The Religious and Social Significance of Methodist Tickets, and Associated Practices of Collecting and Recollecting, 1741–2017

Abstract

Among all the paper ephemera surviving from eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, the humble Methodist ticket has attracted little attention from scholars and collectors. Issued quarterly to members as a testimonial to religious conduct, many still exist, reflecting the sheer quantity produced by 1850, and the significance of keeping practices, where Methodist habits were distinctive. This article explores first the origin and spread of tickets primarily within British Methodism, but also noting its trans-oceanic contexts. Apparently inconsequential objects, they shaped experience and knowledge, illuminating eighteenth-century religious life, female participation, and plebeian agency. Discussion then turns to patterns of saving and memorialization that from the 1740s preserved Methodists’ tickets. Such practices extended the lifecycle of the individual ticket and created the accidents of its survival, giving it new uses as an institutional resource. In recovering the dead, it acquired nostalgic value, but other capacities were lost and forgotten. The ticket's origins, uses, and preservation intersect with major historical and historiographical currents to complicate established narratives of print, urban association, and commerce, and to present alternative understandings of collecting.

Spreading the Work: Introducing Eighteenth-Century ‘Derivatives’ in the Classroom

“…As the experiment in participative literary historiography that it is, the seminar can be structured in two stages, a propaedeutic and an advanced one. Influenced by recent re-castings of eighteenth-century literature along the lines of book history, the history of reading, media and ephemeral studies (Bannet 2011;Bannet 2017;Collé-Bak 2011;Havens 2019;Lloyd 2020;Murphy and O'Driscoll 2013;Siskin 2016;The Multigraph Collective 2018), the propaedeutic stage should offer participants opportunities to become acquainted with the revisionist premises informing the aim of re-writing the history of eighteenth-century literature. Looking at critical assessments of the traditional accounts of the period (as visible in anthologies like the Norton Anthology) along with an induction into the use of online databases where derivatives are to be found is a good starting point.…”