SOURCE: Heitzenrater, Richard P. “Wesley and His Diary.” In John Wesley: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by John Stacey, pp. 11-22. London: Epworth Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Heitzenrater examines Wesley's private notebooks and the ciphers employed therein, maintaining that although the works reveal details of Wesley's private life, they do not significantly alter history's evaluation of him.]

No single name in the history of our tradition is more familiar to Methodists world-wide than John Wesley. Nevertheless, historians and biographers, as well as painters, have had difficulty for over two centuries in capturing a portrait of Wesley that commands a consensus as being true to life. The picture is usually larger than life, perhaps not unexpectedly so—Wesley was, after all, a significant historical personality. But in the process of depicting his significance, the epic proportions of his traditional public image often overshadow the human, personal aspects of the man. The task before us is not to redraw the portrait completely—that is neither possible nor perhaps necessary. The historian's task is to bring the portrait into the light, review it, and make whatever alterations are appropriate on the basis of new evidence or new interpretations. Wesley's private diary proves to be a very useful resource in this endeavour because it gives us such an close view of the personal side of the man.

Many otherwise unsuspecting Methodists, when they hear of Wesley's multi-volume private diary (many parts of which are as yet unpublished), wonder if these notebooks might reveal more than we would (or should) want to know about Wesley's private life. We can set such apprehensiveness aside at the outset. Only those who forget that Wesley was human will have any problem with these writings. And the Wesley-cultists actually have more to cope with in his letters than in his ‘secret’ diary.

The well-known stereotype of Wesley is essentially a ‘public’ image, built upon documents that were published during Wesley's lifetime—journals, sermons, tracts, hymns, and a few letters. This image depicts Wesley as he wanted the public to see him. The present popular image of Wesley still reflects the literary portraits done by his nineteenth-century followers. Most of these arose in the midst of a powerful Methodist triumphalism and were firmly fixed long before any significant study of Wesley's private letters and diary.

The Wesley of the diary is a more candid, spontaneous, searching individual, less concerned about defending himself in the public eye, more pre-occupied with his personal interests and more concerned with tracking his own pilgrimage as a follower of Christ. There is no inherent contradiction between the private and public Mr Wesley; these are two sides of the same man. But a careful look at him through the diary (especially in conjunction with the letters) helps us to develop a more accurate and complete portrait than we can see in the public documents, which tend to support (if not promote) the more stereotypical image.

John Wesley kept a personal, daily diary from the year of his ordination as a deacon at the age of twenty-two in 1725 until just a few days before his death in 1791—the last three-quarters, or sixty-six years, of the nearly eighty-eight years of his life. The diary is quite different from his Journal. The diary, like most of his letters, is a very private document, primarily designed for Wesley's own use, while the Journal, like most of his sermons and tracts, is a public, published document. The Journal narrative is based in part on events listed in his manuscript diary, but the purpose of the material he published is to provide a description and defence of himself and his movement from 1735 wards. Wesley also had a particular purpose in mind in keeping a diary; it was not simply a nonchalant noting down of main events for the day. He started this daily exercise to measure and record his progress in holy living and, in fact, to promote such progress through the careful management of his time. Wesley's little notebook was a constant companion into which he would, at frequent intervals, carefully enter the activities of the past few hours, occasionally using notes on scrap paper to assist his memory from one writing to the next.

Among several impressions that are obvious throughout the little notebooks that comprise his diary, two are especially fascinating: 1. Wesley developed a coded system of diary entry and 2. his method changed and developed in stages. The so-called ‘code’ is made up of several elements that change both internally and in their combinations with each other. First is a cipher which is a combination of substitution and transposition ciphers. In the substitution aspect of the cipher, Wesley uses numbers, dots, or symbols for the vowels he wishes to write. In the transposition aspect, he occasionally switches consonants so that when he writes down a letter such as ‘d’, he may indeed mean the consonant on either side, e.g. for a ‘d’, he would use a ‘c’ or an ‘f’. To further complicate matters, Wesley at times applies the transposition rule to the substitution aspect of his cipher. That is to say, while 2-4-6-8-10 or 1-3-5-7-9 may in either case substitute for a-e-i-o-u, Wesley occasionally (whether through error or intention) uses a number such as 3 or 4, which would normally indicate an ‘e’, to mean either an ‘a’ or an ‘i’, the vowel on either side of the ‘e’ (in the usual ordering). One further complication—Wesley occasionally flips the whole scheme over so that the odd or even numbers in descending order may also mean a-e-i-o-u.

