ion and the Methodists of the late eighteenth century that would
seem to lessen the antagonism toward the Methodists. To the satirists of
the Restoration, Dissenters were reminders of civil war, regicide, the
chaos that religious division could bring. Now the only threat of
religious war or major civil disturbance had come from the Jacobites,
and even that threat was safely in the past. It is notable that Swift,
Pope, and Gay tended to satirize Dissenters within the context of
larger problems. The assault on Methodists, then, is actually not a
continuation of anti-Dissenter satire but something new. Hence the whole
movement of anti-Methodist satire in the sixties and seventies has an
untypically violent tone which cannot be explained solely in terms of
satiric trends or religious attitudes. The explanation lies, I think,
partly in the social, political, and economic background.

The Methodist movement was perhaps the most dramatic symptom (or at least
the symptom hardest to ignore) of the changes taking place in England.
The Methodist open-air services were needed because new industrial areas
had sprung up where there were no churches, and lay preachers were
necessary because of population shifts but also because of the increase
in population made possible by new agricultural and manufacturing
methods. The practice of taking lay preachers from many social classes
had obvious democratic implications. Wesley, in spite of his political
conservatism, challenged a number of widely-held, complacent aphorisms,
such as the belief that people are "poor only because they are idle."[3]
The mass emotionalism of the evangelical meetings were reminders that man
was not so rational as certain popular ideas tried to make him. Wesley's
insistence (with irritatingly good evidence) that he did no more than
adhere to the true doctrine of the Church of England strongly suggested
that the Church of England had strayed somewhere. (It is rather
interestingly paralleled by Wilkes's insistence that he only wanted to
return to the Declaration of Rights, a reminder that the government had
also strayed.) And Methodism, by its very existence and popularity, posed
the question of whether the Church of England, in its traditional form,
was capable of dealing with problems created by social and economic
changes.

These social, economic, and political issues are touched upon by a number
of the anti-Methodist satirists. Most of these satirists, however,