ABSTRACT

The novelist George Eliot was for a time at a school run by two of the daughters of Francis Franklin, minister of Cow Lane Baptist Church, Coventry. Her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Wesleyan preacher, was the model for Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. Eliot's other sources included biographies of Wesley and of Mary Fletcher. Mark Guy Pearse was a Wesleyan minister who, despite preaching for C. H. Spurgeon, developed unusually liberal theological views for his denomination. His fictional output began with Daniel Quorm and his Religious Notions, London, 1875, which is often classed as the first Methodist novel but which has a tract-like religious message. William Hale White trained for the Independent ministry and served as a minister at Bedford. Theological and other problems led to his resignation and he became minister of the Old Meeting House, Ditchling, Sussex, in 1850. William Hasiam Mills was the chief reporter for The Manchester Guardian during the First World War.