ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on Wride’s manuscript autobiography. He was born in 1733. It first describes his early life, education, and apprenticeship in eighteenth-century Salisbury, Wiltshire. Though brought up in the Church of England, he made contact as a teenager with the local Methodist society at Fisherton Anger, which had been founded but abandoned by the renegade preacher and polygamist Westley Hall. Once trained as a shoemaker (or cordwainer), Wride moved to London and became active in Methodism there. Although he had undergone a spiritual conversion, he remained troubled spiritually, but John Wesley thought that he had leadership potential. He also suffered from ill-health, possibly consumption, and money worries. The chapter then summarises his career as an itinerant Methodist preacher, which began in 1768 in Devon and took him to places such as Haworth, Whitehaven, the Isle of Man, York, and Athlone in Ireland. He then retired to Yorkshire, where he remained actively involved in Methodism until his death in 1807.
