Methodists

We got an email from a Sergeant family person, which led me to a supposedly autobiographical novel by Adeline Sergeant called Esther Denison. Adeline was the daughter of a Methodist minister and our Sergeants were chapel people in Lincolnshire before emigrating to South Australia in 1838.
I think this book prompted me to next pick up Adam Bede by George Eliot, from our bookshelf. Published in 1913, it is inscribed from my grandfather to my father on his 19th birthday in 1937. It could be seen as a cautionary tale from a widowed father to his son?
Again it deals with Methodists, and on reading about John Wesley I see the story of Methodism in her novel.
Both women writers used this medium to educate and broaden the minds of their readers in the changing roles of women in the nineteenth century.
Other ancestors such as Robert Simpson and Thomas Scales, Dickenson, Davies and Schoen were also influenced by these religious movements of the eighteenth century, as well as the Steels and Harts in Glasgow.