Susanna Wesley (Clarke 1886)/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV.
LATER MARRIED LIFE.
It was early in 1697 that the Wesleys removed to Epworth, on the opposite side of the county of Lincoln, which, though only a small market town with about 2,000 inhabitants, was the principal place in the Isle of Axholme, a district ten miles long by four broad, enclosed by the rivers Trent, Don, and Idle. The church is an ancient structure, dedicated to St. Andrew, and the rectory was at that time a palace in comparison with the "mud hut" at South Ormsby. It was not a brick or stone-built house, but a three- storied and five-gabled timber and plaster building, thatched with straw, and containing "a kitchinge, a hall, a parlour, a buttery, and three large upper rooms and some others for common use; and, also, a little garden; "together with a large barn, a dove-cote, and a hemp kiln. The children had ample space now to roam about in as well as for ease and comfort indoors; but there were fees to be paid on entrance into the living, furniture to be bought for the larger house, and, as the new rector determined to farm his own glebe, implements and cattle for that worse than amateur farming, for which a bookish man brought up in town was eminently unfit. Mr. Wesley, who was already in debt, borrowed a hundred pounds from the Bishop of Salisbury, which proving insufficient, before he was fairly installed he had to borrow another fifty pounds. The interest on and repayment of these sums hung like a millstone round his neck for the remainder of his life.
The family could have been only just settled at Epworth when Mehetabel, the fifth daughter, was born, and just about the same time Mrs. Wesley heard of the death of her sweet elder sister Elizabeth, the wife of John Dunton. The Duntons had continued lovers up to the day of the wife's death, and the bereaved husband declared that during the fifteen years of their union not an angry look had passed between them. She had been his book and cash keeper, and always took an active part in his business, and, in spite of cares and worries, he never once went home and found her out of temper. She nursed him devotedly in sickness, and when there seemed some possibility of their migrating to America and settling there in business, acquiesced in the voyage, cheerfully assuring her "most endeared heart" that she would joyfully go over to him, adding, "I do assure you, my dear, yourself alone is all the riches I desire; and if ever I am so happy as to have your company again, I will travel to the farthest part of the world rather than part with you any more. . . . I had rather have your company with bread and water than enjoy without you the riches of both Indies." In another she says, "Prithee, my dear, show thy love for me by taking care of thyself. Get thee warm clothes, woollen waistcoats, and buy a cloak. Be cheerful; want for nothing; doubt not that God will provide for us." She seems to have been proverbials in her own generation, for the natural goodness and amiability which unfortunately do not always go hand in hand with the sincerest piety.
Mrs. Wesley had been very happy in the brotherly friendship which existed between her own husband and her sister and Mr. Dunton, and felt the bereavement deeply. Mr. Wesley wrote the epitaph which was engraved on Mrs. Dunton's tomb in Buuhill Fields, and, though it was the fashion of the day to attribute every virtue under the sun to those who had epitaphs written for them, it was acknowledged by general consent that every word of it was true:—
"Sacred urn! with whom we trust
This dear pile of buried dust,
Know thy charge, and safely guard,
Till death's brazen gate's unbarred;
Till the angel bids it rise,
And removes to Paradise
A wife obliging, tender, wise;
A friend to comfort and advise;
Virtue mild as Zephyr's breath;
Piety, which smiled in death;
Such a wife and such a friend
All lament and all commend.
Most, with eating cares opprest,
He who knew, and loved her best;
Who her loyal heart did share,
He who reigned unrivalled there,
And no truce to sighs will give
Till he die, with her to live.
Or, if more he would comprise,
Here interred Eliza lies.
The two sisters were considered very much alike both in person and character, so that anything recorded of Mrs. Dunton throws a side light on Mrs. Wesley's own personality.
Mr. Wesley had been present at the wedding of the Duutons, and then presented them with an "Epithalamium" which was all doves and loves, and Cupids and Hymens. He evidently had a shrewd suspicion that the widowed bookseller was not made to live alone, for in the letter enclosing the epitaph he slily remarks that he hopes it may arrive before another Epithalamium is wanted. Mr. Dunton did marry again, within six months, and Mr. Wesley dropped his acquaintance as precipitately as Dr. Primrose might have done under the same circumstances. He was never tried in the same way himself, as Mrs. Wesley survived him, but, judging from what we know of his character, it is more than probable that he would not have lived long without a wife had he had the misfortune to lose his faithful partner.
