Samuel Wesley - Personal Life

Personal Life

Born in Bristol, he was the son of noted Methodist and hymn-writer Charles Wesley, the grandson of Samuel Wesley (a poet of the late Stuart period) and the nephew of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church.

Samuel informed his mother of his philosophical conviction that his marriage had been constituted by sexual intercourse, precluding any civil or religious ceremony, but after a scandalous delay he married Charlotte Louise Martin in 1793, and they had 3 children. A book published in 2001 provides a fascinating account of how Samuel Wesley's marriage to Charlotte finally broke up with her discovery of Samuel's affair with the teenage domestic servant Sarah Suter. Samuel and Sarah never married but had 4 children together, among them Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810–1876) who was a cathedral organist.

In 1784, Wesley converted to Roman Catholicism.

Read more about this topic:  Samuel Wesley

Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:

    “What had really caused the women’s movement was the additional years of human life. At the turn of the century women’s life expectancy was forty-six; now it was nearly eighty. Our groping sense that we couldn’t live all those years in terms of motherhood alone was “the problem that had no name.” Realizing that it was not some freakish personal fault but our common problem as women had enabled us to take the first steps to change our lives.”
    —Betty Friedan (20th century)

    “The man Shelley, in very truth, is not entirely sane, and Shelley’s poetry is not entirely sane either. The Shelley of actual life is a vision of beauty and radiance, indeed, but availing nothing, effecting nothing. And in poetry, no less than in life, he is a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.””
    —Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)