In this scholarly and highly detailed account of the economic aspects of Wesleyan Methodism in the eighteenth century, Clive Norris has opened a window into an area that has probably puzzled many over the years: was it possible for a High Church clergyman, with a traditional classical education in a public school and an ancient university and no obvious gifts in financial administration, to be, in effect, a business executive managing a complex, expanding country-wide organisation?

To readers without specialised knowledge of financial matters, The financing of John Wesley's Methodism might appear at first glance to be somewhat daunting and worth consulting only perhaps for the kind of minutiae that one looks up on the internet. It is true that there is a huge amount of detail crammed into a little more than 250 pages of narrative, but the author has achieved the difficult task of making a great deal of technical information accessible to those of us who wish to understand these aspects of early Methodism yet who do not possess degrees in economics. The enormous corpus of primary source material has, of course, left posterity with huge gaps, but Norris has carefully used modelling techniques in order to give as accurate an overall picture as is possible – or rather, as he puts it, ‘plausible’.

Although in its early stages Methodism had no formal, regular revenue, unlike the established Church, most of its ministers had some form of regular income. There were also a few wealthy beneficiaries and the early societies raised modest amounts of revenue through collections. However, the rapid growth of Wesleyan Methodism – Norris uses the phrase to distinguish it from the other Methodist groups, such as the supporters of George Whitefield and members of what was to become the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion – placed huge financial demands upon Wesley and his followers. As time went on, the five main activities of the movement – the support of the itinerant preachers, maintenance of preaching houses (later to become chapels), education, welfare and mission – were financed by contributions and subscriptions from members, gifts from benefactors and profits from the Book Room.

The author presents his research in a logical way, beginning with three chapters on the itinerant preachers, then a further three which examine the way in which the building and maintenance of preaching houses and chapels was financed. Later chapters cover the general financing of the growing Connexion, and such areas as education, welfare and missions. An aspect of this book which helps make the material more accessible to the general reader is a section at the end of each chapter entitled ‘conclusions’, so there is no excuse for the amateur to be baffled by the statistical or technical detail that precedes these subsections.

From the vast but uneven quantity of material which Clive Norris has examined it is not always easy to make cogent generalisations, and the financial plight of the preachers provides just one example. Therefore, we read that Samuel Bradburn was so burdened by debt that ‘he considered leaving the itinerancy’ (p.32) and that Thomas Rutherford was so poor that one of his chapels voted him an additional payment ‘in consideration of his large family & the present high price of bread’ (p.33). On the other hand, others found themselves in better circumstances: Jacob Rowell supplemented his income by money-lending, and John Atlay continued to run a book-selling business and act as a coal merchant. In spite of the unevenness of the surviving evidence, Clive Norris manages to pick his way through the minutiae and present us with a coherent overall picture.

One of the most interesting areas to come under Norris's microscope is that of publishing, and the two chapters that he devotes to the subject are highly illuminating, and are almost a microcosm of the whole story, as it were. Clearly, Wesley regarded the Book Room as his own private property and the revenue received from sales as his to distribute as he saw fit. But despite his rather haphazard approach to money matters (and the fact that he was a very reluctant delegator), the Book Room proved to be a very profitable enterprise, and Norris notes that ‘Connexional finances came rapidly to depend upon substantial cash injections from the Book Room’ (p.189) This had the two-fold result of fulfilling Methodism's ‘evangelistic imperative’ and also undergirding its financial base. It is a tragedy, of course, that the process came eventually to be reversed, when by the twenty-first century Epworth Press closed because it was no longer economic, and the successor to the Book Room became the rump which is now Methodist Publishing.

At the end of The financing of John Wesley's Methodism there is a helpful appendix which gives some useful statistical data – particularly on the breakdown of connexional income by occupational groupings. This contains further welcome evidence which dispels some of the old myths of ‘working-class’ Methodism that still persist, by showing how less than 30 per centof members came from the labouring classes, though these still managed to contribute 20 per cent of Wesleyan Methodism's income during this period. It becomes clear from the author's research that the growth of the movement saw a commensurate growth in sophistication in financial management which helped further the sense of ‘middle-class respectability’ which characterised late eighteenth-century Methodism, though one area that Norris might have explored further was the way in which financial management reflected the ‘centre vs. circumference’ problem of the movement – a perennial question that was never satisfactorily resolved.

The appendix is followed by a useful, if rather brief, glossary of ‘key’ terms relevant to Methodist finance, and the bibliography is exceedingly full. Overall, The financing of John Wesley's Methodism is clearly presented, painstakingly researched, and deserves to become a standard work of reference that will illuminate a previously rather ‘dark’ area in the history of eighteenth-century Methodism. It begs for a similar treatment of Methodism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I cannot commend it too highly.