THE EPWORTH WOMEN:
SUSANNA WESLEY AND HER DAUGHTERS
by
Samuel J. Rogal
There exists hardly the slightest doubt that had not Samuel Wesley the elder been partly responsible for bringing three noteworthy sons into the world, both his name and the mediocrity of his heavy literary labors would have remained as obscure as the two hamlets in Lincolnshire where he was forced to act out his role as agent of the Church of England. Indeed, the path from Oxfordshire upon which he had trod after becoming, on 19 June 1688, Bachelor of Arts seemed lined with ample promise of success. Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, ordained him deacon at Bromley (outside London) on 7 August of that year; Henry Compton, Bishop of Oxford and London, ordained him priest at St. Andrews, Holborn, on 24 February 1690. Following some months at sea as chaplain aboard a man-of-war, Wesley obtained a curacy in London (worth £30 per annum), married and moved to South Ormsby, Lincolnshire, as rector at £50 per year. There, Samuel Wesley remained for five years before his final appointment, in 1695, as rector of Epworth, Lincolnshire-a living worth £200 per year.
Unfortunately, the father of the Wesleys was £150 in debt when he arrived at Epworth. The addition of the rectory at nearby Wroote, in 1721, came too late and proved too little to relieve him of any financial burden. In fact, it merely broadened his responsibilities to the point where he could not handle the two posts and son John had to leave (temporarily) his post at Lincoln College, Oxford, and come to his father's rescue. However, the elder Wesley never really paid that close an attention to finances. Two prison terms, a like number of fires, two crop failures, and an unruly mob for parishioners failed to shake Samuel Wesley's poetic temperament or to cast even the slightest shadow over the golden image that he had conjured for himself as the anointed "Poet of the Isle of Axholme."' Arguments with his wife resulted in a series of eventual reconciliations which, in turn, resulted in a series of children: nineteen in all between 1691 and 1710, ten of whom managed to survive infancy. On 4 June 1731, Samuel Wesley the elder was thrown from a wagon; for the next four years he suffered from the effects of his injuries, compounded by recurring attacks of the gout. Mercifully, he died on 25 April 1735, thus bringing to conclusion more than four decades of struggle and failure.
Despite the dreams of Samuel Wesley-political, poetical, and theological-that never materialized, despite his bumbling and his overall incompetence, his family survived Epworth rectory. It survived because his wife Susanna Annesley Wesley (1669-1742), provided more than enough strength to compensate for her husband's weakness. As did her spouse, Susanna Wesley came from Nonconformity, the twenty-fifth and last child of Dr. Samuel Annesley (1620-1696)-nephew of the first Earl of Anglesea, a product of Queen's College, Oxford, vicar (before his ejection in 1662) of St. Giles, Cripplegate (young Daniel Defoe was a member of his congregation), pastor of a Nonconformist church in Little St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, and the so-called "St. Paul of the Nonconformists." Her mother, Dr. Annesley's second wife, was the daughter of John White (1590-1645), the Puritan lawyer and Member of Parliament for Southwark (1640). In 1862, the year of her sister Elizabeth's marriage to the bookseller, John Dunton, the thirteen-year-old Susanna determined to reject her father's religious dissent and to cast her theological lot with the Church of England. Despite the religious liberty achieved at an early age, she remained anchored to her father's household until her marriage to the recently ordained Samuel Wesley; then, she settled into (or, more than likely, she became resigned to) her new life, raising her husband's children, enduring her husband's hardships and misfortunes, bearing up under the unnecessary weight of his idiosyncrasies.
On 11 October 1709 - that year had seen the destruction, by fire, of Epworth rectory and periodic visits of the rector to London-Susanna Wesley wrote to her eldest son, Samuel, then a young scholar at Westminster School: "There is nothing I now desire to live for, but to do some small service to my children: that, as I have brought them into the world, I may, if it please God, be an instrument of doing good unto their souls. 2 Thus, we see a summary of the woman's real and total contribution to history, the contribution filtered through the ancient institution of motherhood. If British Methodism sprang from the formation, in 1729, of the Oxford Holy Club, its seeds were planted by Susanna Wesley at Epworth rectory during the opening decade of the eighteenth century. She alone dressed and undressed her infants and changed their clothes, all at fixed hours of the day. She alone rocked each child to sleep at a specified hour. When an infant Wesley became old enough to sit and to eat without assistance, she included that child within the strict circle of the family table; there that child asked for and ate everything that its mother provided. She prohibited any drinking and eating between meals. At Epworth rectory, evening prayers at 6:00 P.M. preceded dinner, which took less than one hour. At 7:00, she prepared each child for bed - the youngest first; by 8:00, all Wesley children had been stored beneath their blankets.
