Quakers and the Arts (review) (1969)

52Quaker History practices. For example, the quotation "twenty to twenty-five shillings per sheet, or page" on page 37 confuses two very specific technical terms (sheet and page). A description of Philadelphia in 1767 based on William Birch's Views of Philadelphia published in 1802 seems ill-advised, in view of the tremendous growth and change in the city after the Revolution. As for the Quaker background, Mr. Hixson puts his foot wrong at the beginning. He includes "Thomas Godfrey, the inventor, and Benjamin West, the painter" in a brief list of prominent Philadelphia Quakers of 1767; neither man was then a Friend, and in fact Godfrey had died in 1749, and West gone abroad to study in 1760, never to return. A few pages on, the Yearly Meeting for Pennsylvania and New Jersey is "the policymaking body of the Quakers in the Middle Colonies," ignoring the fact that there were Yearly Meetings in New York, Maryland, and Virginia. Fortunately, the details of Collins' disownment and re-instatement by Burlington Monthly Meeting are given correctly, but the earlier errors do not create confidence in the reader. The book is neither good Quaker biography nor a scholarly contribution to the history of American printing, and can only be recommended with reservations. Philadelphia, PennsylvaniaWillman Spawn Quakers and tL· Arts. By Frederick G. Nicholson. London: The Friends Home Service Committee. 1968. 123 pp. 10s. This informative study was prepared by a Fellow in Residence at Woodbooke· It presents the record of a religious testimony rather than a history of taste. Plainness, that is, avoidance of superfluity, made Quakers "a peculiar people." It should be borne in mind that under the Stuart kings court styles in dress, amusements, and conventional behavior had reached the frivolous extreme which brought about the Puritan reaction extending to all sober-minded dissenters. People were "hungry for God." Because Friends were literate from the start they felt no need of pictures to convey their religious teaching. Indeed they demonstrated "uncommon ability to express," as they said in their journals, "the dealings of the Lord with us." Imagination was suspect, the "world's" fashions were ruled out. A "guarded education" forbade music, hunting, dancing, acting, fiction, and even poetry. In the eighteenth century the pattern became standardized . You could spot a Quaker anywhere in England or America. Frederick Nicholson comments upon the rigid period which he entitles "Religion in Drab" as a time of "loss of members, domestic discord, and social isolation." With the Romantic period in England a change set in. Friends read more widely. Yearly Meeting attendere began to include on their program of days in the city "the sights" of London. Now gaps appeared in the fences and eventually the fences fell. Howard Brinton's and my life-span has coincided with the period when this severe construction of the discipline gradually gave way to the present cultivation of "the abundant life." Our great-grandmothers wore the kerchief, cap, and bonnet familiar from the days of Elizabeth Fry. Our grandmothers tolerated the shirred bonnet, while our mothers unashamedly wore hats. After a visit to Book Reviews53 England my grandparents allowed an engraving on their living-room wall. American Friends were a full generation behind their English counterparts in thus coming to terms with the "world." Especially has this been true in respect to music and the so-called "plain language." I attended Westtown School when the change was well under way. Our elders visibly belonged to the vanishing age, we children enthusiastically to the new. Fiction was still called "pernicious" and Shakespeare forbidden. My graduation essay, also a look backward, was entitled "Friendships of Quakers with Men of Letters." This included Ellwood and Milton, Bernard Barton with Charles Lamb and the Lake Poets, our own Whittier, who was my grandfather's friend, Caroline Fox and all the Victorians. With the picture-less era of drab, American readers will like to contrast Fritz Eichenberg's Art and Faith (second edition, 1952, Pendle Hill Pamphlet No. 68) with its invigorating wood engravings. On the cover is Old Noah, pressed upon by his beasts, reaching up to welcome his dove: "and in her mouth was an ohve leaf." Also as...