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Even the most devout Methodists will be excused if they've never considered what their denomination's founder's kitchen looks like. I have stood in it. I was on a tour of the John Wesley House and Museum of Methodism in London, and in my ears were the voices of James Rogers, a preacher who lived in the Wesley home, and Elizabeth "Betsy" Ritchie, John Wesley's housekeeper.
All right, what I heard was only actors, playing Rogers and Betsy on the audiocassette tour. But to one like me who spent his youth fidgeting in Methodist and Holiness church pews, the house is entrancing. In a room off John Wesley's kitchen are display cases containing his personal belongings—christening robe and baby rattle; his nightcap, shoes, and traveling case, containing the holy man's fork and fruit knife—relics displayed with such reverence it's hard to believe Protestants were involved. "The one on the far right has a very special meaning for me," Rogers said of one cabinet. "It's a lock of Mr. Wesley's hair, cut after his death from his poor, dear head and given me." After a pause, the Reverend Rogers added solemnly, "Please, take as much time as you want to look at this cabinet, and when you're finished, switch the tape guide on again."
Wesley moved into his four-story Georgian townhouse in 1779, a year after he built his famous chapel—the "Cathedral of Methodism"—next door. The house stands on City Road in what's now the London Borough of Islington. Wesley, a dissenter from the Church of England, chose a location beyond the old city wall on a site that, ironically, had been used some one hundred years earlier as a dirt dump during the construction of St. Paul's Cathedral about a mile south. Before my visit I stopped to pay respects at Bunhill Fields, the small nonconformist burial ground across the street from Wesley's house. Those buried on the quiet, tree-shrouded grounds include Daniel Defoe, William Blake, George Fox (founder of the Quakers), Susanna Wesley (John and Charles's mother), and John Bunyan. Bunyan's monument is perhaps the largest and most elaborate of the bunch. It includes an effigy of the writer and bas-relief sculptures of scenes from The Pilgrim's Progress. In 1898 Wesley's House was opened to the public, and the Museum of Methodism, established in the chapel crypt in 1984, boasts "one of the world's largest collections of Wesleyan ceramics and some of the finest Methodist paintings."
One of these paintings is the now-famous Robert Hunter portrait of Wesley, which he cherished as one of the finest of him ever rendered—"a most striking likeness," he wrote in his journal. But what Wesley didn't mention was that the portrait, painted when he was 62, makes him appear 30 years younger.
Wesley's pinkness is attributable to what Betsy kindly described as "Mr. Wesley's abiding interest in health." Interest, in the days when every medical procedure was an experiment, is a bit of an understatement. In the dining room is displayed Wesley's "chamber horse"—an exercise chair with a thick leather cushion filled with air, which, when sat in, flattened like an accordion. Wesley hopped up and down in this chair for hours, simulating horseback riding. Betsy said, "He was convinced that a due degree of exercise was essential for health and long life. Walking was the best form, followed by riding. He loved exercise, even in old age, and was physically fit!" (A docent told me Wesley often paced his bedroom, having calculated that 200 trips wall-to-wall equaled a mile.)
In other words, John Wesley was a health nut. "I am as strong at 81 as I was at 21," he wrote, "but abundantly more healthy, being a stranger to the headache, toothache and other bodily disorders which attended me in my youth."
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