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John Wesley grew up in a world of rapid change, very much like ours in some respects and very different in others. The whole way of work was changing in eighteenth-century England. Revolutions in smelting, spinning, and distilling created whole new industries. The world of science was unfolding—the first chemical tables, the first comprehensive biological classification system, the first experiments with the physics of electricity, of photographic materials, and of the steam engine, emerged during Wesley’s life.

Meanwhile, the cities collected the debris of society. Poverty, gin, and filthy living conditions in the city contrasted with the refined life of the new city gentry and the new country gentry, with their ample incomes or lands. The gentleman with his fixed income did not worry about work. He bought a military commission or spent his days with good friends and good literature, as did the young James Boswell. Very few Britishers were this fortunate.

When Wesley began his itinerant preaching in the seventeen thirties, there were no railroads, only a few coach lines, a network of notoriously bad dirt roads, no well-marked maps, no restaurants, and only occasional inns. Instead of welfare or any other relief for the poor, the government gave punishment for the crime of poverty—confinement to a work house. Churches helped some of the poor, but they were mainly the domain of the well-to-do. Still, only five or six members of Parliament even went to church!

Personal health and cleanliness were deplorable. The plague, smallpox, and countless diseases we call minor today had no cures. Rodent and insect control was minimal. Most dwellings had no running water, had chamber pots only for elimination, and had no soap as it was not yet in common use. Infant mortality was extremely high, and a person’s life expectancy was in the forties. Clothing was expensive, so many of the cities’ poor wore rags that were, like their bedding, full of lice. Even though the penalties for crimes today seem barbaric (hanging for petty thievery), no man was safe in the cities or on the highways or even on the high seas.

Imagine a world with no street lights, with no numbers on the doors of homes to tell addresses, with no television, no radio, no telephone, no telegraph, no efficient mail system, no frozen foods or even effective refrigeration, no cars, no vending machines, no electricity, no free libraries, and no aspirin. School of any kind was for the very few; therefore literacy was very rare. Corporal punishment was public—the stocks, the whip, the clipping of ears and nose, worse.

To us today even the terms of apprenticeship seem more like slavery than like work. Young boys and sometimes girls were bound over to a master for seven years of training. They worked six days a week, every day from dawn to dusk and often beyond. Finally they might gain their freedom and set up shop on their own. Or they would journey to work for whatever masters could use them for a while.

Those that migrated to the cities from rural areas neither had the proper skills nor could find many jobs. Perhaps you could sweep streets, run behind a man’s carriage, or sell yourself as a lowly servant. Perhaps you might drink with a group of good soldiers and awaken in camp with other forcibly recruited vagabonds, bound for the wars. If you were unlucky and starving, you might fall foul of the law and be packed off to the stench of Newgate Prison. From there you might have the chance to go to the New World in a boat loaded with prisoners of all sorts. Once you left the countryside, which was closing up, you did not return. Men took to theft, women to prostitution—whatever would feed them.

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