In assuming responsibility for educating her children-a responsibility ceded to her by virtue of the rector's attentiveness to more esoteric matters - Susanna Wesley relied even more heavily upon method. In a letter to her son John (dated 24 July 1732 and addressed to him at his tutor's lodging at Lincoln College, Oxford), written ten years before her death, the mother of British Methodism explicated the principles upon which she maintained order in a world constantly under siege by the harbingers of chaos. Her thesis focused upon pure obedience: "I insist upon conquering the will of children . . . because this is the only strong and rational foundation of a religious education, without which both precept and example will be ineffectual. But when this is thoroughly done, then a child is capable of being governed by the reason and piety of its parents, till its own understanding comes to maturity and the principles of religion have taken root in the mind."3 The thesis then yielded eight by-laws that formed the frame for her method: (1) a full confession of a fault, with a promise to correct it - eliminating lying and needless beating; (2) no sinful act to pass without punishment; (3) no child to be beaten twice for the same fault; (4) a significant act of obedience to be recognized and even, on occasion, rewarded; (5) an intention toward obedience, even if the performance was not as well as it should have been, to be accepted and encouraged; (6) respect for the privacy and the property of others; (7) promises to be strictly enforced and observed; (8) no girl to be put to work (e.g. sewing) before she could read.4
The specifics in support of the by-laws took the form of instruction in prayer, blessing by signs, collects, Catechism, and Scripture. When a child reached the age of five, the mother-tutor turned her attention to matters practical: the alphabet, spelling, reading, and mathematics. However, her most noteworthy technique - one that became a fixture within the regimen of her most famous offspring - concerned the allotted time for private discussion with each child: "I take," she wrote to her husband in early 1712, "such a proportion of time as I can spare every night to discourse with each child apart. On Monday I talk with Molly; on Tuesday with Hetty; Wednesday with Nancy; Thursday with Jacky [John]; Friday with Patty; Saturday with Charles; and with Emily and Suky together on Sunday."5 Thus did Susanna Wesley both cope with and escape from the disorder surrounding the "Poet of the Isle of Axholme." She established her own island, her own independent state, whereon she reigned, alone and absolute, preparing daughters to marry Anglican clergymen and sons to become Anglican bishops. She left Samuel Wesley the elder to soar among the clouds of his own insignificance.
Perhaps it was the times, perhaps it was the unnatural isolation in which Epworth rectory existed: at any rate, Susanna Wesley never seemed able to convey to her children that, no matter how thoroughly they had been "methodized" in infancy and in youth, they could not simply launch upon and then restrict themselves to pre-ordained channels of fortune and existence. The three boys held fairly true to form, but not all of the seven girls managed to attain even a semblance of the desired end. The eldest, Emilia (1691-c. 1770), quickly grew to detest her father and the circumstances into which he had placed the family. Her marriage to an Epworth apothecary, Robert Harper, proved no better; he died early, leaving her without money or children, which only increased her bitterness. "I am ready to give up the ghost with grief," she wrote to her brother John on 24 November 1738, at the same time chastising him for spending so much of his time and money among the Moravian brethren of Count Nicholas Zinzendorf. "How is it possible, in such extremities, to think of anybody's concerns but my own till this storm be blown over some way, or my head laid low in Gainsborough churchyard?"6 Her tragedy seems not to have been the loss of her husband or even her poverty, but a renewal of that dependence upon Epworth from which she seemed never to escape. As her sister Mehetabel poetically described her condition,
Fortune has fixed thee in a place
Debarred of wisdom, wit and grace;
High births and virtue and equally they scorn,
As asses dull on dunghills born;
Impervious as the stones their heads are found,
Their rage and hatred steadfast as the ground.
