In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Forster Family and the Irish Famine Jeanne A. Flood* InApril of1880, atthebeginning ofhis secondministry, W.E. Gladstone offered William Edward Forster the post ofChiefSecretary for Ireland and thus madehimthe executive in charge ofthe government ofIreland. Forster was a distinguished Liberal politician who, his biographer notes, could reasonably have expected a higherplace in the Gladstone ministry. He was offered the Irish post because "public opinion had, by general consent, fixed upon him as the man who was best qualified by his sympathies and administrative capacity to fill it" (Reid 2:233). One might say that Forster at his birth on July 11, 1818, inherited these Irish sympathies from his Quaker parents, both of whom had spent time in Ireland. His mother, Anna Buxton Forster, was born into a wealthy Essex family ofhigh social status. Anna Buxton's motherwas a Quaker who had married an Anglican; she did not raise her children within the Society of Friends. Thus the young Anna "was only taught the accomplishments and introduced into the gaieties of fashionable life" (Forster 1:198). Soon disillusioned with this life, she applied to and was received by the Society of Friends. Through the marriage ofher brother, Thomas Fowell Buxton, into the Gurney family ofEarlham, she was brought into contact with her future husband, William Forster, a Quaker minister who was a close friend of Joseph John Gurney. In 1812, at the instigation of Forster and Stephen Grellet, she and Elizabeth Gurney Fry began working with women prisoners in Newgate. In October of 1816, by which time she too was recognized as a minister in the Society ofFriends, she married William Forster (Reid 1:23—4). Early in 1818, during her first and only pregnancy, "Anna Forster felt it to be her duty to unite with her cousin, Priscilla Gurney, in paying a religious visitto Friends in Ireland" (Forster 1:211). She spentthree months there, doing evangelistic work, returning to England at the end of May, 1818, less than two months before her son was born. "Ofthe result ofAnna Forster's work in Ireland we have no actual record," writes the biographer ofher son, but "the memory ofthatjourney, undertaken in simple faith and love . . . had throughout his life a great and abiding influence" (Reid 1 :29). William Forster the elder was born in 1784 into the large family of a Quaker land agent living in Tottenham near London. Though he trained as a land surveyor to work with his father, he came to feel that he should work actively as a Quaker minister. At twenty-one, he was acknowledged by the *Jeanne A. Flood is a professor of English at Wayne State University. The Forster Family and the Irish Famine1 17 Tottenham Monthly Meeting as an approved minister. Very soon afterwards , he became convinced that he should "give himselfup to the service ofthe Lord wherever he might be pleased to send him under the anointing guidance of the Holy Spirit" (Forster 1 :45). Accordingly he set out on a series ofjourneysthroughoutthe British Isles. Inthe course ofthese travels, he spent fourteen months in Ireland in 181 3-1814.' For four years after his marriage, WilliamForsterlived in Bradpole in Dorset inretirementwithhis wife and son. However in April of 1820, when William Edward was less than two years old, William Forster set off on a religious mission to America, which was to last five years until June of 1825 (Reid 1:31). This was the first of the three religious journeys he would make to the United States. In 1845^16, he served as part of a deputation carrying an Epistle from the London Meeting to Quakers who had recently withdrawn fromthe Indiana Yearly Meeting (Forster 2:193-206). In 1853, he set out again for the United States as part of a deputation carrying an anti-slavery address from the London Meeting to President Franklin Pierce and various state governors. On thisjourney, he became ill, and on January 27, 1 854, he died in Tennessee and was buried in a Quaker cemetery in Friendsville (Forster 2:386-91). William Edward Forster did not follow his parents into the life of a Quaker minister. When he left school in 1835 at the age...

pdf

Share