Yorkshire Almanac John Wesley visits “the new house of the Germans” (the Moravians) at Pudsey, which is financed by overseas donations

28 April 1747: John Wesley visits “the new house of the Germans” (the Moravians) at Pudsey, which is financed by overseas donations

Aquatint by R. Havell from a painting of Fulneck Moravian Settlement by Charles Henry Schwanfelder (Schwanfelder 1814).

John Wesley. 1827. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol. 2. London: J. Kershaw. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

One of Pudsey would take no denial; so I promised to preach there at eight o’clock. Coming before the hour, we walked to the new house of the Germans. It stands on the side of a hill, commanding all the vale beneath, and the opposite hill. The front is exceeding grand, though plain, being faced with fine, smooth, white stone. The Germans suppose it will cost, by that time it is finished, about three thousand pounds. It is well if it be not nearer ten. But that is no concern to the English brethren; for they are told, (and potently believe,) that “all the money will come from beyond sea.”

I preached at eight at the place appointed, and thence rode to Dewsbury, where I was to preach at noon.

But first I called on the Minister, Mr. Robson; and in an acceptable time. Abundance of little offences had arisen, and been carefully magnified by those who sought such occasions. But we both spoke our minds without reserve; and the snare was presently broken.

After sermon, Mr. R. having sent a note to desire I would call upon him again, I went and passed such an hour as I have not had since I left London: we did not part without tears. Who knows how great a work God can work in a short time?

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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19 April 1747: The Methodist John Nelson is attacked by an affluent mob while preaching at Heworth Moor and Acomb (York) on Easter Sunday

15 August 1781: The ineffably peripatetic John Wesley discovers a movable pulpit in Sheffield

25 June 1753: The Moravian Brethren of Fulneck, Pudsey, refuse to participate in the toll-bar riots

12 November 1819: The first, nocturnal vision of Prophet Wroe in one of his fields at Tong Street, Bradford following his near-fatal fever

18 July 1784: Wesley finds children “restrained from open sin” at one of the first Sunday schools, at Bingley

17 May 1828: Joseph Pickles of Wilsden, a Methodist convert, dies, having partially recovered his sight, and helped produce 410 descendants

27 May 1776: Samuel Hick, apprentice blacksmith, overcomes his pacifist leanings to rescue the Wesleyan Richard Burdsall from an Anglican assailant at York

6 May 1744: John Nelson, one of the first Methodist preachers, finds the welcome from gaoler James Barber at Leeds Gaol superior to the accommodation

19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë

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Comment

Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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