ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between eighteenth-century Methodism and nineteenth-century Romanticism has exposed in the writings of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the essayist William Hazlitt significant echoes of the voice of religious evangelism. It suggests that these writers betray a possibly unconscious receptiveness to the emotional inspiration of the culture, if not its tenets. The chapter examines the problematic nature of this relationship in the cultural identification of enthusiasm with the irrationalism and excess of the ‘imaginary Raptures’ provoked by evangelism’s ‘Extraordinary Calls’. It shows that the anxiety was generated by the fact that this visionary and rapturous mode of worship found its most zealous advocates amongst the uneducated classes and women. The chapter considers would nonetheless have subscribed to the current, positive interpretation of ‘enthusiasm’ offered by the Oxford English Dictionary which defines the word as ‘passionate eagerness in any pursuit, proceeding from an intense conviction of the worthiness of the object’.
