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If these last two paragraphs seem something of a dull catalogue of unsexy scholarship that didn't even use the word "postmodern" once, then I should hasten to emphasize just how crucial this work of basic scholarship is. It just so happens that during the same months that I was reading these Wesley texts, I was also reading a number of literary theorists on postcolonial, post-structuralist approaches to autobiography. After swimming in this high theory, I returned with real appreciation (even love) for the late Oliver A. Beckerlegge, who taught himself to read Charles Wesley's shorthand by poring over the texts, looking for keys, comparing text with text, and puzzling over "whether a slightly slanting stroke is a t, b, or r; or whether a slightly curved stroke is intended to be a curve or a straight line." Or, again, to think that Beckerlegge faithfully left a lacuna in a sermon for years, rather than speculate what the shorthand symbols for md could mean, until at the page proof stage it dawned on him with certainty that this was "music and dancing" at the conclusion of the parable of the Good Samaritan. I have nothing but admiration for such patient and virtuous scholarship, which feels a deep accountability to the actual words of Charles Wesley, even to the ciphers themselves.

Such text critical work is indeed foundational. The vigor, quality, and breadth of research on Jonathan Edwards in the last generation, for example, simply would not have been possible were it not for the thoroughness and comprehensiveness of the Yale edition. It remains to be seen whether the similarly exacting textual work that is going into the Works of John Wesley, and now into the various works of Charles Wesley, will stimulate a similar wave of scholarship. There are certainly myriad possibilities for these texts beyond the good use made of them by the Methodist faithful.

The tercentenary was an occasion for new biographies from both sides of the Atlantic. Gary Best's Charles Wesley: A Biography and John Tyson's Assist Me to Proclaim: The Life and Hymns of Charles Wesley are two very readable and sympathetic biographies that draw widely on the sources, though neither of these is the sort of scholarly biography that will be received as a definitive work, such as appeared just after the 250-year anniversary of John Wesley's conversion with Henry Rack's Reasonable Enthusiast: John Wesley and the Rise of Methodism (1989). Tyson does more with the hymns and offers a more careful analysis of Charles Wesley's theology; Best offers a stronger narrative and sense of context, and he paints a darker picture of brother John along the way. But both provide a sympathetic portrait of a Charles Wesley who is difficult not to like.

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