for their children, shall be no longer members of our Society.’ Dancing posed a threat to the moral and spiritual education of children by exposing them to the world’s fashions and temptations through balls, assemblies and other gatherings.
Not all Methodists supported this prohibition. For the preacher Mark Davis, dancing was ‘natural, and as innocent as smiling, laughing, talking, or any other natural manner of expressing our joy’, and an ‘art whereby we are taught a good carriage, a graceful and easy way of moving our limbs, and a genteel manner of address’. At a quarterly meeting of preachers, Davis was told that he could no longer preach unless he promised to comply with the Conference ruling. This action prompted the publication of Davis’s pamphlet Thoughts on dancing: occasioned by some late transactions among the people called Methodists (1791), which expressed a moderate view of dancing and provided abundant examples from scripture in support.
The pamphlet provoked strong replies from Thomas Olivers, who penned An answer to Mr. Mark Davis’s Thoughts on dancing: To which are added serious considerations to dissuade Christian-parents from teaching their children to dance (1792), and Richard Rodda, a Cornish-born preacher and leading Methodist figure in the years after Wesley’s death.
Rodda’s letter, which addresses Davis as a friend, is a fierce and often satirical performance. He wonders whether Davis is ‘a real well-wisher’ to Methodism. He likens Davis’s argument to that of the clergyman Martin Madan’s 1780 work Thelyphthora, which cited several passages from the Bible in support of polygamy, claiming that Madan’s reasoning led at least one man he knows to misuse it for immoral behaviour. Employing a crescendo of dance forms, Rodda asks whether Davis would ever have preached Jesus Christ ‘dancing a Minuet, a Rigadoon, a Cotillon, a Country Dance; in order to introduce himself into Company, by making a fine Bow, etc.?’
He recalls a passage from the clergyman Edward Clarke’s Letters concerning the Spanish Nation (1763) in which the crucified Christ steps down from the cross to dance a seguidilla, suggesting Davis would have little trouble reconciling the ‘gross Ignorance and blind Superstition’ of this scene with his own arguments. Rodda’s letter and the wider debate demonstrate an enduring concern within Methodism about how to live in the world without being corrupted by it.
‘a very valuable and beautiful case of birds’ (PLP 96/5/25)
In September 1847, William Gladstone wrote to George Harris, third Baron Harris and newly appointed governor of Trinidad (he would later become governor of Madras), thanking him for a ‘beautiful case of birds’. A list of these birds, as well as other items relating to Harris, can be found in the Glynne-Gladstone Archive held by our friends at Gladstone’s Library. This letter, written at Fasque, where Gladstone was spending the summer with his family, offers a glimpse into Gladstone’s personal life, political career and religious beliefs during an eventful year – although perhaps not by Gladstone’s standards – in which he returned to the House of Commons, fathered his fifth child (Mary), and experienced the financial collapse of the Oak Farm brick and iron works, a company partly owned by his in-laws, the Glynne family.
Gladstone left government in June 1846. The following year he was elected MP (or ‘burgess’) for Oxford University, which saw him return to parliament in opposition. The election caused Gladstone ‘immense and prolonged anxiety’, partly due to his association with the Tractarian movement: ‘To be turned inside out upon questions of personal religious conviction is a fearful process’, he writes. Turning to domestic politics, he comments on ‘railway mania’, which will ‘in its ultimate effects, the construction of an increased number of lines, add vastly to the wealth and power of the country – but for the present and for years to come it will be felt as nothing less than a nightmare upon our trade’.
There is joy, too, in the consecration of an Episcopal Chapel built by his father, Sir John Gladstone. The Bishop of Oxford ‘preached on the Sunday and rivetted his audience many of whom were Presbyterians as if he had them in a vice’. He writes also of the Bishop of Brechin (David Moir), who was to officiate but had died a few days earlier, ‘busy, in his bed and on the day of his death, in revising the Sermon he had prepared for the occasion.’
The Little Scholar (PLP 23/28)
In 1859, the Methodist New Connexion (MNC) appointed its first missionaries to China. The ministers John Innocent and William Nelthorpe Hall arrived in Shanghai the following year and moved north, establishing a mission in the port city Tianjin (天津) (or Tientsin, as it is known in MNC records). The mission expanded steadily, opening stations in Laoling (乐陵) in 1866, the province of Shandong (山东) by 1876, and Tangshan (唐山) in 1884, near the coal-mining centre of Kaiping (开平). By 1900, MNC membership in China had reached almost 4,000. Missionary work, however, was not without its dangers. MNC churches were destroyed during riots in Tianjin in 1870, and many missionaries and Christian converts were killed during the Boxer Uprising between 1899 and 1901.
Zhao Yunming (赵允明) (romanized as ‘Chao Yun Ming’ by MNC missionaries) was a former member of the Boxer movement and a participant in the uprising. In a letter to William Walker, a minister stationed in the Halifax West Circuit, Zhao thanks Walker for his circuit’s spiritual and financial support, reflecting on his past as a Boxer and his conversion to Christianity.
In the letter, Zhao refers to himself as the ‘Little scholar’. He entered the Church in 1901 as an ‘enquirer’, and was baptized after a year. MNC missionary John Hedley, a friend of Walker, later appointed Zhao as a Bible seller and then a school teacher. In the autumn of 1906, Zhao — then in his early fifties — was appointed as a preacher in the Tianjin circuit. Hedley, who served eighteen years in China, recorded Zhao’s transformation in an article, which accompanies this letter. Originally from North East England, Hedley led a well-travelled life: he published accounts of his journeys through China and Mongolia, served with the Chinese Labour Corps in France during the First World War, lived for more than a decade in Hawaii, taught Chinese literature and history in California, and became a U.S. citizen in 1928.
If you want to come and see the above items and more from the Preachers’ Letters and Portraits archive, they are available to view in the Special Collections Reading Room of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Please keep an eye on the Rylands blog for other wonderful items from this archive.
See our Special Collections A to Z website for further information on both the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC), as well as the Library’s other Methodist and Nonconformist collections.
Thanks to Dr Gregory Scott (Chinese Studies, University of Manchester) and Ann Chow-Thomas for their help with this blog.
All images unless otherwise stated are copyright of the University of Manchester and can be used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike Licence.
Oh the debates on dancing – took me right back to the mid 80s & Footloose!