Most likely it was when Mrs. Wesley was first installed at Epworth that she faced the problem of education for her children. Had she not done so, her daughters would have grown up ignorant, for funds wherewith to send them to school would never have been forthcoming. Strenuous efforts would naturally have been made for the boys; for education, and that at a public school, was regarded as & sine qua non by the father, and he would have moved heaven and earth to procure it for them. Mrs. Wesley was a quietly practical woman, who, having much to do, found time to do everything, by dint of unflagging energy and industry and a methodical habit of mind. It was, of course, impossible to teach her eldest boy till he was able to speak, but as soon as he began to talk she began to instruct him. It was a rapid and pleasant process, for she wrote that "he had such a prodigious memory that I do not remember to have told him the same word twice. What was more strange, any word he had learned in his lesson he knew wherever he saw it, either in his Bible or any other book, by which means he learned very soon to read an English author well." For two years or so, Samuel was her only pupil, and from her experience with him she never attempted to teach any of her children the alphabet till they were turned five, although the youngest of all, Kezia, picked up her letters before that age. Her mother regretted this, and said it was none of her doing, but reading must have been in the atmosphere. Mrs. Wesley's ninth child was born at Epworth in 1698, but, the parish registers having been destroyed by fire, it is not known whether it was a boy or girl. This child speedily died, and the next addition to the family was a John who was followed the next year by a Benjamin, both of whom died in infancy.
It appears that during the earlier part of the time at Epworth, Mr. Wesley's aged mother lived with him, and was, probably, a valuable assistance to the young wife, who always had a baby coming, and was frequently confined to her room and couch for six months at a time, though, as she rarely had more than one maidservant for all purposes, she must have managed the children even in her moments of greatest weakness, and it was this perpetual strain of mind and body that added so much to her feebleness.
On the 16th of May 1701, husband and wife took counsel together. Money was terribly scarce and coals were wanted, for, though it was almost summer, it would not have done to be without firing when another child was hourly expected. Every penny was collected together, but they could only muster six shillings between them. The coals were sent for, but the pockets were empty. On Thursday morning there was a joyful surprise. Kind Archbishop Sharpe, who knew how poverty pinched the family at Epworth, and all about the debts, and how hard the rector worked in hammering rhyme and prose out of his brains for London publishers, spoke to several of the nobility about him, and even appealed to the House of Lords in his behalf. The Countess of Northampton, moved by the tale of privation, gave twenty pounds for the Archbishop's proteges, ten of which, at Mr. Wesley's desire, were left in his Lordship's hands for old Mrs. Wesley, and the other ten were sent by hand to the Rector, arriving on the morning that found him penniless. The money was not an hour too soon, for that very evening twins, a boy and girl, were born. In, announcing the event to the Archbishop, Mr. Wesley wrote:—
"Last night my wife brought me a few children. There are but two yet, a boy and a girl, and I think they are all at present; we have had four in two years and a day, three of which are living."
Neither the twins nor the boy who preceded them survived many months, and in 1702 Anne was born; and the mother having now, for a wonder, only one baby in hand, while little Mehetabel, or Hetty as she was called, having attained the dignified age of five years, Mrs. Wesley began to keep regular school with her family for six hours a day, and kept it up, for twenty years, with only the few unavoidable interruptions caused by successive confinements, and a fire at the Rectory. How patiently she taught was shown when, one day, her husband had the curiosity to sit by and count while she repeated the same thing to one child more than twenty times. "I wonder at your patience," said he; "you have told that child twenty times that same thing." "If I had satisfied myself by mentioning it only nineteen times," she answered, "I should have lost all my labour. It was the twentieth time that crowned it."
Mrs. Wesley does not seem to have thought much of her own system of education, but she could not suffer her children to run wild, and could not afford either governesses, tutors, or schools. The only way of teaching them was to do it herself, and, while they were quietly gathered round her with their tasks, she plied her needle, kept the glebe accounts, wrote her letters, and nursed her baby in far more ease and comfort than she could have done if the little crew had been racing about and getting into boisterous mischief. It was at the desire of her son John, when a man of thirty, and perhaps with his own aspirations to family life, that she wrote down the details of how she brought up and taught her children, and that record is best given in her own words.