Sarah Wells

Not much is known about the lives of Oxford’s Methodist lay women in the late 18th and early 19th century. In this obituary from the Wesleyan Methodist Magazine of 1842, however, we get a glimpse of one such life:

June 23rd – At Oxford, Mrs Wells, in the seventy-fourth year of her age. She was a member of the Wesleyan society upwards of thirty-two years; was adorned with the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit; and, from the time of her conversion, lived in all consistency and godliness to the end of her days; but in patience she possessed her soul.

In 1841 Sarah Wells, a widow aged 70, is living at Patons Gardens, Queen Street, Oxford, very close to the New Inn Hall Street Chapel where she would have worshipped.