The Revolution in Tanner's Lane: The Honesty of Dissent in Politics, Religion and the Family

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 17; p. 32
• Main Author: Pooley, Roger
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2013
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); English literature; Politics; Religion
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Think of Mr. Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, whose insistence on mortifying the flesh, not to mention the natural curls, of the girls in Lowood School is not extended to the women of his own family, 'splendidly attired in velvet, silk and furs'.1 Or many of the clergy of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, for example Archdeacon Grantly in The Warden, who sets out his sermon writing materials before locking his study door and sitting down to read the 'witty mischief of Rabelais instead.2 Rutherford is well aware of the particular pressures to be hypocritical that occur in a Free Church community, to pretend to a conversion experience in order to be admitted to membership, for example. [...]we may see in his father's the origin of his most unhappy fictional marriages, those in which the gulf can never be bridged because one spouse is mentally commonplace and unfeeling. While many of the radicals were also Dissenters, the Methodists in particular had no background in Old Dissent, and Wesley himself was a Tory who preached against the American Revolution.12 In the first part of The Revolution in Tanner's Lane, Rutherford is interested in tensions within the radicals between the religious, like Zachariah, and those not bound by a church theology or loyalty at all, such as Major Maitland; in the second part, he exposes the tensions in a rural chapel congregation over the repeal of the Com Laws, a popular radical cause, but not one that appealed to the local farmers who stood to lose by it. Hobsbawm argues that other local factors were more important in deciding whether Nonconformists supported political radicalism in the period - against Halévy's influential account, which E.P. Thompson appears to take at face value some years later in his largely hostile account of working-class Methodism. 13 Michael Brealey, Bedford's Victorian Pilgrim: William Hale White in Context (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2012), pp. 82-7; The Early Life of Mark Rutherford, p. 5.