THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Wesley, John ___ 1703-1791 ___ British
___ priest
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
John was the 15th of 19 children
born to Susanna, wife of Samuel Wesley, Rector of Epworth. Samuel and Susanna
believed that Christian living depended on acts as well as faith and were
campaigners for social justice. John Wesley studied at Charterhouse school
and Christ Church, Oxford. As a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, he helped
establish the Holy Club, dubbed Methodist due to their method of studying
the Bible. While still young men, the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel to Georgia sent both John and Charles to Georgia, a journey which
proved a formative experience. Subsequently, John Wesley became passionate
about including all ordinary people in the church, and began a campaign
of preaching outdoors. He is said to have preached 40,000 sermons (sometimes
to crowds numbering in their thousands) and travelled 250,000 miles in doing
so. Prison reform and universal education were among the many social issues
he cared and preached about. He married a widow with four children in 1751,
but she grew resentful of his concern for young women who attended his societies
and left him. A long journal, published in eight volumes, was edited by
Wesley himself from a meticulous set of daily diary entries. What strikes
one most about Wesley's journal, Ponsonby says, is 'not the moral excellence
of the austere religious organiser, but the astounding physical strength
and nervous energy of the man'.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1725-1791 ___ religious social
travel prison education Germany Holland US
WEB TEXT LINKS
etext
extracts
on the Channel Islands
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
University of
Georgia Libraries
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Journal of John Wesley
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |