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I look out my office window in Vancouver at a mountain that appears singular and imposing. From experience, though, I know that if you drive up that mountain, you will find that it distinguishes itself into two equally impressive peaks. In fact, the bowl-shaped depression between them will be the site of some of the events for the Winter Olympics in 2010. Yet we still speak of it in Vancouver as one "mountain."

So have the brothers John and Charles Wesley been seen by later generations. Founders of Methodism, and key figures in the 18th-century evangelical revival in Britain, they appear from a distance as a kind of hyphenated compound: John-and-Charles-Wesley. One mountain. If we distinguish the two at all, it is John Wesley plus a hymn-writing sidekick. Charles Wesley is just John Wesley in rhyme. Maybe we even unconsciously see the Wesleys as an 18th-century version of the later evangelistic teams in American revivalism: preacher plus songleader, sort of like Moody and Sankey, or Billy Graham and Cliff Barrows. But does it really matter where you put that tiny little apostrophe, anyhow? Wesley's theology, or the Wesleys' theology?

It does matter.The tercentenary of the birth of Charles Wesley (1707-88) saw the publication of a number of fine books on the younger evangelist that have begun to distinguish him clearly so that he stands out in his own right, no longer elided into the towering figure of his brother John (1703-91). The result is that we can see two mountains now, and sometimes even a wide gap between them.

These publications mark the culmination of a renewed scholarly interest in the younger evangelist that has gathered pace over the past two decades, especially since the founding of the Charles Wesley Society in 1990. This scholarship is founded in the first instance on getting the primary texts right and getting them out there. For those of us who have sung "And Can It Be?" or "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling" for as long as we can remember, it is hard to believe that three centuries on there could still be Charles Wesley manuscripts that have yet to be prepared properly for publication. And this is where much of the attention of a small group of dedicated scholars has been focused, doing the painstaking work of textual criticism and preparing critical editions. As with John Wesley's works, this has involved deciphering and translating Charles' idiosyncratic shorthand, and using internal and external evidence to distinguish which sermons and hymns were from John and which came from Charles' pen (and which ones we can't be sure of either way).

For example, The Poetical Works of John and Charles Wesley, edited by George Osborn (1868-72), was for long the chief source for studying the poems of the Wesley brothers, but its usefulness was limited, given its omissions, inaccuracies, and editorial eccentricities. The Unpublished Poetry of Charles Wesley, edited in three volumes by S.T. Kimbrough, Jr. and Oliver A. Beckerlegge (Kingswood Books, 1988-92), brought to light the poetry that had been left unpublished in Charles' own lifetime or was simply missed by Osborn. And now the Duke Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition has placed reliable editions and transcriptions of the published verse of Charles Wesley online too. Together this forms a large body of poetry, some of which had never seen the light of day before, and all of it more usable for scholars than ever.

Likewise, various prior editions of Charles' sermons have been superseded by a critical edition edited by Kenneth Newport, The Sermons of Charles Wesley (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001). And the tercentenary saw the publication of a critical edition of Charles' journal, The Manuscript Journal of the Rev. Charles Wesley, M.A., edited in two volumes by Kenneth Newport and S.T. Kimbrough, Jr. For the first time, this edition translated the shorthand and restored the deletions of the Victorian editors. Some of the personal details that previous editors did not see fit to publish are the sort of everyday concerns that most interest many of us now. To this body of texts, we may add a scholarly edition of the journal letters and familiar correspondence of Charles Wesley that is also in the works. I only wish I'd had these texts available for the last book I wrote, in which Charles Wesley figured significantly.

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