Wesley in Georgia

In October 1735 a young Oxford clergyman sailed for the new colony of Georgia to convert the Indians and to save his own soul. Two years and four months later he slipped out of Savannah by night, a warrant at his back and his ministry in ruins, asking the question that would remake his life: who shall convert me?

John Wesley published the journal of those years in 1740, in the dated-diary form his first readers recognized. This volume reshapes it into the continuous memoir a reader today will actually read — Wesley's own voice throughout, the date stamps dissolved and the long Atlantic crossing, the doomed courtship of Sophy Hopkey, and the slow collapse of his Savannah parish given the shape they had in his memory. Where his published text grew reticent — above all about Sophy — the adaptation draws on the fuller manuscript journal he kept in his own hand.

Wesley's failure in Georgia is where Methodism begins. Includes an editorial introduction, a cast of characters, a glossary of Wesley's theological vocabulary, a frontispiece map of the 1737 colony, and an appendix gathering the Williamson–Causton court record from the other side of the conflict.