Biographical Dictionary of British Quakers in Commerce and Industry, 1775–1920 (review)

Ned Milligan touched the lives and research of dozens of scholars of Quakerism and other fields in his long career with the Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London. For a generation, he has been the final word on the details of Quaker history in the British Isles. His publications have ranged from the entry on Quakers in the 1964 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the history of Ackworth School to Quakers and railways. Without question, however, this volume, published in his eighties, will stand as his greatest accomplishment, one that has few parallels.

For reasons that are not clear, Quakers have not produced the sorts of multi-volume encyclopedia and reference works that have become standard for other denominations. One thinks of the Mennonite Encyclopedia or the Brethren Encyclopedia in the past generation for groups that are comparable to Friends in size and sectarian standing. But since Joseph H. Smith produced his monumental Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books in 1867, Quakers have compiled few similar works. The closest thing that comes to mind recently is the collaboration of Margery Post Abbott and many other scholars a few years ago on A Historical Dictionary of the Quakers, but it was necessarily brief.

Milligan’s work thus stands out. It brings together entries on about 2,800 Friends. Its period is the “long nineteenth century,” dating, as Milligan says, from “the founding of a substantial number of country banks” in the 1770s, and ending, as he puts it, in 1920 “because it marks the beginning of a tendency of Friends, for a variety of reasons which need exploration, to abandon commerce and industry for teaching and social work.” Naturally, there is some subjectivity in the selection of entries, and doubtless some will question why farmers, or Friends in the professions, or in important but subordinate positions in various firms, were not included. Milligan also admits that nearly all of his subjects were men, allowing that the subject of Quaker women’s involvement in their husbands’ businesses, or what he calls the largely unexplored world of bonnet makers, merits further attention.

Acknowledging what is not here does not diminish the importance of what is, and the author’s accomplishment in bringing it together. Milligan has brought together a mass of useful and detailed information. A typical entry includes birth and death dates, names of parents with their dates, the name of the spouse, birthplace, occupation, education, occupation, Quaker and public activities, and a brief reference note. Milligan has an eye for the delightful quotation. For example, on pages 248 and 249 we find that while working in Antwerp, John W. Hoyland “learnt something of the way in which a commercial office should not be run, and something also of the disagreeable necessities often involved in the proper conduct of business—disagreeable necessities to which he was never reconciled,” and that his great-grandmother Barbara Wheeler, the wife of William Hoyland, was favored to see her former religious views as “the innovations of folly, false philosophy, and vain deceit” and so became a Friend.

This volume, alas, is probably one of the last of its kind. Such specialized reference works will likely in the future exist only in cyberspace as on-line resources. The advantages are many: cost saving, the ability to add new entries and correct errors in existing ones, instantaneous access around the world. Still, I am glad hat this volume found its way into print. Not only is it extraordinarily useful, it is a delight.