A second feature of his ‘code’, evident on almost every page of his diary (especially after 1729), is the persistent and heavy use of abbreviations. These also change and develop as he becomes accustomed to his own use of shortened words. Many words, or even phrases, having become more and more abbreviated, are finally indicated by a single letter. For example, in a typical early morning entry from the early 1730s, Wesley shows that he was asking himself certain ‘questions’ for the day, proceeding with his self-examination, and then reading the Bible—simply by the letters ‘qxb’.

A third aspect of the ‘code’ is Wesley's use of symbols other than letters or numbers. Besides symbols within the cipher to indicate particular letters, Wesley also uses special symbols to indicate words and phrases. In addition to these, he develops a rather interesting set of symbols to indicate ‘degrees of attention’. He uses six variations of the dash, above or below other entries, with or without a tail going up or down, to indicate these ‘degrees’, six attitudes that range from very negative to very positive: cold, dead, indifferent, attentive, fervent and, best of all—a dash above the entry with the final little tail going up—zealous.

Besides, cipher, abbreviations, and symbols, Welsey also works into his ‘code’ several number schemes. He uses numbers to indicate a variety of things on the diary page, from the simple notation of the time of day to the rather complicated hourly listing of his resolutions broken and resolutions kept. Simply by entering ‘t2’ under the resolutions-broken column, Wesley indicates that he has failed to measure up to the expectations of the second question for Tuesday, one of a rather long list of questions for hourly self-examination at the front of his diary. The second question for Tuesday is, ‘Have I any proud or vain thoughts?’ Another use of numbers which occurs in his most complicated scheme of diary-keeping, the ‘exacter’ diary style of 1734-36, is a rating system whereby he could indicate his ‘temper of devotion’ by means of numbers from 1 to 9.

A fifth element of his ‘code’ is the use of eighteenth-century systems of shorthand. Wesley used two different shorthand schemes: Weston's shorthand, starting in 1734, changing to Byrom's shorthand in 1736. Byrom's shorthand predominates in Wesley's diary entries from that point onward to 1791. Although the shorthand appears to be visually baffling and although Wesley's use of it is at times rather imprecise and often abbreviated, it still is probably the simplest part of Wesley's code to decipher.

The second major characteristic of Wesley's diary that I would mention in addition to the ‘code’ is the fact that the style of diary-keeping goes through stages. Over the first ten years, the system gradually increases in complexity and completeness of daily entry. Over the succeeding few years, it gradually reverts to a simpler format that Wesley then follows for the rest of his life.

Starting in 1725, Wesley uses a rather simple daily entry, sometimes just one line, sometimes two (for morning and afternoon), writing usually in longhand with a few abbreviations, with a few cipher entries scattered among the rest. By 1729, Wesley is writing almost entirely in abbreviations (occasionally using a few special symbols) and expanding his entries to three or four lines per day. He gradually makes more complete notations for each day so that eventually a daily entry takes up half a page.

By 1734, however, this scheme of daily entry has become totally inadequate for his increasingly complex listing of activities. He switches then to what the Oxford Methodists called the ‘exacter’ diary, one full page for each day and a column format by which he could indicate not only activities for each hour but also the results of his complicated schemes of self-examination. By 1737, he had begun incorporating the shorthand into this format, at the same time making briefer and simpler entries for each hour. By early 1738, he has discarded the column format and has gone back to what we might call the paragraph style, using again half a page for each day's entry. In spite of a gap in the diary from 1742 to 1781 (these volumes having been lost or destroyed after Wesley's death), the only difference in the next extant diary, beginning in 1782, is that the daily entry has shrunk back to about three or four lines per day. The diary, however, is still mostly in shorthand and still rather precise in its indications of time and activities.

A dozen or so of these manuscript volumes have survived, and even the casual observer can tell that they contain a great deal of information. Some of the data from these newly transliterated pages is helping to rewrite the early history of Methodism. The picture of Wesley that emerges from the pages of his diary is overwhelmingly detailed. Over two thousand pages of closely written entries list the activities of Wesley's busy life during those years. The cryptic but extensive notes form a vast data bank about Wesley, some of it trivia esoteria, perhaps, but in large part, useful information that helps expand and clarify our understanding of Wesley's life and thought.

DETAILS FROM THE DIARY

The diary adds a myriad of details to the life story of Wesley—facts about places, people, readings, writings, dates, health, preaching, weather, and a host of other topics. In some cases this information confirms other sources; at other times it corrects misinformation or conjectures.

