ABSTRACT
Historians generally agree that Methodism was highly influential in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the historiographic debate on its influence in British society is so well known that it need only be briefly described here. The modern historiographical debate over the influence of religion in general and Methodism in particular in the pre-Victorian era was begun by Francois Guizot and W.E.H. Lecky in the 1870s and continued more earnestly in the early twentieth century by Elie Halevy. 1 The heart of Halevy's thesis was that the influence of John Wesley and Methodism reduced the probability that a French-style revolution would take place in England. The debate over Methodism's influence was reinvigorated by Maurice Quinlan in 1941 with his Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners 1700-1830. Quinlan accepted Halevy's thesis, and in addition claimed that the conservative trends of the Victorian era were present decades before Victoria became Queen. 2 Halevy's argument was accepted by many scholars, including Bernard Semmel, who argued that the revolution was averted by the democratic impulse that Methodism peacefully introduced into English society. 3 Other scholars, notably E.P. Thompson and the Hammonds, accepted the Halevy thesis but with a pejorative twist: they claimed that Methodist and Evangelical influence created a brow-beaten, subservient class of workers who were either afraid or unwilling to attack the upper classes which Methodism had taught them to revere. 4 Recently David Hempton and Ian Christie have provided a new assessment of the Halevy thesis. Instead of allowing that Methodism was the primary restraint on revolution, they have argued that it was but one of many potentially calming influences during the stressful years between 1789 and the end of the Napoleonic Wars. 5
