I have been reading a book of travels. I do not know when I have been so much amused. It is a pity that so few of our travellers write like rational creatures.
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"I do not think that I have ever spent an hour in my life, from the age of twenty-one to this day, without employing it in some useful way."
"I was much struck with the spirit of the people, who, though poor, were neat, clean, and cheerful. They seemed to have no care, but to please God."
"I should be glad if I could spend my whole life in reading and writing."
"I have no time to be in a hurry."
"The rich, the honourable, the great, will hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven."
English Anglican cleric and founder of Methodism, whose open-air preaching and class-meeting structure created the largest 18th-century evangelical revival. Closely associated with Charles Wesley (his hymn-writing brother) and George Whitefield (early co-revivalist, later doctrinal opponent). For an intellectual contrast, see George Whitefield, Calvinist evangelical revivalist — Whitefield's predestinarian Calvinism vs Wesley's free-grace Arminian theology split the early Methodist movement permanently in the 1739-41 break. The founding evangelical Calvinist-Arminian schism — the two parallel evangelical traditions American Christianity descends from.
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Most travel writers produce shallow, sensationalist accounts that insult the reader's intelligence. Genuine travel writing should engage the mind with careful observation, honest reflection, and reasoned analysis — not just entertain with exotic curiosities or exaggeration. A truly good travel book treats both subject and reader with intellectual respect, making it rare and genuinely pleasurable when one actually delivers that standard.
Wesley was himself a tireless traveler, riding over 250,000 miles on horseback across Britain preaching Methodism. He was a prolific journal-keeper and correspondent who wrote with precision and purpose. His own journals model exactly what he demands here: clear-eyed observation, methodical reasoning, and moral seriousness. He had no patience for vanity or intellectual laziness, whether in the pulpit or on the printed page.
The 18th century saw an explosion of travel literature as European exploration, Grand Tours, and colonial expansion created enormous public appetite for accounts of foreign lands. Much of this writing was sensationalized, plagiarized, or fabricated for entertainment. Wesley lived through the Enlightenment's push for rational inquiry, making the gap between what travel writing promised — knowledge — and what it often delivered — spectacle — a genuine cultural frustration for educated readers.
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