Some of the facts that we can glean from the diary remind us of Wesley's fascination with the world around him. He tours Blenheim, viewing the tapestries in the newly constructed palace. While travelling near Manchester, he steps into the cavernous darkness of Poole's Hole. Pretending at archaeology, he digs into the hermit's grave at Lindholme Hall. An inquisitive visitor, he steps off the measurements of Lincoln Cathedral. On at least two occasions, he builds a camera obscura (a primitive optical gadget). He enjoys the mystery of the aurora borealis and the passing of a comet.

We can follow Wesley around England, not only tracing his routes but also noting the names of roadhouses where he ate and slept. Many, like the Red Lodge south of Newark, are still entertaining guests.

We discover some of the tribulations of his travels—his horse falls on a bridge in Daventry and slips into a muddy ditch near Leicester; he loses his way in the woods of Oxfordshire and the swamps of Georgia; his leg goes lame near Tetsworth. A wall falls out from under him near Coscombe, raising the question of what he was doing walking on the wall to begin with! His purchase of a pistol just before setting out on foot from Oxford to Epworth (a five-day walk) hints at other dangers of eighteenth-century travel.

Some of the entries provide clues to the dates and origins of Wesley's writings—sermons, letters, treatises that have previously been undated. The fire which cancelled a scheduled horse race, mentioned in his sermon, ‘On Public Diversions’ (No. 143, new edition), is noted in his diary on 1 September 1732, at Epworth, just before he began writing a sermon to preach in his father's church on the following Sunday. Another series of diary entries confirms the fact that a group of sermons, though extant only in Charles Wesley's handwriting, are actually John's sermons, written and preached first by John, then copied and used by Charles.

The diary also mentions other private activities not often evident in the more public accounts of Wesley's life as a young man. He constructs an arbour at Epworth, helps the workmen build his house in Savannah, works in his garden in Georgia, and plants trees at Wroot. He goes fishing with Thomas Hawkins and pares apples with Benjamin Ingham. As a student at Oxford, he exercises with frequent walks around Christ Church meadow and occasional games of tennis.

Wesley notes other leisure activities in his early diary entries that we do not hear about in his own or other accounts of his life, such as going to the races at Port Meadow or playing a variety of games common in the eighteenth century: backgammon, billiards, Pope Joan, brag, ombre, quadrille, loo, quoits, draughts, similies, cross questions and crooked answers.

Some of the activities listed in his diary are similar in nature to some noted in his Journal. But without the diary we would not have known that Wesley saw a performance of Hamlet at Goodman's Fields Playhouse in London or that he heard Handel direct a performance of the oratorio Esther at the theatre in Oxford. He gave Lord Oxford a tour of the Bodleian Library and walked around Lord Aylesford's estate in Meridan. The diary shows Wesley confronting mobs, visiting the House of Commons, and even mending his breeches.

We can also see in the diary an occasional entry that reflects Wesley's reaction to special events in his life. On a summer day in 1733 he writes: ‘Waked by spitting blood. O Eternity!’ After viewing the hanging of a horse-thief he notes with some surprise, ‘I but little affected!’ Upon his first arrival in Savannah he notes at the bottom of a page, ‘Beware America; be not as England.’ In April 1738 he remarks after having been visited by Peter Böhler, ‘Convinced that faith converts at once.’ The news that his would-be love Sophy Hopkey was to be married to someone else led him to end his diary entry that day with ‘No such day since I first saw the sun! … Let me not see such another!’

The diary also contains, for some periods, rather complete financial accounts, whereby we can tell how much he paid to ride the Trent ferry (a penny each way) how much he was paid for preaching in rural Oxfordshire churches (up to a guinea per Sunday), how much he paid to hire a horse for a day (about a shilling), or how much a ‘Cromwell shilling’ cost him (two shillings). He visits the bookbinder, the printer, the barber and the brazier. He goes to auctions, to markets, to exhibits and to fairs and often records the cost of these excursions to the halfpenny.

The diary also reveals the private side of many of Wesley's public activities. For instance, Wesley spent over fifty hours preparing his sermon, ‘Circumcision of the Heart’ (three to four times his normal effort at that time) and revised it several times after reading it to friends. In the spring of 1740, he spent twenty to thirty hours during some weeks preparing the first extract of his Journal for publication. The diary for January 1783 indicates that Wesley spent over fifty hours preparing the monthly edition of his Arminian Magazine.