With these unpolished wights thy youthful days
Glide slow and dull, and Nature's lamp decays:
Oh, what a lamp is hid 'midst such a sordid race!7
The next surviving Wesley daughter, Susanna (1695-1764), did not fare much better. Familiarly referred to as "Suky," she married, in 1721, Richard Ellison (d. 1760), a landowner of some means. However, in April 1752, John Wesley reported that "all his cows are dead, and all his horses but one; and all his meadow-land has been under water these two years (which is occasioned by the neglect of the Commissioner of the Sewers, who ought to keep the drains open): so that he has very little left to subsist on." Husband and wife parted company shortly thereafter, their two sons and two daughters having been grown. In describing her death, her younger brother stated that "Sister Suky was in huge agonies for five days, and then died in the full assurance of faith. Some of her last words (after she had been speechless for some time) were, 'Jesus is come! Heaven is here!' "8
Those same last words may well have been applicable to the desires of two other Wesley daughters, Mary and Mehetabel (Hetty), although perhaps not for the same reasons. The former (born in 1696 and known as Molly), on 1 November 1734, accompanied her infant child to the grave. Only that January she had married John Whitelamb (1707-1769) - native of Wroote, principal scribe in the preparation of the elder Samuel Wesley's Dissertahones in Librum Jobi for the printer ( 1735), the rector of Epworth's curate at Wroote and his successor there (1734-1769), and a former pupil of John Wesley at Lincoln College, Oxford.9 Hetty (1697-1751), on the other hand, experienced quite a different form of suffering. The eighth child, fifth daughter, and the first Wesley born at Epworth rectory inherited her father's bent toward the muse; in fact, those pieces of her verse that survive (in such niches as The Gentleman's Magazine, The Poehcal Register, The
Christian Magazine, and The Arminian Magazine, as well as in several eighteenth-century British hymnals) seem to surpass, in quality, the poetic ramblings of Samuel Wesley the elder. However, circumstances forced her to marry (1725) a drunken plumber-glazier, one William Wright;10 money advanced by Dr. Matthew Wesley, the rector's affluent brother-physician. established the incompetent mechanic in a London shop situated in Dean's Street, Soho Square. There, Mehetabel gave birth to four children - three of whom died at or shortly after birth, while the fouth, Amelia, lived but several years before her mother's own departure from earthly misery. As the rector of Epworth had found relief in his verse and erudite literary projects, so did his daughter turn to her poetry - not so much to escape from or to relieve the stench, the squalor, and the tragedy of her Soho surroundings, but to try to comprehend the meaning of her miserable existence. Thus, after the death of her third child on 28 September 1728, she writes,
Tender softness! infant mild!
Perfect, purest, brightest child!
Transient lustre! beauteous clay!
Smiling wonder of a day!
Ere the last convulsive start
Rends thy unresisting heart,
Ere the long enduring swoon
Weigh thy precious eyelids down;
Ah, regard a mother's moan,
Anguish deeper than thy own.
Fairest eyes, whose dawning light
Late with rapture blest my sight,
Ere your orbs extinguish'd be,
Bend their trembling beams on me!
Dropping sweetness! verdant flower!
Blooming, withering in an hour!
Ere thy gentle breast sustains
Latest, fiercest, mortal pains,
Hear a supplicant! let me be
Partner in thy destiny!
That whene'er the fatal cloud
Must thy radiant temples shroud;
When deadly damps, impending now,
Shall hover round thy destined brow,
Diffusive may their influence be,
And with the blossom blast the tree!"
Although the piece is far too personal for general congregational use, its tone and its imagery possess definite hymnodic qualities. In fact, the overall emphasis upon personal trauma and suffering reminds the reader, after only a superficial glance, of the more polished poetic accomplishments of her younger brother Charles.
At some point following the death of her fourth child, with her spirits undoubtedly at their lowest, Mehetabel Wesley Wright took the time to compose her own epitaph:
Destined while living to sustain
An equal share of grief and pain
All various ills of human race
Within this breast had once a place.
Without complaint she learn's to bear
A living death, a long despair;
Till hard oppress'd by adverse fate,
O'er charged, she sank beneath the weight
And to this peaceful tomb retired,
So much esteem'd so long desired.
The painful mortai conflict's o'er
A broken heart can bleed no more.12
Certainly, the piece (either as epitaph or poem) may be vulnerable to the charge of reeking with self-pity. Nevertheless, the lines do function clearly as another example of Hetty Wesley's unpolished but still honest and intense poetic feeling. In an age dominated by masculine wit, masculine genius, and masculine poetic expression, there was very little that Mrs. Wright could do with whatever raw talent she possessed.
