‘A Friendly and Familiar Book for the Busy: William Arthur’s the Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett

Abstract

Sir Henry Lunn (1859-1939), former Wesleyan minister and missionary turned journalist, ecumenical pioneer, and successful entrepreneur, wrote several volumes of autobiography in the first third of the twentieth century. Reflecting some fifty years later on the strengths and weaknesses of the Methodism of his youth in Chapters from My Life (1918), he wrote: Our pulpits in the ’70s …. had largely lost touch with the Catholic idea of poverty as one of the great virtues. Some years earlier a much-revered President of the Wesleyan Conference had written two widely different books. One was a powerful assertion of the need for the Baptism of the Holy Spirit in Christian work. The other was a glorification of a rich Methodist tradesman. Both books had a large circulation.The ‘much-revered President’ was William Arthur (1819-1901), President of the Conference in 1866, and his ‘two widely different books’ were Tlie Tongue of Fire (1856) and The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett, late ofKingswoodHill (1852). The Tongue of Fire, hailed as a spiritual classic in the nineteenth century and much reprinted then and thereafter, examined the role and importance of the Holy Spirit in Christian life and work. The Successful Merchant, written four years earlier and equally successful in publishing terms, was more controversial in subject-matter and message. As will be seen, it attracted mixed reviews, and some contemporaries shared Henry Lunn’s disquiet at the portrayal of the central character. Arthur himself dedicated the book ‘to the young men of commerce’, and claimed that his purpose was to meet the need for a Christian ‘Commercial Biography’, thereby encouraging informed reflection on the relationship between faith and work. This paper seeks to place The Successful Merchant, described by its author as ‘a friendly, familiar book for the busy, in context in the genre of Methodist biographical literature, in the social and ecclesiastical setting of mid-nineteenth-century Wesleyanism, and in the debate on work and wealth which has been a strand in Methodist identity, history, and historiography since the days of the Wesleys. First, however, some attention must be given to the book itself, its author, and its hero.