Such careful indication of time in the diary (usually to the quarter-hour, sometimes to the minute) makes it possible to know how much time Wesley spent daily in prayer, meditation, reading, writing, travelling, talking, eating, worshipping, and other ‘necessary business’ (as he notes at times). A statistical analysis and comparison of different periods of his life reveals a remarkable degree of consistency (as well as some important changing patterns) in the nature of his busy-ness as well as the course of his daily schedule.

The diary contains not only a record of Wesley's hourly activities, but also on many of the prefatory pages, notes on a variety of miscellaneous concerns. Predominant on these pages are lists—questions for self-examination, resolutions for self-improvement, writings to be done, writings already finished, members of societies and bands, books read, books owned, laundry sent out, money lent, ideas borrowed, even colloquialisms picked up along the way.

Details of this sort, fascinating in themselves, combine to give us a more complete and accurate view of a Wesley whose image at times appeared somewhat elusive. This material also makes possible a more careful examination of the development of Wesley's mind and spirit and of his leadership in the Methodist movement. The sources of Wesley's thought and the context of his writings, both essential to an understanding of his theology, become much more explicit. Once these materials are more widely accessible, biographers and theologians will have a unique resource to help them understand Wesley in a more particular as well as holistic manner.

THE PORTRAIT IN THE DIARY

What sort of Wesley emerges from the pages of the diary? It is not an unfamiliar Wesley, but rather a much more complicated one than we usually see. The diary allows us to paint in some details we find in no other sources, thereby in its own way helping to make his portrait more lifelike. No one would doubt that Wesley was busy, devout, methodical, and resolute, but with the help of some samplings from his diary we can see precisely in what ways his life exhibited these characteristics.

We all know that Wesley was busy, but what precisely was the extent and nature of his busy-ness? The statistics of his accomplishments are a well-rehearsed part of the Wesley story: travelling 250,000 miles during his ministry, preaching 40-50,000 times, publishing over 400 separate items, some of them multi-volume works—all adding up to more than one, or perhaps even two, normal lifetimes of productivity.

The diary helps us answer some of the questions that naturally arise. Where did he go? What did he do? Whom did he visit? What did he read? A sampling from his first diary shows him during his Oxford days, reading Horace, De Arte Poetica, writing a sermon, going to an auction and visiting friends at a local pub. A sample page from the second diary shows Wesley visiting his lady friends in the Cotswold Hills on his way back to Oxford in the summer of 1729 and reading Reflections on Learning, the Art of Thinking, and several other works. Once at Oxford he is again visiting friends, on one occasion rowing up the river with some fellow students, as he says ‘by water to Ensom’, losing more than once while playing cards on the way (his financial accounts for this period tell us that he spent and lost twelve shillings on this little jaunt).

A page from his ‘exacter’ diary of 1735 shows him again talking with many friends, indicating the nature of their conversation (rt, ‘religious talk’; vt, ‘various talk’; it, ‘idle talk’; lt, learned talk’). In the morning he is studying shorthand; in the evening he is reading the Greek Testament with his Methodist friends. On a page from the Georgia period, the shorthand reveals that he is reading Clement of Rome and spending a great deal of time talking to Sophy Hopkey and her aunt. Another sample page from a weekend in October 1738 shows, among other things, the people he is visiting and the places he is preaching, with two of his preaching texts noted in Greek at the bottom of the page. One of them is especially noteworthy, a favourite text even after Aldersgate: ‘And by works was faith made perfect’ (James 2.22). His diary just a year or so before his death shows Wesley at the age of eighty-six reading Brevint's works, still writing sermons, editing the Arminian Magazine, attending a love-feast, and spending many hours writing letters to friends and associates: a regular activity during the winter months that he spent in London.

These sample pages show every day, every hour, packed with activity. The time is well spent, except perhaps for those infrequent occasions when Wesley notes ‘idleness’. These documents tell not only his schedule of rising, singing, fasting and other daily activities, but also the breadth and depth of his reading, the variety of his writing and editing, the scope of his travelling and the nature of his conversations with people, as well as the many regular occasions for personal prayer, Bible study, meditation and other specifically religious practices. In all this busy-ness Wesley was trying to do all for the glory of God. He saw idleness as sinful, along with some other light-hearted activities not conducive to promoting God's glory. The regularity and frequency of his spiritual exercises bring into focus this desire to glorify God in his devotional life.

