Review

If asked to name an Oxford-educated Anglican clergyman-turned-Methodist who travelled thousands of miles on preaching tours, penned voluminous journals, and published prolifically; one prudent with money but lavish in charity, hot-tempered but generous-spirited, and most importantly, perhaps, who blew hot and cold on the prospect of reunion with the Church of England, it is safe to say that for most people Dr Thomas Coke would probably not be the first or even the second person who springs to mind. As these two books show, it has been both Coke's blessing and his curse to be too much like the splendidly flawed leader he once looked set to succeed. Wesley bequeathed a Connexion beset with unresolved questions. Who owned its chapels: local trustees or Conference? How ought Methodists to relate to their estranged parent, the Church of England? Were Wesley's ordinations valid? How were missions to be funded? The founding father's absence was keenly felt, and, like most of the generation that came to maturity in the 1780s and '90s, ‘the Doctor’ suffered by comparison with the giant who preceded him. Since then he has frequently been ignored and, arguably, misunderstood.Having spent a scholarly lifetime working on Coke, John Vickers probably knows more about him than anyone else alive. His classic 1969 biography, originally published by Epworth Press, has recently been reissued in paperback by Wipf and Stock. In 2005 Kingswood Books published Coke's journals, also edited by Vickers, and now an edition of his correspondence, also from Kingswood, completes a trio of works that mark the culmination of research begun in the 1950s. Between them they paint a vivid picture of a zesty figure whose ambition and occasional vanity were married with restless energy—he visited America nine times, heading for India at age sixty-six and dying en route—and a burning determination to further the work of God. Born to prosperous parents in Brecon, Coke was a handsome man—Wilberforce thought that at fifty he still looked like ‘a mere boy’—but his apple-cheeked visage belied an impulsive and sometimes tactless nature (Apostle, 41). Vickers allows us to hear Coke in action: although and perhaps because it was heartfelt, his preaching was, in the words of one careful contemporary, ‘too rapid for the tardy movements of sober theological discussion’. The actress and courtesan Dorothea Jordan was less circumspect: ‘his manner and delivery were so truly ludicrous that I was forced to pinch myself to keep from laughing’ (Apostle, 318–19).While Vickers rescues his subject from neglect, then, he does not whitewash him. Coke always elicited mixed opinions. Here again, though, Vickers suggests that Wesley was at least partly responsible: in plucking Coke from the wreckage of a failed curacy and making him his ordained right-hand man after the mould of his brother Charles, he stoked the resentment of older preachers against this ‘upstart crow’ with his peacock manners and dress (Apostle, 39). By ordaining Coke in 1784 as semi-episcopal superintendent for North America, Wesley also implicated his lieutenant in the most controversial event in the history of Methodism to that date. Yet Coke himself was not blameless. However innocently meant, the memorial sermons in which he presented himself as Elisha to Wesley's Elijah provided brickbats for those only too keen to throw them (Apostle, 47–8). Neither did his habit of sniffing out crypto-deism among his fellow preachers win him friends. The uncharitable sneered that his Bible Commentary plagiarized ‘the unfortunate Dr Dodd’, executed as a forger in 1777 (Apostle, 329). He was also a control freak, insisting on his authority as ‘father’ of the overseas missions and bankrolling them out of his own deep pocket. So while by the 1810s other denominations were pioneering local auxiliaries to guarantee regular incomes, Methodist endeavours still relied on Coke's gruelling ‘begging tours’ of provincial Britain. In America he looked bad alongside Francis Asbury, whose heroic travels (and canny politicking) made his fellow superintendent's sporadic appearances on the continent look dilettantish (e.g. Letters, 478–94).Here was a man who could exasperate even his friends. Yet Vickers also reminds us of the perils of judging the past by later standards. In a sense his earlier work anticipates the thrust of current scholarship: as David Hempton, Phyllis Mack, and others have ably shown, experimentation and adaptation were crucial to the success of early Methodism; tension and failure were part of its evolution. While it was a given that no one could fill Wesley's shoes, the movement nevertheless remained addicted to charismatic leaders. Coke was among the most dynamic. We should remember, too, that denominational definitions were blurred and the boundaries permeable. Although, for instance, Coke's letters to Anglicans proposing reunion scandalized some when they came to light, it is significant that at least one episcopal correspondent took the prospect very seriously (e.g. Letters, 133–8). Readers whose pockets are shallower than Coke's may be relieved to know that the Letters add little to the biography save detail, some of it repetitive. The former might have benefited from closer editorial attention: several protagonists are introduced more than once, and others only on their second or third appearance. Nevertheless, both books ought to be read by anyone interested in the development of Methodism either side of 1800, not just in Britain but in the United States, the Caribbean, and further afield.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.