Of Anne Wesley (b. 1702), referred to occasionally as Nancy, details are hard to come by. Perhaps the most significant facts may be her name and the year of her birth: realizing Samuel Wesley's loyalties to his sovereign (whomever he or she might have been at the moment), we can easily assume that this Wesley daughter was named for the last of the Stuarts, who succeeded her brother-in-law William to the throne in 1702. In 1725, Anne married John Lambert, an Epworth surveyor of some education, intelligence, and financial resources; the couple then moved to London, where Lambert found more than one occasion on which to join his brother-in-law William Wright in the latter's dipsomaniacal exercises. Anne appears to have been present, on 23 July 1742, at her mother's deathbed, but nothing further about her turns up after that date.l3
Martha (or "Patty" - 1706-1791) presents a totally different situation, although she seems to have inherited the usual marital problems associated with the daughters of Epworth rectory. In 1735, she married Westley Hall (d. 1776), another of John Wesley's former pupils at Lincoln College, who went on to become rector of Wootton Rivers, Wiltshire. Originally, he was to accompany the Wesleys and James Oglethorpe to Georgia, but his marriage forced the cancellation of his participation in that evangelical misadventure. Hall's problem - which obviously became Martha's - focused upon the second of the wine-women-song trinity, as opposed to his brothers-in-law, who inclined toward the first. Even before the marriage, he had an affair with Keziah Wesley who, strangely enough, moved in with the Halls almost immediately following their union. The rings of this domestic circus became complete in 1739, when the widowed Susanna Wesley joined the Hall household. During that year, everyone removed to London, where Westley Hall became the overseer of the London Methodist society recently formed in the English capital. In the interim, he sired an illegitimate child by way of a liaison with his wife's seamstress; then followed several more affairs (also resulting in children) ranging, geographically, from Ireland to the West Indies. Hall's attentiveness to his own wife took the form of ten offspring, only one of whom survived infancy. In matters of religion, the former scholar of Lincoln College and (also former) rector of Wootton Rivers evidenced an equally urgent need for sampling the various fruits of the orchard: he drifted in and out of Methodigm and Anglicanism, finding time, also, to try his luck with the Moravian Brethren, the Quietists, and the Deists.14
Little wonder, then, that Martha Wegley Hall, after her husband's death, sought some form of compensation for forty years of social and intellectual inertia. After placing Westley Hall safely into the earth, she drifted toward the theological, literary, and cultural scenes that prevailed within the London residence of her brother Charles at Chesterfield Street, Marylebone. There she met the pious but intellectually active Hannah More and the young social reformer and parliamentarian William Wilberforce, as well as the laurels of British letters: David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith. Through Mrs. More - writer of drama, fiction, and social and religious prose tracts - Martha Hall came, sometime in 1780 or early 1781, to the circle of Samuel Johnson, who then resided at Bolt Court, Fleet Street. James Boswell describes in detail a dinner and discussion held on Sunday, 15 April 1781, in which Martha Hall participated. The Scottish biographer depicts her as resembling John Wesley, "both in figure and manner," and she spent the evening trying to draw out Johnson's views on "the resurrection of the human race in general." When at one point in the discussion Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Hall begin talking simultaneously, their host asks for quiet and addresses the two as ladies, which (when he noted the incident later in his journal) prompted Boswell to remark, "The term ladies applied to the two old animals was truly ludicrous."15
However, the relationship between Martha Wesley Hall and Samuel Johnson was not to end on such a derogatory note as that resounding from Boswell's journal and biography. Beneath the heavy and rough exterior that seemed to typecast the sage of Bolt Court lay a kind, mellow, and deeply religious soul; he saw Martha Hall in her late seventies, an essentially unhappy and obviously financially restricted woman, but one thoroughly virtuous. Thus, in the first week of December 1784 - perhaps only seven days before his death - Johnson determined to invite the sister of Methodism's founder and leader to come live in his house, to occupy the room once belonging to Anna Williams - herself a woman whom death had rescued from further suffering. Unfortunately, he was simply too ill to carry out his intentions. Martha became dependent first on her brother Charles, then (after his death in March 1788) on her brother John. In his will,l6 John Wesley bequeathed, from the sale of his books, £40 to his sister; she lived but three months after his death, the last survivor of Samuel and Susanna Wesley's Epworth brood.