Wesley was indeed devout. Every one of the diary pages is filled with a variety of symbols to indicate periods of prayer: private prayer, public prayers morning an evening, as well as short-sentence prayers (called ejaculatory prayers) at the turn of every hour. On the day he discovered Miss Sophy was to be married he even indicated in his diary his consternation at not being able to pray. Wesley also indicates periods of meditation: in a college garden at Oxford, on his way to preach at Islington, and on other occasions appropriate for reflection.

Two other specific details indicated in Wesley's scheme of diary-keeping help us to see the measure of his devotional stance. One of these is the set of symbols I mentioned earlier, the dashes which show ‘degrees of attention’ for private prayer, meditation or almost any other activity. Another detail is his hourly rating scheme whereby he indicates his ‘temper of devotion’ by number. Within this scheme 6 seems to be his most normal entry, so that 7 and 8 are generally better, 4 and 5 a lesser evaluation of his attitude.

From the nature of these details in the diary it quickly becomes evident that Wesley was not only busy and devout, but also methodical. The diary itself is a visual illustration of his methodistic tendencies, but these tendencies extended far beyond the method for the diary. Wesley also had a specific method for reading, a method for writing, a method for acquaintance (that is, making new acquaintances), a method for visiting and even a method for deciding important questions. By 1735 he was beginning to question some of his regular practices such as early rising and fasting, and as Wesley's body yearns for more sleep in the morning, the young scholar casts lots to see whether he should stay up or go back to bed. And as breakfast approaches on a fast day and his stomach cries out for food, he again casts lots to see whether he should break the fast. In most of these instances, the drawn lot, determined of course by God's providence, supported his time-tested resolutions more often than his weakening will-power.

Wesley was a methodist not only in his activities, living by method and rule (as the title of an earlier book stated), but also in his theology. Eclectic as it was, his method of theologizing approximated in significant ways to that of some Dutch and English Arminians who had been called ‘New Methodists’ in the previous century because of their new method of doing theology. That, however, is a full story in its own right.

In all of Wesley's frantic activity he demonstrates yet another attribute: he was resolute. He had purpose and direction, with specific expectations for each step of the way. In the early diary entries his resolute attitude is visible in the many lists of resolutions by which he guided his thoughts and activities. The ‘exacter’ diary during the 1730s is the high point of his systematized approach to score-keeping in this regard. Two columns at the right-hand side of the page indicate ‘resolutions broken’ and ‘resolutions kept’, keyed by letter and number to long lists of guidelines he sought to follow. His resolutions usually arose from (and therefore indicate some problem areas in) his attempt to press on toward perfection. Many of his periods of self-examination resulted in the drawing up of new resolutions. We can sympathize with Wesley when he writes, ‘Before you sit at a full table, pray for help’. The pervasiveness of his self-inquiry is illustrated by one particularly persistent question over which Wesley frequently stumbled: ‘Have I said or done anything without a present or previous perception of its direct or remote tendency to the glory of God?’ It is easy to understand Wesley's difficulty in trying to answer that in the affirmative at the end of every hour.

These resolutions and questions gradually evolved into lists of rules for the Methodists. Though none of the later lists were quite so specific and thorough as those he designed for himself, the temper of them all is evident in what came to be known as the ‘General Rules’, summarized under three simple directives: to avoid evil of every kind, to do good of every possible sort and to attend upon all the ordinances of God. Wesley's own resolute intention is best illustrated in a resolution copied down by his friend, Benjamin Ingham: ‘Resolved—to make the salvation of my soul my chief and only concern.’

Certainly Methodism is more than the lengthened shadow of one man, but we cannot fully appreciate the richness of our heritage without recognizing the mark left upon it by the character and personality of John Wesley. Sometimes the halo and tinfoil of well-meaning triumphalists obscure our view of the real person. But these diary records, along with other private materials from his pen such as the letters, help us to recall the failures as well as the triumphs, the tedium as well as the excitement, the struggles as well as the strengths, of Wesley's own personal attempt to press on to perfection. Some observers will find his peculiar interests fascinating. Many will be intrigued by the sheer energy that his life-style exhibits. To some he will seem more than slightly eccentric or compulsive, as he certainly did to many in his own day. To others, the depth of his spirituality and the breadth of his learning will appear overwhelming.

The diary does not alter the broad judgments history has passed on John Wesley's reputation. These records reveal him no less of a hero. They detract not an ounce from our admiration for him. But these valuable little notebooks do take us a bit closer to a more life-like portrait of John Wesley the man.