Peter Nockles

Reactions to Robert Southey's Life of Wesley (1820) Reconsidered

This article analyses the varying contemporary and later responses to Robert Southeys Life of Wesley (1820). Acclaimed for its literary qualities, its appearance in the shadow of the Evangelical Revival and the growing Methodist movement meant that its biographical perspective was long obscured by the nineteenth-century ‘Wesley legend’. Methodist reviewers such as Henry Moore and Richard Watson, repelled by his critique of ‘enthusiasm’ as well as his claim that Wesley was motivated by power and ‘ambition’, questioned Southeys theological credentials and religious orthodoxy. A more nuanced view of Southeys biography was provided by Anglican commentators such as Reginald Heber and Alexander Knox who, while sympathetic to Wesley and the Evangelical Revival, supported many of Southeys judgements from a High Church Anglican standpoint. This article sets Southeys biography within the context of his own theological and political evolution, exploring the issues of authorial motivation and the longer-term literary and historical impact and legacy of his biography.

'"The Difficulties of Protestantism": Bishop Milner, John Fletcher and Catholic Apologetic against the Church of England in the Era from the first Relief Act to Emancipation, 1778-1830'

‘It is an old theory of ours, that there are very few of the positions assumed by the antagonists of the Catholic church, which may not be turned against each other, with far more effect than they carry against the common adversary whom they all seek to assail. A skilful use of the weapons employed against each other by various sects of Protestantism, in their internecine warfare, would supply one of the most curious, and we will venture to say, one of the most solid and convincing arguments of the truth of the Catholic religion to be found in the whole range of polemical literature’. ( Dublin Review , 1855). Anti-Catholicism, represented in the era of the eve of Emancipation by a rich genre of polemical literature focusing on the supposed ‘difficulties of Romanism’, has been the subject of much recent study; notably for the eighteenth century by Colin Haydon, and for the nineteenth, by Walter Amstein, Edward Norman, D. G. Paz, Walter Ralls, F. M. Wallis and John Wolffe. In contrast, English Catholic controversial writing against the Church of England, focusing on what one Catholic writer (in a conscious reversal of the stock Anglican polemical title) called the ‘difficulties of Protestantism’, with notable exceptions such as Sheridan Gilley, Leo Gooch and Brian Carter, 5 has been comparatively neglected for the half century prior to the dawn of the Oxford Movement in 1833.