Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies Lori Branch, Series Editor Joanna Southcott (1812)
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Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies Lori Branch, Series Editor Joanna Southcott (1812). Engraving by William Sharp © Trustees of the British Museum AKE L ETHODISM Polite LiteratureM and Popular Religion in England, 1780–1830 JASPER CRAGWALL THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cragwall, Jasper Albert, 1977– Lake Methodism : polite literature and popular religion in England, 1780–1830 / Jasper Cragwall. p. cm. (Literature, religion, and postsecular studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1227-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1227-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9329-4 (cd) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Religion and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 4. Religion and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 5. Romanticism—Great Britain. 6. Methodism in literature. 7. Methodism—History. 8. Methodism—Influence. 9. Great Brit- ain—Intellectual life—19th century. 10. Great Britain—Intellectual life—18th century. I. Title. II. Series: Literature, religion, and postsecular studies. PR468.R44C73 2013 820.9'382—dc23 2013004710 Cover design by Juliet Williams Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Sabon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Nadya, with all my love Contents Acknowledgments ix Chapter 1 Introduction: “Lake Methodism” and the Lows of High Argument 1 Chapter 2 “Elocution to the Mute”: Anglican Authority and the Cultural Revolt of Methodism 33 Chapter 3 Wordsworth and the Ragged Legion: Poets, Priests, and Preachers 77 Chapter 4 Sage or Sibyl? A Lay Sermon 112 Chapter 5 Joanna Southcott’s Body, and the Posthumous Life of Romantic Prophecy 150 Chapter 6 Resurrection, the New Birth, and Vital Christianity: The Methodism to Frankenstein’s Madness 184 Postscript 225 Works Cited 229 Index 247 Acknowledgments riting a book, I’ve found, is a good counter to the romance of the solitary author. I won’t ever be able to express adequate gratitude for the generosities I’ve received, though it’s my great pleasure to make an attempt here. W Over many years, this book developed with support from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, as well as with timely grant and leave sup- port from Loyola University Chicago. Loyola has given me a community of scholars and students without whom this book would never have been possible. Steve Jones has been my mentor, inspiration, and friend—the best senior colleague, I’m convinced, in all academia. Joyce Wexler has given me countless hours of sage advice, and I owe almost as much to every other member of the department. My readers, Adam Potkay and Dan White, brought heroic sharpness of thought and welcome critique to the manuscript. They saw clearly what I only glimpsed, saving this book from many blunders, and revealing many new paths. The book and I would have been immeasurably poorer without the suggestions and conversation of Lori Branch, John Bugg, ix x • Acknowledgments Fred Burwick, Mark Canuel, Billy Galperin, Marilyn Gaull, Susan Green, Colin Jager, Scott Krawczyk, Ron Levao, Larry Lipking, Fred Lock, Peter Manning, Jon Mee, Jeanne Moskal, Dahlia Porter, Bob Ryan, Starry Schor, Stuart Sherman, Jerry Singerman, Gene Stelzig, Helen Thompson, Tim Whelan, Caroline Winschel, and Sarah Zimmerman. Most of all, I’d like to thank Sandy Crooms, Eugene O’Connor, Kristen Ebert-Wagner, and the entire editorial staff at The Ohio State University Press, who have expertly shepherded this book. For invitations to take my arguments on the road, I’m grateful to Tom Kaminski and the Johnsonian Society, Tavia Nyong’o and the Center for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, New York University, and Richard Gibson and the Department of English, Wheaton College, as well as col- leagues at the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism and the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. Earlier versions of Chap- ters Three and Six appeared in the Huntington Library Quarterly 68.4 (2005) and Romantic Autobiography in England, ed. Eugene Stelzig (Ash- gate, 2009). I’m grateful to the publishers for permission to rethink some of this material here. Years ago, Henry Abelove gave me his “Methodism,” before I knew it was possible to know any other. I’ve only since learned it’s not possible to know any better. For this, and for years of kind guidance and good friend- ship, I thank him. My greatest debts, and my deepest thanks, are to Susan Wolfson. She has given me so much, and for so long, that no indexing could possibly be sufficient. She has read, at every stage of its development, every inch of this book, with indefatigable genius and astonishing generosity. This has been more than I deserve: and yet more than this, Susan has taught me to read, write, teach, and think. I owe to her my professional self. To my wife, I dedicate this book—small recompense for years of boundless love. Chapter 1 Introduction “Lake Methodism” and the Lows of High Argument I feel that I am all unfit For such high argument. —Wordsworth, Peter Bell (1798 version, lines 929–30) he title of this book, Lake Methodism, is doubled, bearing an argu- ment for the doublings of Romanticism. Methodism figures the first claim: although religion has been an underutilized concept in Romantic studies, recently it has been emerging as one of the most power- Tful lenses for focusing late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Brit- ish literature. We are beginning to appreciate how, against intellectually privileged and socially restricted experiments in secularization, “the reli- gious” retained, if not an absolute political and cultural hegemony, then something close to it throughout the period. The ironic consequence of the Historicist intervention was the dismissal of a major agent for historical meaning, as “religion” came to be understood as one of the most extreme “spiritual” resolutions that displaced or denied ideological contradic- tions re-emphasized by critical practice. Lake Methodism adopts histori- cist technique in order to unsettle this historicism, joining new scholarship that has explored the ways religious discourse—vitally embedded in mate- 1 2 • Chapter 1 rial life as well as the afterlife—affected and constituted a variety of romanticisms.1 Yet even within this invigorated conversation, there remain moments of striking isolation. D. Bruce Hindmarsh, for example, begins The Evan- gelical Conversion Narrative (2005) with surprise at his solitary interest in the most salable autobiographical genre of the Romantic period.2 More- over, if the classroom—or its metaphor, the anthology—is the final arbiter of which arguments have persuaded (or at least interested) the academy, “religion” still has achieved only a tenuous connection with “Romanti- cism.” The canonical landscape has shifted tectonically over the last decades, as many new anthologies have emerged with aggressively revi- sionist programs, yet the sermons, spiritual lessons, hymns, theological dis- quisitions, and at times sanctimoniously moralizing prose and verse that were some of the best-read texts of the Romantic period remain largely unrepresented.3 1. Especially Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006); Richard E. Brantley, Locke, Wesley, and the Method of English Romanticism (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984) and Wordsworth’s “Natural Methodism” (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1975); Mark Canuel, Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Brian Goldberg, The Lake Poets and Pro- fessional Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Diane Long Hoeveler, Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780–1820 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010); Colin Jager, The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Robert Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 2. Hindmarsh observes, “Although I could find dozens of studies of the Puritan con- version narrative in the seventeenth century, I could not point to a single book-length study of the genre as it reappeared and proliferated in England during the Evangelical Revival.” The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), vi. For a recent engagement with other versions of the genre, see Romantic Autobiography in England, ed. Eugene Stelzig (Aldershot; Bur- lington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). 3. So, for example, Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak’s admirable British Literature 1780–1830, though “motivated by a desire to give a comprehensive sense of the range of writing produced in England between 1780 and 1830, including works