Victorian Quakers (review)

Book Reviews51 Victorian Quakers. By Elizabeth Isichei. London: Oxford University Press. 1970. 326 pages. $9.00. Many of us are in the habit of making reference to what Friends in earlier times had done or what they thought—usually in support of our own views of the moment. So it is a relief to learn, through Mrs. Isichei's book, that no matter what observation one has made, with whatever abandon of good scholarship, it would be difficult to be wholly wrong. For at least half of the 300-odd years of Quaker history, Friends were conservative and radical, quietist and activist, collectivist and individualistic, evangelical and inwardly searching. One thing, though, they apparently were not. They were not poor—not after the early nineteenth century. Of course this book is about English Quakers, and deals only tangentially with the special American problems that centered around the Hicksite separation and the Civil War. Nevertheless American Friends will find most of the personalities and problems almost shockingly familiar. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Elizabeth Isichei is not a Friend, and it is refreshingto find a scholarly history of this sort that is reasonably sympathetic yet without veneration. The critical eye which she turns on Quaker philanthropy, for instance, is certainly salutary. The motives of John Bright and George Cadbury (among others) may not have been in every case beneficent. The former's opposition to liberal factory legislation and the latter's subsidy of political candidates do not outweigh their generally wholesome contributions to Victorian society. Still, the profits from cotton and cocoa could not be ignored. As I say, the territory is familiar. There is another way in which I had hoped this non-Quaker historian would serve us. I had hoped she might put Victorian Quakerism on a larger canvas than a Quaker scholar might ; that she would see it as part of the whole society of the times—particularly in the latter section of the book which is labeled "Quakers and Society." Here the information is copious and well-organized. We learn about the principal social patterns that ran through the Society of Friends— their demography, their political activities, their interest in pacifism, antislavery, temperance, and (less vigorously) industrial reform. We learn also of the First Day Schools (intended, at first, not for young Quakers, but for uneducated nonQuaker adults), the Adult Schools, and the Mission Meetings in the slums, by means of which scholars "reached the plateau of respectability through the exercise of sobriety, thrift, and self-improvement." These ventures by wealthy Friends on behalf of their poorer brethren collapsed under the weight of their own paternalism and condescension at the beginning of the century. Mrs. Isichei records all this with interest and fairness. But the viewpoint is at close range, mostly as Quakers saw themselves. How did Friends measure up to the revolutionary changes that swept through the nineteenth century? How did they respond to Darwinism? How did they feel about the publication of Essays and Reviews that shook the religious establishment in 1860? Fabian Socialism gets the merest mention (because one of 52Quaker History its founders was an ex-Friend). The Christian Socialist movement is nowhere mentioned, although Peter d'A. Jones in The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877-1914 (1968) includes at least a dozen references to Friends. We do get something of Friends' early reactions to Chartism, but nothing about the Cooperative movement , the numerous Freethought organizations, Labour and the Labour Church, the struggle for land nationalization, and the beginning agitations for cremation, vegetarianism, and birth control (which proper Victorians called "Malthusianism "). Admittedly Quakers did not figure very largely in these areas at the time. Mrs. Isichei reminds us that "on the whole Quakers played little part in the history of political dissent." Still, Quakers, almost entirely urban in the late nineteenth century, must have responded to all these Victorian goings-on, which all became matters of some Friendly concern eventually. I am personally curious as to why Friends were not attracted to them more immediately. Mrs. Isichei apparently considers all these subjects beyond the scope of her study, and she has certainly given us enough to ponder on without...