Gideon Ouseley: Rural Revivalist, 1791-1839

Abstract

Gideon Ouseley was born in the year of John Wesley’s second visit to County Galway, was ‘converted’ in the year of Wesley’s death, and died on the one hundredth anniversary of Wesley’s introduction to field preaching. A Methodist rural revivalist could have no better pedigree. I first encountered him, not in a dream as many Methodist contemporaries seem to have done, but in the correspondence of Joseph Butterworth, MP, to whom Ouseley sent graphic details of the nature of Irish Catholicism for his controversial speeches against Roman Catholic emancipation, and in the records of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, in which Ouseley stands out as the most flamboyant missionary of his generation. In terms of published works Ouseley’s career can also be traced through his prolific anti-Catholic pamphleteering and in the pages of William Arthur’s unexceptional Victorian biography. But by far the most revealing record of his life and work is to be found in the manuscripts collected by John Ouseley Bonsall, a Dublin businessman who hero-worshipped his missionary uncle.