Charles Wesley has not received the attention from historians that he deserves. The immense stature of his elder brother John has led to him being relegated to the position of ‘assistant’ and a hymn-writer par excellence. Charles himself tended to be self-effacing and neither he nor his contemporaries considered his writings to warrant publication or preservation to anything like the same degree as John's. The appearance of a major work on the younger Wesley, therefore, is always to be welcomed, and not just because the publication of this biography has been timed to coincide with the tercentenary of Charles's birth. It is true that, as Gary Best points out, ‘Charles has been terribly ignored’ in comparison with his more illustrious brother, but he adds, rather puzzlingly, that ‘the last major biography of him was written in the nineteenth century’, which is a little unkind to such scholars as Frederick Luke Wiseman, Frederick Gill and Arnold Dallimore, who produced important biographical studies of Charles Wesley in 1933, 1964 and 1988 respectively.

Charles Wesley: a biography is, on the whole, a solid, detailed and well-constructed survey in which the author makes extensive use of the wide range of primary and secondary sources which are now available – including the recent work of such scholars as Heizenrater and Newport – though one might question the citing (p. 88) of Roy Hattersley's biography of John Wesley (itself littered with factual errors) as an authority. One cannot help feeling, however, that a golden opportunity has been missed. Although the book has the great merit of placing the younger Wesley's career in the context of the life and work of his elder brother and the great friend (and rival), George Whitefield, Charles's ideas tend to be submerged in the detail of Gary Best's narrative. It therefore becomes difficult to tease out Charles's attitude towards some of the major issues which he faced, such as separation from the Church of England and Calvinism. One would have wished, too, for the chapter entitled ‘A Moravian conversion’ to have had less emphasis upon description and more space given to a critical examination of this stage of Charles' spiritual journey, and the extent to which his and John's experiences were comparable, if at all.

The endnotes themselves are copious but it might have helped the general reader if they were partly explanatory rather than solely referential in character. The index, too, leaves something to be desired. There is a reference to Charles's first visit to Ireland, but not to his second one in 1748, which was just as significant. Under the subheading ‘Charles Wesley’, there are numerous references to preaching but, strangely, only one brief allusion to Charles's love of poetry and just one to his views of the sacraments. Indeed, there is no separate section in the main body of the book on Charles as a hymn-writer or poet, and although other scholars have written copiously on these aspects, the author might have chosen to devote just a single chapter to the subject. Another relatively minor oversight is that of a family tree which would have been helpful, given the size of the Wesley family. However, far more serious is the absence of a bibliography, which is astonishing. A newcomer to Wesley studies, hoping to use this book as a springboard to more detailed study, will find this omission disappointing, to say the least. This is a great pity. The overall impression of Charles Wesley: a biography is of a very detailed, competently written narrative, lacking critical analysis at key points and with some surprising omissions.