Author: Wesley, John
Biography:
WESLEY, John (1703-91: ODNB)
Nearly all the verse by Wesley that appeared after 1770 is contained in collections of previously published writings and is therefore omitted from this bibliography; poetry was not in any case the most significant part of his literary work. A leader of the Methodist movement from the 1740s until his death, he was a child of the manse, born in Epworth, Lincolnshire, to the Anglican rector Samuel Wesley and his wife Susanna Annesley. He was educated at the Charterhouse and Oxford (BA 1724, MA 1727) and went on to seek holy orders, being ordained deacon in 1725 and priest in 1728. In 1735 he accepted an invitation to go to Georgia as a missionary for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, accompanied by his brother Charles (q.v.) and two friends. As a minister in Georgia, he published the first Anglican hymnbook in America but was obliged to leave abruptly at the end of December 1737. Wesley preached outdoors for the first time in 1739 and did so for the rest of his career--at first as an itinerant preacher throughout Britain, then, as the Methodist following grew, from fixed bases in London and Bristol. In 1751, after a few unsuccessful romantic episodes, he married Mary (Goldhawk) Vazeille (1709/10-1781), a widow with four children. The marriage was not happy; she left him definitively in 1776. Wesley oversaw the rapid evolution of the movement--building up, notably, a network for the production and distribution of approved religious literature, much of the editorial work of which he undertook himself. He wrote prodigiously: sermons, expositions of doctrine, biblical commentary, and an influential Journal published in parts between 1740 and 1789. He made the first collection of his own prose works in 32 vols. in 1770-74.Although he strained the ties that kept him in the Anglican church--notably by ordaining ministers for America and Scotland--he observed the letter of the regulations and never formally separated from it. Wesley preached in the open air for the last time on 23 Feb, 1791, and died at his home on City Road, London, on Mar. 2; he was buried in the grounds of his City Road Chapel (not consecrated ground) a week later. (ODNB 23 Jan. 2021; WorldCat; Isabel Rivers, Vanity Fair and the Celestial City [2018]) HJ
Other Names:
- John Westley
- John