Abstract
Mary Tooth lived with Mary Fletcher and Sarah Lawrence in Madeley from 1799 (when she was twenty-one) and she remained in the community until her death in 1843. Tooth continued preaching into the 1840s, despite Methodist prohibitions against women preachers, and considered herself as a member of the Church of England, despite the movernent’s secession. She preserved the legacy of the Fletchers, and controversially recorded a tradition of women’s preaching, both in her own life writing and as Fletcher’s literary executrix. Tooth’s manuscript Journal consists of fourteen volumes, sporadically covering the period 1799 to 1842, and it remains unpublished. It omits personal details in favour of anecdotes and transcriptions of the writing and preaching of others, as Tooth assimilates herself within a communal history rather than articulating an individuated life. Until recently historians of Methodism have replicated Tooth’s original self-effacement, as she usually appears as an adjunct in discussions of the life of Fletcher, or as a footnote in the history of Madeley, and has never been the subject of a detailed study.1 Nonetheless, Tooth’s Journal enables us to explore ideas of relational selfhood and communal history, as in her life writing she imagines herself as a precious repository for the values of the past at a moment when the history of women’s preaching and their role in the evangelical revival was passing out of living memory.
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Notes
The most extensive treatment of Mary Tooth’s life and work is in Lisa Bernal Corley and Carol Blessing, ‘Speaking Out: Feminist Theology and Women’s Proclamation in the Wesleyan Tradition’, in Allyson Jule and Bettina Tate Pedersen (eds), Being Feminist, Being Christian: Essays from Academia (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 127–56. Tooth’s Journal is briefly discussed in
Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) and
David Frudd, ‘Mary Fletcher as a Source for Spirituality in Methodism’, in Norma Virgoe (ed.), Angels and Impudent Women: Women in Methodism (Loughborough: Wesley Historical Society, 2007), 84–113. She is also mentioned in
Dale A. Johnson, ‘Gender and the Construction of Models of Christian Activity: A Case Study’, Church History, 73.2 (2004), 247–71 (261–2). Zechariah Taft limits his account to three pages, noting Tooth’s ’successful labours in the same glorious cause, in which her spiritual mother had been so long, and so successfully employed’. Zechariah Taft, Biographical Sketches of the Lives and Public Ministry of Various Holy Women, 2 vols (London: Kershaw and Baynes & Son, 1825–28; repr. Peterborough: Methodist Publishing House, 1992), vol. 2, 230.
Paul Wesley Chilcote, Her Own Story: Autobiographical Portraits of Early Methodist Women (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 26.
Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Domestic Papers: Manuscript Culture and Early Modern Women’s Life Writing’, in Michelle M. Dowd and Julie A. Eckerle (eds), Genre and Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 33–48 (34, 43).
Lisa Moore, ‘“Something More Tender Still than Friendship”: Romantic Friendship in Early-Nineteenth-Century England’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist Studies Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 21–40 (37).
Isabel Rivers, ‘Dissenting and Methodist Books of Practical Divinity’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 127–64 (159).
Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 285.
Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 75–6.
Linda H. Peterson, ‘Collaborative Life Writing as Ideology: The Auto/biographies of Mary Howitt and Her Family’, in Cynthia Huff (ed.), Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities (London: Routledge, 2005), 176–95 (179, 189).
Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 27.
Susie C. Stanley, Holy Boldness: Women Preachers’ Autobiographies and the Sanctified Self (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002), 60.
George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: J. M. Dent, 1960), 88.
Correspondence between Tooth and Joseph Benson suggests that he offered to read the manuscript, but Tooth insisted on keeping it in her own hands. Christine L. Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 77–8; Gareth Lloyd, ‘Repression and Resistance: Wesleyan Female Public Ministry in the Generation after 1791’, in Virgoe (ed.), Angels and Impudent Women, 114–31 (120–1).
Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘The Posthumous Publication of Women’s Manuscripts and the History of Authorship’, in George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker (eds), Women’s Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 121–36 (128–9).
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© 2014 Amy Culley
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Culley, A. (2014). ‘They Live Yea They Live Forever’. In: British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137274229_6
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