when in company.”45 It is clear from Bosanquet’s narrative that there was much more at stake than outward conformity to familial culture. Bosanquet equated this small acquiescence to losing her religious sense of self.
Bosanquet’s writings also confirm that evangelicals sought their new family as the final step into a new life. When she was with her old friends, it was harder for her to be religiously authentic. Thus, instead of partaking in the usual fashionable pursuits of her age, she searched for a religious life and family of like-minded souls. In 1758, Bosanquet found her new family when she began boarding in London with a company of single Methodist women, including Sarah Ryan and Sarah Crosby.46 She wrote about the London Methodists: “The more I saw of that family the more I was convinced Christ had get his pure Church below … whenever I was from home this was the place of my residence and truly I found it to be a little Bethel.”47 Taking these friends as her real family signified the point in the narrative where she experienced significant dissonance between her old family ways and the new family. The new family members prided themselves on simplicity, not finery and elaboration, and fiery religiosity over conformity. And these new friends were both from lower classes than the Bosanquets; Sarah Ryan and Sarah Crosby simply subsisted in their roles as housekeepers and secretaries for Methodist preachers.
This decision must have vexed her parents, who saw her deepening entanglement with the evangelical world as a sort of madness. Clearly her parents viewed her London evangelical society as more Bedlam than Bethel; they blamed Methodism for her “strong nervous fever—they thought it all arose from some trouble of mind I would not own—and told me one day if I did not rouse my Self out of that Low state my head sho[u]ld be blistered and I should be shut up in a dark room.” They also threatened to place her in an insane asylum.48
Mary Bosanquet’s relationship to her parents became strained as she became more and more embedded in the culture and customs of her new Methodist family. Her parents worried that Bosanquet would be a bad influence on her brothers and convert them to Methodism.49 When she came into a small, but adequate, inheritance of one hundred pounds per year at the age of twenty-one, she recognized this could support her new life. She already had plans in mind, then, when her father sat her down to discuss her future and told her, “there is a perticular promise I require of you, that is, will you never on any accation Either now or hearafter attempt to make your Brothers what you call Christian.” Her father clearly saw evangelicalism as a madness that could be contagious and hoped that his daughter would not infect her brothers. Bosanquet wrote that in her response, “I answered Looking to the Lord—‘I think Sir I dare not consent to that.’ He replyed then you fo[r]ce me to put [you] out of the house.”50 In recalling this flagrant disobedience, Bosanquet emphasized that God’s ultimate authority superceded her parents’. Joining with Methodists allowed Bosanquet to challenge her father in ways that would not have been possible otherwise. In these conflicts between household and religious authority, Methodists felt that familial authority was secular and temporal, while divine authority was absolute. After many weeks of increasing familial tension, one day her mother ordered a coach to carry her daughter away from home.51
It was important to Bosanquet, in constructing this autobiography, to write about the ways in which her religious rebellion was justified within an alternative culture and code. Bosanquet reported that on her first night as an “orphan” (though she was twenty-one), she lay awake in her new bed, and “I looked on my Self as lying under a deep reproach—and was ready to tremble at the thought of being thrust out from under the Othority and protection of My father’s roof. But I remembered that word he that loveth father or mother more then me is not worthy of me.”52
The tangled lines of affection and economics persisted between Bosanquet and her parents through her young adult life. In 1763, she thought about taking a vacant farmhouse on her property in Leytonstone, a mile from her family’s house, in order to hold Methodist meetings there.53 As an adult, Bosanquet had struck a peace with her parents. She visited them, and they were satisfied with her life, as long as she was living her new life at a distance from them. She sought divine assistance as to how she could preserve this peace while drawing dozens of evangelicals to preach and pray near her parent’s house. “Those words again presented ‘he that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.’”54 In 1763, when she decided to go through with her plans to live near them, her parents were surprisingly equanimous in their assent to this plan, but her father “added with a Smile ‘if a Mob Should pull your house about your ears I cant hinder them.’”55
Bosanquet had made a deeper peace with her parents before their deaths in 1767. While her father had left her a diminished inheritance because of her refusal to marry when she was younger, her mother increased this on her deathbed. Bosanquet and her mother spoke of those “formal trials” in an affectionate manner, and Bosanquet recalls, “I found much love to her of consequence much pain, She Exprest a tender kindness towards me in her illness.”56 But even as her parents were facing their final moments, Bosanquet admitted her mind was often elsewhere. She was thinking of her new family circle: the religious orphanage she had begun, and the woman she called her “Spiritual Mother,” Sarah Ryan, who lay close to her own death in the bed and home they shared. Eighteenth-century people shared beds with friends of the same sex when necessary, but their sleeping arrangements may have been part of their choice to live plainly, claiming no more space than necessary. Sharing a bed also most certainly marked the intimacy of their chosen relationship; they were inseparable until Ryan’s death in 1768.57
Bosanquet’s narrative reveals the ways in which converting to Methodism created rifts in many families during the eighteenth century. Bosanquet found connections, extended family, and friends, who drew her toward her new spiritual life and into a new family. She found a new sense of belonging in a very different kind of family that allowed her to remain single throughout her young adult life, when her primary bonds were with fellow Methodist women.
Hester Ann Roe’s Narrative
Hester Roe (1756–93) was also an English Methodist, but her entrance into the Methodist family was very different from Bosanquet’s, and, by her account, included an extended period of separation from her birth family before she was free to become a full member of the Methodist family. Like Bosanquet, Roe was a prominent Methodist layperson whose piety was renowned in Wesleyan Methodist circles. In the nineteenth century, her autobiography became a sensation, in both the secular and religious print realms in England and America, going into multiple printings and versions.58 She compiled the autobiography from personal journals, to tell the story of her early years and the beginning of her attraction to Methodism. Her writings served as a model for many nineteenth-century American women; she was well known and beloved to nineteenth-century readers who admired her story of piety overcoming temptations and family pressures, an autobiography that was as dramatic as a romantic novel.
Roe grew up in Macclesfield, a small town near Manchester, England, in a small, close-knit family with only one other sibling who survived to adulthood, a brother who left home in his early teens. Her father, an Anglican minister, had died when she was young, and Hester was left to take care of her mother, who was frequently ill. Roe’s family had a servant and was never particularly troubled financially, but her family was simply comfortable in comparison to the upper-class stratum of the Bosanquets. Just as the familial situations of these two women were very different, their cultural situations were also dissimilar. Bosanquet’s world revolved around southern England’s fashionable arenas and the sheltered estate of Leytonstone, while Roe’s world was the provincial town of Macclesfield in the North of England. North England became an increasingly important arena for the Methodists in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Manchester was the capital of the industrial North and the engine for England’s launch into the industrial age, with factories and mines springing up throughout the North. As well, Methodists were able to capitalize on the population growth and lack of institutionalized religion by drawing up new itinerant circuits as these industrial centers became
