of reading and writing not only allowed for the rise of autobiographical dis-course, it also encouraged the development of interiority and the practice of communing with one’s own thoughts in private. At precisely this moment in the acculturation of individualism in England, the evangelical narrative of conversion can be discovered flourishing among a numerous laity. Commonplaces, biblical tropes and narrative conventions occur in evangelical autobiography but this is not hagiography, at least not usually. The emphasis again and again in stories such as that of Martha Claggett is that people were surprised to find that the gospel was for them personally. Martha Claggett discovered that the gospel was not merely about playing a role in a pre-determined world – through nominal adherence to the established church and participation in communal ritual – but that it had to do with a deeply personal story that could make sense of her fears in child-birth, her guilt for having contemplated abortion, her grief over her dead brother, her depression, her vanity, as well as her dreams and hopes. After John Wesley’s own conversion, he wrote with wonder that God had taken away, he writes, ‘my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’, and he put all these personal pronouns in italics in his journal.

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-43

Chapter

of reading and writing not only allowed for the rise of autobiographical dis-course, it also encouraged the development of interiority and the practice of communing with one’s own thoughts in private. At precisely this moment in the acculturation of individualism in England, the evangelical narrative of conversion can be discovered flourishing among a numerous laity. Commonplaces, biblical tropes and narrative conventions occur in evangelical autobiography but this is not hagiography, at least not usually. The emphasis again and again in stories such as that of Martha Claggett is that people were surprised to find that the gospel was for them personally. Martha Claggett discovered that the gospel was not merely about playing a role in a pre-determined world – through nominal adherence to the established church and participation in communal ritual – but that it had to do with a deeply personal story that could make sense of her fears in child-birth, her guilt for having contemplated abortion, her grief over her dead brother, her depression, her vanity, as well as her dreams and hopes. After John Wesley’s own conversion, he wrote with wonder that God had taken away, he writes, ‘my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’, and he put all these personal pronouns in italics in his journal.

Chapter

of reading and writing not only allowed for the rise of autobiographical dis-course, it also encouraged the development of interiority and the practice of communing with one’s own thoughts in private. At precisely this moment in the acculturation of individualism in England, the evangelical narrative of conversion can be discovered flourishing among a numerous laity. Commonplaces, biblical tropes and narrative conventions occur in evangelical autobiography but this is not hagiography, at least not usually. The emphasis again and again in stories such as that of Martha Claggett is that people were surprised to find that the gospel was for them personally. Martha Claggett discovered that the gospel was not merely about playing a role in a pre-determined world – through nominal adherence to the established church and participation in communal ritual – but that it had to do with a deeply personal story that could make sense of her fears in child-birth, her guilt for having contemplated abortion, her grief over her dead brother, her depression, her vanity, as well as her dreams and hopes. After John Wesley’s own conversion, he wrote with wonder that God had taken away, he writes, ‘my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death’, and he put all these personal pronouns in italics in his journal.

ABSTRACT

To gain an appreciation of the secular self-identity which emerges alongside the evangelical conversion narrative, it is instructive to consider the life of an ex-Methodist named James Lackington, particularly since Michael Mascuch regards Lackington’s Memoirs as an early and seminal example of the modern identity.32 James Lackington was a 16 year old in London who went along to a Methodist meeting in 1762. His conscience was awakened under the preaching and a month later he found peace with God. He tried to make a living as a journeyman shoemaker but by the time he was 28 he was penniless. He was able to get a small business loan of five pounds from John Wesley and with that he started retailing books. Beginning with a bag of books he bought for a guinea and sold in an obscure passageway, he built an enormously successful bookselling business in London, so that some 17 years later he boasted an income of £5,000 a year. His secret was the invention of the practice known today as remaindering – the buying and selling of unsold books at below the cover price. In 1793 he bought a block of houses in Finsbury Square for a new shop that he called ‘The Temple of the Muses’. The main floor was large enough to drive a coach and six horses around, and the shop quickly became one of the sights to see in London.