Explaining the appeal of Methodism

This study of Methodism in one particular English county has been an attempt to meet a need, identified by several writers, to get beneath the national statistics and official reports, the pamphlets and correspondence of connexional leaders, and to reconstruct a bottom-up view of Methodism from the perspective of ordinary members and adherents. It aims to offer a response both to E. P. Thompson's call to ‘know more about, not the years of revivalism, but the months; not the counties, but the towns and villages’, and to David Hempton's for ‘more sophisticated local studies showing what the Methodist message was and how it was heard and appropriated.’

So how does an understanding of the rise of Methodism in Bedfordshire add to the understanding of the rise of Methodism more generally? Two questions have dominated the historical study of Methodism: why did it grow in the way that it did, and what was the impact of its growth on society? Answers to the first of those questions have generally focussed on the social and economic background to the rise of Methodism. Changes in society, it is argued, created a need that Methodism met. In his first book, Religion and Society in Industrial England (1976), Alan Gilbert argued that that need was for new communities in a society where traditional communities were being disrupted both by population movement and by changing economic relationships:

In a refinement to this idea Gilbert later wrote about the appeal of Methodism for a class of people who felt themselves at odds with the existing establishment: