ABSTRACT
This chapter explores John Wesley’s tracts on the adverse conditions experienced by the poor arising from the economic conditions of the country, including A Word to a Smuggler (1762), Thoughts on the Present Scarcity of Provisions (1773), and A Serious Address to the People of England, with Regard to the State of the Nation (1778). As one of the most widely travelled people in eighteenth-century Britain, his first-hand exposure to the lives and conditions of ordinary people gives Wesley’s reflections on trade, levels of employment, and population demographics an authenticity and vividness not always found in estimates made at a cool distance. While there is a moralism that can only be described as victim blaming of the troubled poor, when it came to practical solutions, Wesley saw a place for government intervention through taxation and trade policies that might alleviate food shortages. Wesley deemed the chief causes of want to be the gluttony and luxury of the wealthy, so living simply and frugally made room for production of greater wealth that would benefit a greater number of people. It was not socialism, but it was the kind of conviction that would inform the Methodist social conscience in the century that followed.
