ABSTRACT
Concurrent with the growing popularity of religious periodicals came changes in English society, changes which would be attributed to Queen Victoria in the decades to come, but which were actually in place long before she ascended the throne in 1837. Indeed, the Methodist Magazine and other religious periodicals did much more than provide a source of entertainment for the weary, browbeaten masses of industrial England. Historians generally agree that Methodism was highly influential in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 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. The debate over Methodism's influence was reinvigorated by Maurice Quinlan in 1941 with his Victorian Prelude: A History of English Manners 1700-1830.
