The Letters of Charles Wesley, A Critical Edition, with Introduction and Notes: Volume 2, 1757–1788

Abstract

Eight years ago I reviewed volume 1 for this journal. My first and most substantive point then was to congratulate the authors on tackling the hugely challenging project of publishing a critical edition of Charles Wesley’s letters. This task is made particularly difficult because of Charles Wesley’s extensive use of Byrom’s shorthand. Those congratulations are reiterated: only those who have engaged, in however small a way, with Charles Wesley’s original letters or faced the task, as I have, of tackling a body of correspondence where the received published corpus contrasts (sometimes radically) with the surviving originals can fully appreciate the magnitude of the undertaking.The result is a monumental contribution to scholarship around Charles Wesley, and thereby to the whole religious and cultural context of his times. It sits alongside other volumes of his writings—sermons, journal, poetry, other letters—that have appeared over the last three decades and now provide the reader with a formidable array of sources about this charming, sociable, spiritual, mercurial, and enigmatic individual who, if nothing else, was the key religious poet of his time and a great deal more.Although the second volume appears slighter smaller than the first, this is misleading as there are more pages. It is simply that Oxford University Press has used thinner paper, which is to be applauded as we look critically toward reducing environmental impact in small ways as well as large. Plus, incidentally, it makes the book easier to navigate, to say nothing of taking up less shelf space!But to the content. As previously, each letter is preceded by brief notes about the addressee; the source and type of the document from which the text is taken; date and address from which the letter was written, with additional information as appropriate. Footnotes follow each letter, rather than being at the foot of each page: while more annotation might have been welcome, the exigencies of such a wide-ranging undertaking have already been stated, and economy of space is likely also to be a factor.Given my own extensive research on John Fletcher’s correspondence with Charles Wesley, I turned to those letters first in this volume. Jean de la Fléchère (later to become Revd John Fletcher) probably arrived in Britain in 1749 (not 1750—the Dictionary of Evangelical Biography [470] is not the most accurate source). While I was more than pleased with how all but one have been treated, I was puzzled that the first (under ‘undated letters’ [18]) is only part of a longer letter to both John and Mary Fletcher of 13 March 1782 to which, by internal evidence, the editors should have had access.When Charles Wesley wrote to John and Mary Fletcher on 24 May and 21 June 1785 (416–18, 420–2), these are treated as separate letters, although noted as ‘on the same sheet’. In these cases, it might have been preferable to treat them as a single letter.Another issue is the repetition of several letters, such as that which appears in ‘undated letters’ (20) as to James Hutton, c.1774–75 but makes a further appearance (250) as October 1771. There are a number of such instances, the most puzzling being one as to John Wesley (281–3) of 20 January 1774, but which reappears twice more (288–90, 291–3) as to John Horton or John Wesley, and 19/26 June 1774. Granted, the latter two are nineteenth-century copies, and there are slight variations: but some notes of explanation would have been helpful.There are bound to be much lesser oversights in a work so challenging as this, for which allowance must always be made. Joseph Pilmore (482) was not born in ‘Tadmouth’ (there is no such place in Britain!) but in Fadmoor, rural north Yorkshire. William Ley (477) was not mentioned in John Wesley’s final will but in one made in 1770 (both DEB again). I am grateful to collegial scholars for drawing my attention to these lacunæ.I conclude with words with which I ended my previous review: ‘this remains a massively laudable achievement . . . This volume of eighteenth-century correspondence deserves to have a wide readership well beyond the realms of Methodist studies or church history for it is a significant body of material for literary scholars or other historians.’