Shared Methodist Print Culture in Upper Canada and the Mid-Atlantic States, 1789-1851
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Books for the Instruction of the Nations: Shared Methodist Print Culture in Upper Canada and the Mid-Atlantic States, 1789-1851 by Scott Kenneth McLaren A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture University of Toronto © Copyright by Scott McLaren 2011 Books for the Instruction of the Nations: Shared Methodist Print Culture in Upper Canada and the Mid-Atlantic States, 1789-1851 Scott Kenneth McLaren Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Information Collaborative Program in Book History and Print Culture University of Toronto 2011 Abstract Recent historians who have written about the development of Methodist religious identity in Upper Canada have based their narratives primarily on readings of documents concerned with ecclesiastical polity and colonial politics. This study attempts to complicate these narratives by examining the way religious identity in the province was affected by the cultural production and distribution of books as denominational status objects in a wider North American market before the middle of the nineteenth century. The first chapter examines the rhetorical strategies the Methodist Book Concern developed to protect its domestic market in the United States from the products of competitors by equating patronage with denominational identity. The remaining chapters unfold the influence a protracted consumption of such cultural commodities had on the religious identity of Methodists living in Upper Canada. For more than a decade after the War of 1812, the Methodist Book Concern relied on a corps of Methodist preachers to distribute its commodities north of the border. This ii denominational infrastructure conferred the accidental but strategic advantage of concealing the extent of the Concern’s market and its rhetoric from the colony’s increasingly anti-American elite. The Concern’s access to its Upper Canadian market became compromised, however, when Egerton Ryerson initiated a debate over religious equality in the province’s emergent public sphere in the mid-1820s. This inadvertently drew attention to Methodist textual practices in the province that led to later efforts on the part of Upper Canadians to sever the Concern’s access to its market north of the border. When these attempts failed, Canadian Methodists found ways to decouple the material and cultural dimensions of the Concern’s products in order to continue patronizing the Concern without compromising recent gains achieved by strategically refashioning themselves as loyal Wesleyans within the colony’s conservative political environment. The result was the emergence of a stable and enduring transnational market for Methodist printed commodities that both blunted the cultural influence of British Wesleyans and prepared the ground for a later secularization of Methodist publishing into and beyond the middle decades of the nineteenth century. iii Acknowledgments In many ways this part of the dissertation is the most difficult to write. Not because I am reluctant to recognize the many people without whom I could not have continued to progress along this perilous path, but because I know that whatever words I put down on these few pages will inevitably fall far short of fully describing, and therefore suitably acknowledging, their generosity and support. I could not have imagined a wiser or more generous academic advisor than Patricia Fleming. It was she who first directed me to the Methodists as an eminently practicable object for historical inquiry in view of the habit they acquired from John Wesley for keeping long and detailed records. In addition to giving me my subject, Professor Fleming struck precisely the right balance between encouraging me to construct my own narrative, and gently steering me away from several dangerous research shoals. Though balancing a million other commitments, including bringing the monumental History of the Book in Canada to successful completion, the careful and thorough attention she brought to my work never once faltered. The final shape of this study also owes much to the intellectually rigorous comments made by Lynne Howarth and Jeannine DeLombard along the way. Though representing divergent disciplinary perspectives, they both helped me to sharpen my theoretical field of analysis while turning out the clearest and most substantial narrative I could. I am also particularly grateful to Alan Galey and Bertrum MacDonald for the insightful suggestions they contributed at the final oral defence. Their comments both strengthened my confidence in the value of this work, and helped me to understand ways its intellectual reach could be further extended. I owe a special debt of thanks to the staff of the former United Church/Victoria University Archives, especially its former director Sharon Larade and her assistants Julia Holland and Alex Thomson. I very much regret that future researchers will no longer have the privilege of poring over the United Church’s unique