His father had been a non-juring clergyman, one of the many ejected from their livings on St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1662; and he himself had been educated as a Nonconformist at Mr. Morton’s famous academy on Newington Green, where Daniel Defoe had preceded him as a pupil, and where he had heard John Bunyan preach.  At the conclusion of his training there he was pitched upon to answer some pamphlets levelled against the Dissenters, and this set him on a course of reading which produced an effect he was far from intending:  for instead of writing the answer he determined to renounce Dissent and attach himself to the Established Church.  He dwelt at that time with his mother and an old aunt, themselves ardent Dissenters, to whom he could not tell his design.  So he arose before daybreak one morning, tramped sixty miles to Oxford, and entered himself at Exeter College as a poor scholar.  This was in August, 1683.

He took up his residence in Oxford with forty-five shillings in his pocket.  He studied there five years, and during that time received from his family and friends just five shillings; obtained his Bachelor’s degree, and departed seven pounds and fifteen shillings richer than when he entered the University.  The winter of 1683 was a hard beginning for a scholar too poor to buy fuel, the cold being so severe in the Thames valley that coaches plied as freely on the river from the Temple to Westminster as if they had gone upon the land.  Yet “I tarried,” he afterwards wrote, “in Exeter College, though I met with some hardships I had before been unacquainted with, till I was of standing sufficient to take my Bachelor’s degree; and not being able to subsist there afterwards, I came to London during the time of my Lord Bishop of London’s suspension by the High Commission, and was instituted into deacon’s orders by my Lord Bishop of Rochester, at his palace at Bromley, August 7th, 1688.”

He had maintained himself by instructing wealthier undergraduates and writing their exercises for them (as a servitor he had to black their boots and run their errands); also by scribbling for John Dunton, the famous London bookseller, whose acquaintance he had made during his last year at Mr. Morton’s.  With all this he found time and the will to be charitable, and had visited the poor creatures imprisoned in the Castle at Oxford—­many for debt.  He lived to take the measure of this kindness, and to see it repeated by his sons.

Maggots:  or Poems on Several Subjects never before Handled was no very marketable book of rhymes.  Yet it served its purpose and helped him, through Dunton, to become acquainted with a few men of letters and learning.  He had something better, too, to cheer his start in London.  Dunton in 1682 had married Elizabeth, one of the many daughters of Dr. Samuel Annesley, the famous Dissenter, then preaching at a Nonconformist church which he had opened in Little St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate.  Young Wesley, a student at Newington Green, had been present at the wedding, with a copy of verses in his pocket:  and there, in a corner of the Doctor’s gloomy house in Spital Yard, he came on the Doctor’s youngest daughter, a slight girl of fourteen, seated and watching the guests.