Spaces of nineteenth-century congregational faith: James Smetham (1821-1889) and Methodism in Stoke Newington

Project Description

This one-year project will explore the art, visual culture and poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite artist and Methodist James Smetham (1821-1889). It will use these cultural productions to consider the geographies of nineteenth-century Methodism and how they influenced congregants’ embodied experiences of religious practices. Visual and textual analysis of all Smetham’s paintings, sketches, visual diaries and poems will illustrate the lived, imagined and biblical spaces that Smetham engaged with during his everyday Methodist practices. Simultaneously, archival research into the spaces in which Smetham lived, worked and worshiped in Stoke Newington (north London), will allow his cultural productions to be approached as practices undertaken in specific geographical spaces. Collectively, these explorations will highlight how congregational experiences of Methodism were informed by both embodied engagements with physical places and imagined reflections on metaphysical spaces during Bible study, prayer, worship, evangelism and social fellowship. Findings will be disseminated through a conference paper, two peer-reviewed articles, a public-art project, and exhibition. This project will also contribute to my broader research, eventually resulting in a monograph that, responding to limited references made to congregational experiences of Methodism in the written archive, will use space, material and visual culture to explore everyday congregational experiences of nineteenth-century Methodism.