Although Martha could lay claim to being the last of the Epworth Wesleys, she was not the last born; that honor went to Keziah, or "Kezzie" (1710-1741). Apparently, her affair with Westley Hall proved to be her closest brush with marriage; this nineteenth and final Wesley child became the only one to reach adulthood and then pass on to the grave, unwed. Brother John placed the responsibility for her unhappiness and even for her death directly upon Rev. Hall; in fact, six years after her passing, he hurled a stinging barb at his brother-in-law's conscience, the tone of which seems a radical departure from his usual willingness to forgive and to forget. Thus, from London on 22 December 1747, he accused Westley Hall to the degree that
. . . in spite of her [Keziah's] poor, astonished parent, of her brother, of all your vows and promises, you shortly after jilted the younger and married the elder sister. The other, who had honoured you as an angel from heaven, and still loved you much too well (for you had stole her heart from the God of her youth) refused to be comforted. From that time she fell into a lingering illness, which terminated in her death. And doth not her blood still cry unto God from the earth? Surely it is upon your head.17
Whatever the cause of Keziah Wesley's relatively early death, the blame could hardly have rested solely with Hall. She passed away quietly and insignificantly on 10 March 1741, more likely the result of a delicate constitution than a broken heart.
Lest anyone feel the urge to rise up in indignation against what could be termed "injustices" brought down - by God, fate, or some other unknown reason - against the Wesley daughters, he or she must remember that those women were, essentially, undeniable facts of eighteenth-century life. They were daughters of a country parson and destined, despite Susanna Wesley's dream of seeing them settled within the upper echelons of the enlightened establishment, to grace the living quarters of other country parsons or perhaps country squires. The times in which they lived and the situations in which they were placed dictated that they could as easily be shackled to a Westley Hall or to a William Wright as to an honest, loving, kindly, intelligent, and affluent Lincolnshire squire or vicar. Their brothers were, literally and swiftly, launched forward from the Epworth nest, at no small expense or sacrifice to the rector and his wife, in the direction of Westminster School, Charterhouse, Oxford, Georgia, Germany, wherever; the daughters had to remain at Epworth rectory until someone came to remove them. And, as was the case with the majority of the young Wesley females, marriage did not mean an automatic severing of the Epworth cord. Only Martha found a real opportunity for social and intellectual intercourse, but that one moment - that fling, as it were - came to her too late in life for her to derive any significant degree of pleasure or enlightenment from it. Even the poetic expressions of Mehetabel submitted to the rude sounds of her husband's hammer and to the clanking of his ale cups; what she did manage to create seems devoid of life, wasted on the corpses of her babies and upon thoughts of her own demise. In essence, then, there existed, as one twentieth-century biographer entitled her labor, only sons to Susanna. The Wesley daughters, as did their mother, simply endured their respective lots, and whatever talents they possessed were never permitted to bear fruit. They became, in the end, simply so many names to be added to the mortality bills of neoclassicism.
Notes
1During the period of Samuel Wesley's residence, Epworth was a market town of approximately 2,000 people, the principal place in a strip of land formerly enclosed by five rivers: Idle, Torr (west and south), Trent (east), Ouse, Don, Humber estuary (north). The strip was known as the Isle of Axholme (axe being Celtic for water). For a description of the area and the rectory at Epworth, gee John Telford, Life of Charles Wesley (London: Methodist Book Room, 1900), pp. 12-13, as well as Telford's Life of John Wesley (London: Hodder Stoughton, 1886), pp. 11-13.
2See Robert Southey, The Life of Wesley and the Rise and Progress of Methodism (1820; rpt. London: George Bell and Sons, 1901), p. 8.
3Nehemiah Curnock (ed.), The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1909-1916), III, 36. John Wesley inserted into his journal for 1 August 1742 - the day upon which Susanna Wesley was buried in Bunhill Fields, London - two letters written by his mother. The first is to Samuel Wesley the elder (6 February 1712), the second is the one from which I have cited. Both epistles refer to the education of her children.
4Journal, III, 38-39.
5Journal, III,33. Those who keep track of numbers will notice that two children are missing from the list: Samuel the younger and Keziah. The former was then at Oxford, while the latter was not yet two years old when the letter was written.
6Journal, II, 152. Gainsborough, where Mrs. Harper was then living, is some fifteen miles northwest of Epworth. It is, roughly, the setting for George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860).
