Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

JOHN WESLEY IN WALES, 1739-1790. Entries from his Journal and Diary relating to Wales. Edited, with an Introduction, by A. H. Williams. University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 1971. Pp. xxxviii, 141. £ 3.00. This useful volume extracts from Nehemiah Curnock's standard edition of John Wesley's Journal and the diary jottings published with it, the accounts of Wesley's thirty-five visits to Wales and his eighteen passages through it en route to or from Ireland. It is intended for students of Welsh religious history and also as a source book for teachers, students and sixth-formers who might be daunted by the prospect of sifting through (or even laying hands on) the eight volumes of the Journal in search of the passages relating to Wesley's Welsh travels (one hopes they will not be equally daunted by the price of this volume). While using Cumock's annotations, Mr. Williams has added handsomely to them, drawing on many other sources with an editorial skill that is both helpful and unobtrusive. There are three maps among the appendices. The Introduction surveys Wesley's relation to Wales. This is a very interesting essay (one wishes it could have been longer) and it not only shows the fruits of meticulous local scholarship gathered by an editor of Bathafam, but also provides some illuminating comments on wider patterns in the evangelical revival. {Particularly good is the discussion of the role of the Anglican 'Religious Societies' as matrices of the new movement. Mr. Williams also surveys a larger theme which does not emerge properly from Wesley's Journal: the delicate and sometimes difficult relationship of England-based Arminian Methodism with Welsh Calvinistic Methodism. He traces its course through the honeymoon period of the earliest phase, to the understanding arrived at in 1747, by which Wesley agreed not to send his preachers to Calvinist societies unless invited; on through the long hiatus following the breach of Howell Harris (generally charitable to Wesleyans) with his sterner Welsh colleagues in 1750, to the renewal of Wesleyan activity in north as well as south Wales after 1763. Even by the end of Wesley's long life the impact of Arminian Methodism on Wales was not very great: a matter of three circuits, seven preachers and six hundred rather scattered members. Wesleyanism remained 'an English importation conducted predominantly in English among a population overwhelmingly Welsh'. But by this time the founda- tions had been laid for an indigenisation of Wesleyan Methodism under Dr. Coke, who persuaded Conference to appoint Welsh-speaking preachers to Wales. It is to be hoped that English Methodists-whose knowledge of their inheritance tends to be remarkably parochial-will profit from this book, and that some other historian of the movement will study the remarkable course of Irish Wesleyanism along similar lines. Jesus College, Oxford. J. D. WALSH REACTIONS TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By Richard Cobb. Oxford University Press, 1972. Pp. 310. £ 4.00. Reactions to the French Revolution is primarily concerned with the poor, the unhappy, although only occasionally the very lovable. Like Restif de la Bretonne, that eighteenth-century diarist of the peculiarities of the