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Culture and Piety in the Far West: Revival in Penzance, Newlyn, and Mousehole in 1849
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
A brief but classic account of a Cornish revival is to be found in Salome Hocking’s book Some Old Cornish Folk, published in 1903. Writing semi-fictionally but also semi-ethnographically about a number of years before, the author, herself sprung from Cornish Methodism, described the thronging penitents, the exuberant singing and the ‘thrill of excitement’ that went through the village. Crucially she commented on the circumstances. The revival, she explained, had arisen ‘at a time when no one was thinking about it, and no special services were being held. It seemed to have nothing to do with the preacher either…’ The event, she was suggesting, was entirely spontaneous. Although it was triggered by a young girl going forward to kneel as a convert below the pulpit, the subsequent stir was not the result of any earlier contrivance. The awakening was unexpected, not planned. Much of the writing about revivals – periodic episodes of religious enthusiasm attended by mass conversions in evangelical Protestantism – revolves around this distinction. Nineteenth-century advocates of revivals, in America as well as in the British Isles, contrasted the older pattern in which ‘Christians waited for them as men are wont to wait for showers of rain’ with the later way in which the episodes were promoted by ‘systematic efforts’. Subsequently historians have taken up the theme. John Kent, the leading commentator on English revivals of the Victorian era, while recognizing the existence of planning among some early nineteenth-century Methodists, places the dividing line between the prevalence of contagious spontaneity, and the use of devices to achieve conversions, after 1860.
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- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 44: Revival and Resurgence in Christian History , 2008 , pp. 225 - 250
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2008
References
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7 I am pleased to acknowledge a British Academy grant that enabled me to conduct the bulk of the research for this paper. I am also extremely grateful for the help of John Probert, Cedric Appleby and other specialists in Cornish Methodist history, and for the guidance of the staff at the Cornwall Centre, the Cornwall County Record Office, the Courtney Library of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, Truro, and the Morrab Library, Penzance.
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119 1851 Census, fol. 223.
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121 Respectively Abraham Chirgwin, Susan Tonkin; Nicholas Berriman (though his shop was in Penzance), Benjamin Dale, George Richards; William Wallis; ? Hosking, ? Smith (both unidentifiable in census); and Richard Richards. 1851 Census, fols 309, 267; 624, 306, 236; 283; 277.
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123 Penzance Circuit, 1843–9, 26.
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