Susanna Wesley
This is the story of Susanna Wesley, 1669-1742 Mother of Charles and John Wesley, who were founders of the Methodist Church. Susanna and her husband, Samuel, had nineteen children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. Her son Charles became a well-known hymn writer and her son John became the found of Methodism. Susanna was brought up in a Puritan home as the youngest of twenty-five children. As a teenager, she became a member of the Church of England. She became the wife of a chronically debt-ridden parish rector in an English village. She said, "I have had a large experience of what the world calls adverse fortune." Nonetheless, Susanna managed to pass down to her children Christian principles that stayed with them.
This is the story of Susanna Wesley, 1669-1742 Mother of Charles and John Wesley, who were founders of the Methodist Church. Susanna and her husband, Samuel, had nineteen children, ten of whom survived to adulthood. Her son Charles became a well-known hymn writer and her son John became the found of Methodism.
Susanna was brought up in a Puritan home as the youngest of twenty-five children. As a teenager, she became a member of the Church of England. She became the wife of a chronically debt-ridden parish rector in an English village. She said, "I have had a large experience of what the world calls adverse fortune." Nonetheless, Susanna managed to pass down to her children Christian principles that stayed with them.
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PAETINGS. 153<br />
part of one of the girls is also chronicled by the<br />
Rector in one of his letters to John at Oxford, where<br />
he says<br />
:<br />
even at<br />
"<br />
M miraculously gets money<br />
fruit of her earning to<br />
Wroote, and has given the first<br />
her mother, lending her money, and presenting her<br />
with a new cloak of her own buying and making, for<br />
which God will bless her/'<br />
The marriages of some of the daughters took place<br />
from Wroote, though <strong>Susanna</strong> was married in 1721 to<br />
Mr. Ellison before leaving the Epworth parsonage.<br />
He was comfortably off in those days, and she bore<br />
him four children, but he was extremely disliked by<br />
the <strong>Wesley</strong>s; and, after a fire which destroyed his<br />
house so that the family only just escaped with their<br />
lives, his wife left him never to return, and spent the<br />
remainder of her days among her children who were<br />
grown up and settled in London and Bristol.<br />
Hetty must have been married from Wroote to<br />
William Wright very much against her own will, and<br />
justly so, as he was in every way unsuited to her. Her<br />
uncle Matthew gave her a handsome sum of money,<br />
with which her husband set himself up in business in<br />
London, where they lived in Crown Court and Frith<br />
Street, Soho. Most of her children died in infancy,<br />
to her great grief, and her uncouth and illiterate husband<br />
took to drinking habits and ill-treated her. She<br />
saw a good deal of her uncle while he lived, of her<br />
brother at Westminster, and of John and Charles<br />
when they were in London. They all sympathised<br />
with her, and did all that could be done by fraternal<br />
affection to lighten her burdens.<br />
She was known and<br />
highly thought of in the literary circles of the day,<br />
meeting clever people at her uncle's house. Like most<br />
of her family, she wrote poems, many of which were
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