Victorian Quakerism: Evangelical Revival, Liberal Renaissance

Victorian Quakerism:Evangelical Revival, Liberal Renaissance Herbert F. Tucker (bio) In a characteristic paradox, the professedly unworldly Society of Friends has long exerted within larger British society an influence disproportionate to its size. Never approaching a hundred thousand members even during its seventeenth-century heyday under the organizational charisma of George Fox, the census of British Quakers hovered in the very low five figures throughout the Victorian era. For every Friend at meeting on Census Sunday 1851, there were fifty Methodists at church (Isichei xix). The Society's quietistic retreat across the long eighteenth century was a phenomenon at once theological—radically Protestant cultivation of the Light Within—and sociological, focused upon the integrity and purity of worshipful community (Brinton; Punshon). By 1800, Friends emerged as a sect apart, socially distinguished by codes of attire (bonnets and wide brims, collarless coats and dresses of plain design) and speech (Second Day and Eighth Month for Monday and August, retention in ordinary discourse of the elsewhere disused thee). These practices had arisen in Commonwealth days as badges of egalitarian rebellion but persisted, like the practice of disowning those who married non-Quakers, as binding strands within a fabric of introversion that, again by paradox, made the Society conspicuous to those outside it. [End Page 166] Barred like other Dissenters from the national universities and many traditional professions, even once the Reform era of 1830 had loosened restrictions on entry into public life, Friends remained fixtures of the commercial and artisanal middle class, centred on trade and its adjuncts: banking, transport, and increasingly industrial modes of commodity production, notably brewing and chocolate (Bebbington 4). Diligence, sobriety, a reputation for fairness, and the advantages of a tight-knit community helped Quakers prosper at better than thrice the national average (Isichei 166) and enabled a few of them to amass great wealth, family names such as Barclay and Cadbury becoming British household words. From such income there flowed forth a steady current of Quaker philanthropy, at first in support of slavery abolition but later in the century involving such causes as tariff repeal, prisoner relief and penal reform, temperance, advocacy on behalf of Aboriginal peoples, agitation to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, resistance to the Crimean and Boer Wars, and women's suffrage. While Friends openly petitioned and lobbied legislators, and a handful (notably John Bright) even became MPs, the sect retained its long-standing allergy to the state, refusing to swear legal oaths, pay church tithes, or brook legislation delegating to Anglicans the education of factory children. When it came to self-government, Friends' laboriously participatory decision-making, in which votes were not taken but business arose by spirit-led agreement from Monthly through Quarterly Meetings to the London Yearly Meeting, checked antinomian tendencies, as it counteracted an inevitable prestige hierarchy that stemmed from disparities in wealth or gender; the stake each member held in the authority of the gathered whole—the "sense of the meeting"—made for an abiding coherence (Isichei 132, 182). A recognized leaven within the social body, the Victorian Society of Friends still jealously guarded their status as a Peculiar People—which term of derision, like the seventeenth-century epithet "Quaker," they embraced with stubborn complacency. At least at the start of our period they did. For the Victorian decades witnessed a transformation of this status quo that comprised a twofold revolution, the work of successive generations on either side of a tipping point circa 1865. Phase one, which galvanized Quakers as it did the rest of anglophone Protestantism in the UK and USA, was dominated by evangelical revivalism. Rooted in a conviction of sin underwritten by scriptural literalism, and summoning believers to rebirth in their saviour Christ, atonement theology gained by mid-century a purchase it had never had within quietist Meetings or even amid the prophetic turbulence of Fox's day. Formerly, Bible study had taken second place to those inward and corporate leadings by whose light Friends read the Testaments and discovered in themselves a human perfectibility that required no sacrificial redemption. But by the 1830s, the crusading zeal of, among others, J.J. Gurney (brother to the prison minister Elizabeth Fry) sharpened awareness both of...

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