documentary heritage while sitting at the oak tables and under the vaulted ceiling of the Victoria iv College reading room. I am also grateful to staff at the United Methodist Archives at Drew University for all their assistance while I was working with the papers of Nathan Bangs. Scholarship is a type of conversation, and I found that links to a vital research community were essential for sustaining my enthusiasm. I am especially grateful to several colleagues in the collaborative program in Book History and Print Culture, as well as at York University, who helped buoy me up on a steady stream of good cheer including Andrea Trevor, Greta Golick, Von Totanes, Janet Friskney, Rob van der Bliek, Catherine Davidson, Janet Webber, and Renate Wickens. I am also deeply indebted to Cynthia Archer and the Joint Committee on Educational Leaves at York University. Without their support in the form of several course releases over a period of four years, this dissertation would have become an unimaginably more protracted affair. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Leslie Howsam for the steadfast interest she took in my work almost from the beginning, and for all the doors she helped to open along the way. But there is one person who has seen this project in a way that no other could, who has supported it in a way that no other could, and whose tireless generosity ultimately sustained it to the final moments of completion. Widowed countless times as I sequestered myself behind a wall of books and archival photocopies, burdened with reading every word I committed to paper (and there were many more than now remain), and wakened numerous times in the middle of the night when I bolted out of bed to capture a new and fragile idea on paper, my wife Maura has been an unyielding pillar of strength. Her emotional and intellectual contributions to my work surpassed all my expectations. Perhaps to her unspoken horror, I suspect she now knows more about Methodism and Methodist print culture in Upper Canada than all but a tiny handful of specialist scholars. Dedication of that order cannot be recompensed. It can only be recognized. This dissertation is for her. v Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One Methodist publishing and religious identity 26 in Britain and America Chapter Two Opening a market for Methodist texts 95 in Upper Canada Chapter Three Contending for Methodism in the 151 Upper Canadian public sphere Chapter Four The politics of print and the failed claim 203 on the Methodist Book Concern Chapter Five The cultural unmaking of the Concern’s 258 commodities in Upper Canada Conclusion 323 Bibliography 336 vi List of Abbreviations CA Christian Advocate. NY: Methodist Book Concern, 1826-1827 Christian Advocate and Journal. NY: Methodist Book Concern, 1827-1828 Christian Advocate and Journal and Zion’s Herald. NY: Methodist Book Concern, 1828-1833 Christian Advocate and Journal. NY: Methodist Book Concern, 1833 - CHC Case and His Cotemporaries, or, the Canadian Itinerants’ Memorial by John Carroll. Toronto: Methodist Conference Office, 1867-1877. 5 vols. CG Christian Guardian Toronto: Guardian Office, 1829 - JGC Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Volume I. 1796-1836. NY: Carlton & Phillips, 1855. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Volume II. 1840, 1844. NY: Carlton & Phillips, 1855. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Volume III. 1848-1856. NY: Carlton & Porter, 1856. MAC Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Wesleyan-Methodist Church in Canada, from 1824-1845. Toronto: Anson Green, 1846. MM Methodist Magazine. New York: Methodist Book Concern, 1818 - MSC Minutes of Several Conversations between the Rev. Mr. Wesley, and others. London: G. Paramore, 1791 UCA United Church Archives, Canada vii 1 Introduction ”A book may derive prestige from the imprint of one publisher, and be quite discredited by the imprint of another house in the same street.” Leopold Wagner, How to Publish London, 1898.1 When the New York Methodist Book Concern burned to the ground in 1836 the loss was so great that it nearly devastated the city’s insurance companies. Although the stock and buildings were valued at some $340,000, less than a tenth of that amount was recovered through formal indemnity.2 The rest had to be made up by individual Methodist subscriptions that began pouring in from around the United States and Canada. Financial losses were quickly recovered, new buildings completed by November 1839, and in less than one decade from the date of the original calamity, the value of the Book Concern had climbed to an impressive $750,000.3 The extraordinary willingness of Methodists to contribute such large sums of money, even in the wake of massive financial losses associated with the Panic of 1837, can be partly accounted for by rhetorical strategies John Dickins began to develop shortly after the Concern’s establishment in 1789.4 In his first catalogue issued in 1793, Dickins explained to 1 Quoted by Peter McDonald in British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (11).