Wesley Corpus

Moral and Sacred Poems, 3:206ff (1744)1 Baker list, 78 Editorial Introduction: Poetry played a prominent role in genteel culture in eighteenth-century Britain. In addition to well-selling collections by poets like John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Edward Young, there were regular sections of poetry in most of the leading periodicals. The genre was embraced for political critique, moral instruction, philosophical argument, religious devotion, light diversion, and a range of other public purposes. John Wesley was typical of many in his day in keeping a manuscript notebook during his Oxford years where he copied poems that he found instructive or worthy of reading repeatedly (see the MS Poetry Miscellany in the section of this website devoted to John Wesley's poetry collections). While Wesley's manuscript collection includes several selections that he would have viewed as entertaining, it is clear that he particularly valued poems with strong moral and religious themes. Thus, he was sympathetic to a suggestion made by Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, in 1742 that public culture would greatly benefit from a collection of "chaste" moral and sacred poems. Wesley soon began work on such a collection. It was issued as a series of unbound leaflets, beginning in 1743. The last installment appeared in 1744 and the full compliment were bound as a three-volume set. While the target audience of Wesley's CPH series was Anglican worshipers, and the HSP series was aimed at those involved in the renewal movement, the hoped-for audience of this series was clearly the larger public, particularly those of genteel society. Slow sales suggest that it was not well received in this setting. About 150 sets of the initial bound copies remained in the inventory at John Wesley's house in London at his death, nearly fifty years after its publication. Wesley included several of the selections from his "MS Poetry Miscellany" in this published set, representing some leading poets of the last century. He added some more recent works, without seeking permission from their original publishers, which drew him into copyright disputes in a couple of cases (notably over Edward Young's Night Thoughts). Wesley chose to devote the entire third volume of this set to poems by his father, his older brother Samuel, his friend John Gambold, and beginning on page 206 twenty poems "by the Revd. Mr. John and Charles Wesley." As in their other joint works, John and Charles chose not to identify who contributed specific poems.