George Fox and His Family I

GEORGE FOX AND HIS FAMILY I Cecil W. Sharman* Early Friends generally thought the details of their outward lives not important enough to record, and most later writing about them has concentrated on their messages and public careers. Whilst this is understandable there is a case for saying that the person and the achievement can be more fully appreciated if more is known about the underlying private interests and feelings. Courage and endeavor mean more to us when we recognize the network ofprivate sensibilities and affections which have had to be disciplined to make possible the public accomplishment. Despite the reticence of seventeenth century Friends much can be learned when we look even at familiar passages in the right way. This often means considering the story from a different point of view. A sort ofoblique reading is needed, with our attention on what may lie behind the direct statement. We have to look backwards and forwards , for people retain vividly in mind and body the pictures and effects of all their past years, so that the quality of an event may be misjudged ifwe overlook the matrix ofexperience out ofwhich it has come. Sometimes the writer is not conscious of what he reveals: at other times, as it were on the edge of perception, the writer appears briefly to detach himself and perceive not only the immediate action but its quality, whether of triumph, or pathos, or comedy. In fact it could be argued that some self-recognition, especially of the potentially comic, is essential in anyone who is truly outstanding, for without it there is a flatness in the personality which diminishes our sympathy. Our appreciation is complicated by the fact that we may fail to recognize the ways in which the world of the early Friends differed from our own. Their assumptions, their needs, and the scale oftheir lives were in endless ways completely unlike our own, whether we think of Britain or America. Understanding them means shedding our attitudes and learning to see theirs. Naturally, in this we get little help from them, for they saw no reason to dwell on matters which for them were obvious and unchanging. *Cecil W. Sharman was until retirement head of the English department in a Grammar School at Warrington, Cheshire, England. He was also editor ofNot More but My Love, Selections from the Epistles of George Fox (London, 1980). 1 2 Quaker History With these interests in mind let us look again at Fox. We have two main sources of information, his own writings, especially the Journal , and a miscellany of papers, of which there is here space only to refer to letters from the Fell family and the fragmentary Swarthmore Account Book. Fox disposes of his early life in a few sentences; yet have they not more to tell than he seems to offer? He was born in a Leicestershire village where his father, Christopher, was "by profession a weaver, an honest man, and there was a seed ofGod in him. " His mother was "an upright woman; her maiden name was Mary Lago, ofthe family of the Lagos and of the stock of the martyrs."1 These are simple assertions but they indicate a known stable family background, and no little pride in it. Nor should be overlooked the great warmth of praise drawn from the weight Fox gave to "honesty" and "uprightness ." In the passage there are other references to relatives in the Midlands and even to an uncle in London. These suggest a large family group able to maintain close communication over a distance and apparently sharing in business transactions. References to people by their trade as "weaver" or "shoemaker" should not lead us to the thought that they were people who spent all day at loom or bench, whether for their own keep or as employees. We are dealing with a pre-industrial society. In 1688 Geoffrey King, a pioneer demographer, estimated the population of England at five and a halfmillion. Ofthat total halfwere "labouring people and outservants ," "cottagers and paupers," "seamen and soldiers," with a few "thieves and beggars" to make up the tail. Of the other half about a million and a quarter were...