Scotland’s Methodists, 1750–2000 (review)

Margaret Batty’s book ably fills a significant gap in Methodist history as the first book-length comprehensive survey of Methodism in Scotland. Based on extensive research in both Scottish and English archives, the book covers the entire period from John Wesley’s first visit to Scotland in 1751 to the present day. The first three chapters narrate the development of Scottish Methodism until the union of the Wesleyan Methodists and the Primitive Methodists in 1932. Batty devotes a full chapter to Primitive Methodism in Scotland as the most significant sectarian presence there. The second part of the book focuses on local preachers and Sunday schools, both important factors in nineteenth-century Methodism, and the Scottish United Methodist experience from Union to the present.

Two long chapters, comprising one third of the book, deal predominantly with the nineteenth century. Batty usefully situates her narrative within brief summaries of economic, social, and intellectual developments in Scotland and outlines the marginal presences of some of the nineteenth-century Methodist sects: the New Connexion, the Bible Christians, the United Methodist Free Churches, and the Independent Methodists. She shows that while Methodism was strongest in the major cities and among industrial workers, it had a significant presence in fishing villages along the east coast as well. She also demonstrates the effects of economic depression, Scottish emigration, and Irish immigration on fragile Methodist communities and describes the efforts of Methodists to improve social conditions in Scotland’s slums, including temperance work.

The reader’s overall impression is one of Methodism’s perpetual struggle in a difficult environment. Batty shows how Methodist missionaries and itinerants in Scotland tried to overcome the obstacles posed by a Calvinist Presbyterian established church; prejudices against unqualified preachers; and resistance to those hallmarks of Methodism, itinerancy and class membership. The support from the English Methodist Conference, their ruling body, was usually lukewarm, and Scottish finances were often a drain on English resources. Both Wesley himself and the Wesleyan Conference made concessions to Scottish conditions, allowing a category of communicants, regular worshippers at Methodist services who were unwilling to attend class meetings but were admitted to the Lord’s Supper, while in England only class members received tickets to the celebration. Somewhat reluctantly, the Conference also allowed Scots Methodists to celebrate the Lord’s Supper according to Scottish rather than Anglican practice. These concessions appear to have made little difference; in 1900 Scottish Wesleyan and Primitive Methodists combined totaled just under eight thousand two hundred members, a little over one percent of the total membership of the two denominations in England, Scotland, and Wales.

Batty’s title is, significantly, Scotland’s Methodists, not Scottish Methodism; although she describes both doctrinal and governance issues, her focus is on people rather than institutions. Her work is detailed and comprehensive, but her descriptions of the experiences of individual preachers and communities, while valuable, can overwhelm the reader with too much detail. Yet paradoxically, this reader occasionally hoped for more information, for example about Methodism’s attraction for east coast fishing communities and the late nineteenth-century inroads made there by the Plymouth Brethren, a sectarian rivalry about which we usually hear little. I would also have liked more extended analysis of why female evangelism aroused such opposition in Scotland, especially during the mid-nineteenth-century revival.

In general Batty’s book is descriptive rather than analytical, and greater analysis of why Methodism failed to establish more than a toehold in Scotland would have been welcome. Yet Scotland’s exceptionalism is what raises Batty’s work beyond its local significance. Nowhere else did Methodists encounter the particular combination of circumstances that made their expansion in Scotland so difficult. In England Methodism grew within the established church. Batty shows that Scottish Methodists faced a church establishment that opposed Wesley’s Arminianism, was deeply suspicious of unlearned or unqualified preachers, and resisted practices that smacked of Anglicanism, particularly centralized authority. The depth and success of Scottish education meant that Methodists faced congregations that expected greater...