John Wesley's Plagiarism of Samuel Johnson and Its Contemporary Reception
| Autor: | Henry Abelove |
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| Rok vydání: | 1996 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Huntington Library Quarterly. 59:73-79 |
| ISSN: | 1544-399X 0018-7895 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/3817906 |
| Popis: | A bout the last week of September, 1775, John Wesley published A Calm Address to Our American Colonies. In it he argued that "the supreme power in England" had a clear, legal right to tax the colonies and that the Americans who thought otherwise and were "all in an uproar" had been misled by a small cabal of designing Englishmen. What these Englishmen secretly hoped to do was overthrow the monarchy, and they were fomenting civil unrest in America and in England, too, as a means to that end. If the Americans wanted to be sensible, they would stop acting as dupes of the cabal and quietly pay their taxes.1 Such a pamphlet was bound to get a warm reception in official quarters. It may even be true, as one of Wesley's itinerant lay preachers later said, that the ministry arranged to have copies distributed at every church in London and sent a spokesman to Wesley with an offer of a pension-and, when he refused the pension, gave him instead fifty pounds to donate to a charity of his own choosing.2 Outside official quarters the pamphlet was by no means so generally approved. Many readers were pro-American and reacted angrily to it; some attacked it and Wesley as well.3 Of these attackers perhaps the |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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