7See George J. Stevenson, Memorials of the Wesley Family (London: Methodist Conference Office, 1876), pp. 263-267.
8John Wesley to Ebenezer Blackwell (Epworth, 16 April 1752); Wesley to Charles Wesley (London, 7 December 1764). See John Telford (ed.), The Letters of John Wesley (London: The Epworth Press, 1930), III, 87; IV, 277.
9Although the Wesleys could ill afford to do so, they contributed to finance Whitelamb at Oxford. John Wesley was pleased with his student's scholarly habits, as he reported them to his father on 11 June 1731: "He reads one English, one Latin, and one Greek book alternately and never meddles with a new one in any of the languages till he has ended the old one. If he goes on as he has begun . . . by the time he has been here four or five years, there will not be such an one of his standing in Lincoln College, perhaps not in the University of Oxford" (Letters, I, 85). At one time the brothers-in-law were fairly close, but the leader of the Methodists became disturbed over certain unexplainable shifts in Whitelamb's religious views. Thus, upon hearing (two months after it occurred) of the death of the rector of Wroote, Wesley exclaimed, "Oh, why did he not die forty years ago, while he knew in whom he had believed! Unsearchable are the counsels of God, and His ways are past finding out" (Letters, V, 151).
10Apparently, one of Wright's drinking companions was Richard Ellison, then husband of Susanna Wesley the younger.
11Quoted in John Julian (ed.), Dictzonary of Hymnology (London, 1907; rpt. New York: Dover Press, 1957), II,1258-1259. There is no extant collection of Mehetabel Wesley's poems; thus, one must take them where he can find them.
l2Quoted in Southey's Life of Wesley, p. 266. See also the elegy that she wrote "To the Memory of Mrs. Mary Whitelamb," in the Gentleman's Magazine, 6 (1736), 740, as well as an epitaph for the same sister, printed in Stevenson's Memorials of the Wesley Family, p. 294.
13The journals, diaries, and letters of Samuel the younger, John, and Charles Wesley each contains mention of "Anne"; however, Susanna's sister, Anne Annesley, also lived in London between 1725 and 1750, and thus it is not easy to identify positively the brothers' vague references.
14Quietism came from France in the latter part of the seventeenth century; its basic tenet became the condemnation of all human effort. To be perfect, one tried to attain complete passivity and annihilation of will, abandoning himself to God to the extent that he ceased to care even about his own salvation. The Quietist practiced a form of mental prayer, at which point the soul rested, in pure faith, in the presence of God. In that state, the believer found outward acts unnecessary and sin impossible. A fairly clear discussion of Quietism is found in the historical novel, John Inglesant (1881), by Joseph Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903), set during the reign of Charles I (1625-1649) and the Commonwealth period (1649-1660). The Deists of Westley Hall's day held, generally, to the view of God the creator, but with no further interest in the world that He created. Some followers did accept all of the truths of natural religion, including belief in a world to come - but they all rejected revelation. The reader may wish to consult John Toland (1670-1722), Christianity Not Mysterious (1696).
15See James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., ed. R. W. Chapman, rev. ed. J. D. Fleeman (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 1136-1137. In his journal, Boswell noted that Martha Wesley Hall was "very like" John Wesley, "and preaching at table in his manner" (Joseph W. Reed and Frederick A. Pottle [eds.], Boswell, Laird of Auchinleck, 1778-1782 [New York: McGraw Hill, 1977], pp. 324-326). In addition to Boswell, Johnson, and Mrs. Hall, the diners were Anna Williams (1706-1783) Johnson's blind companion and house partner; Edmund Allen (1726-1784) printer and Johnson's landlord; Mrs. Elizabeth Desmoulins (n. 1716), another of Johnson's female confidants; Robert Levett (1705-1782), a ck)se friend of Johnson, for whom the latter undertook several literary tasks; and Alexander Macbean (d. 1784), Johnson's one-time amanuensis. The fare included soup, hashed veal's head, bacon-ham, fowls, broccoli, roast lamb, asparagus, pudding, porter, and port.
16See John Wesley's Journal, VIII, 343.
17Wesley's Letters, II, 111-112. Judging from the tone and the context of the lengthy letter, Wesley chose this particular moment for a general lambasting of his brother-in-law, prompted by Westley Hall's inclination toward polygamy and his sampling of various religious denominations.
Edited by Brian Seidel
