William Penn, and: William Penn: Apostle of Dissent (review)

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES Edited by Edwin B. Bronner William Penn. By Harry Emerson Wildes. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc.; London: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1974. ix, 469 pages $14.95. William Penn: Apostle of Dissent. By Hans Fantel. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1974. xiv, 298 pages. $8.95. More than forty biographers have tried to bring William Penn back to life, but it is generally recognized diat a definitive biography has yet to be written. The time is ripe: Hannah Benner Roach has gathered copies of all the known Penn materials at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania under the auspices of The Papers of William Penn Committee, and the major aspects of Penn's life have been illuminated in several recent scholarly monographs. The task remains a very difficult one, however. Penn's career encompassed a kaleidoscope of roles, and die successful discussion of the various facets of his life and mind demands an extraordinary command of seventeenth-century English, Continental, and American colonial history. Moreover, Penn's personality, unlike that of, for example, George Fox or Benjamin Franklin, does not come across well in the literary remains , and he has provided us widi relatively few details about important influences and developments in his life in die many letters and documents that survive. In their new biographies of Penn, neither Hans Fantel nor Harry Emerson Wildes has utilized fully the available resources. Hans Fantel has attempted to provide "the general reader" with an intellectual portrait of Penn that sets his thoughts and activities in the context of Western intellectual history. More specifically, he sees Penn as a major figure in the transition from the medieval preoccupation with otherworldliness, collectivism, hierarchy , traditionalism, coercion, and dogma to die modem concern with secularity, individualism, equality, progress, freedom, and creativity. Penn's intellectual maturation mirrors that of the Western mind. Fantel's selfconsciously modern readers may also appreciate his incursions into psychohistory and his focus on such topics as the place of women in Puritanism and Quakerism. This approach to a Penn biography has possibilities, but Fantel simply does not give adequate evidence that he is in command of the necessary background materials for such a book. He drops die names of the giants of Western intellectual history all over his pages, but the references are awkward and unilluminating, and the intellectual history materials are dealt with in a highly simplistic manner. There is little evidence of acquaintance with Quaker scholarship; the discussions of Puritanism are caricatures; and factual errors are legion. The strengths of the book, 47 48QUAKER HISTORY including its tendency to highlight the truly critical developments in Penn's life and its concrete and fascinating—if sensationalistic—descriptions of seventeenth-century urban conditions, architecture, and medicine, indicate that Fantel could possibly write a better popular "life and times" biography than this offering in intellectual history. Unlike Fantel, Harry Emerson Wildes has tried to give readers a definitive biography covering all aspects of Penn's life. Wildes has worked through a variety of sources, relying especially on the Albert Cook Myers Collection at the Chester County Historical Society. Aldiough this is an indispensable collection for the Penn biographer, it is not what the dust-jacket proclaims as "a store house of completely original, previously untapped source material " nor "the largest and most trustworthy collection of original Penn material." Moreover, Wildes makes no reference to the collection of Perm materials made by Hannah Benner Roach—a collection to which the latter of the above descriptions truly applies. Sources are not the main problem with the book, however. Wildes has possibly provided more facts about Penn's life than any other biographer, and, despite a significant number of careless errors (for example, the dating of Thomas Loe's appearance at Macroom on p. 20) and cavalier handling of disputed events (for example, Penn's separation from Oxford on pp. 27-28), this biography may well provide the most comprehensive account available of the consecutive events in Penn's life. But this sound skeleton does not become die framework for a satisfying biography for several reasons. First, the book is weak on the seventeenth-century historical background , weaker on the thought and...