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A Note on Quakerism

Although I have drawn attention in the notes to specific Quaker contexts where they are relevant, the following brief note offers a simplified overview of Quakerism which the reader may find helpful. The ‘further reading’ section of the bibliography includes several works offering full and scholarly accounts of Quaker history, culture and thought.

The Society of Friends – or Quakers – are a religious group that emerged in the religious and social tumult of the English Civil War era, led by George Fox (1624–1691). Like many radical Protestant sects in the seventeenth century, they rapidly became a persecuted minority, although as time went on their charismatic and disruptive beginnings (most infamously going naked as a sign) gave way to greater degrees of organisation. Theologically, the same period saw the evolution of a quietist spirituality based on simplicity, unique forms of worship and detachment from society. This was codified in Robert Barclay’s Apology for True Christian Divinity (1676) and became the dominant (if not only) current of Quakerism across the eighteenth century.

The basic unit of Quakerism is the Meeting. Although there are ministers and elders, there is no formal hierarchy: any member may speak if they feel a spiritual prompting and Quakerism permitted female preaching from early in its history. Barton belonged to the Woodbridge Meeting, the old Meeting House of which still stands and beside which the poet is buried. Meeting Houses were grouped into Monthly and then Quarterly Meetings which oversaw matters of organisation and spiritual discipline among members at district and regional levels: this discipline was especially crucial to the eighteenth-century identity of Quakerism, as inherited by Barton. Yearly Meetings stand at the apex of this pyramid, and the London Yearly Meeting formalised doctrine for Friends in Britain through the issue of epistles. These were collated into what was known as the Book of Discipline or Extracts from the Minutes and Advices of the Yearly Meeting (its descendent is now entitled Quaker Faith and Practice). As at all levels, decision making at the Yearly Meeting was carried out not via a formal process but through intuiting the ‘sense of the meeting’ as it developed among all members.

Quakerism in Barton’s time had developed a series of practices that seemed remarkable to outsiders. These included idiosyncratic speech-ways (e.g. using ‘thou’ instead of ‘you’ on the basis of radical equality, or refusing oaths because all speech should be truthful); rejecting fashion, ornament and luxury in favour of plainness; and filling their burial grounds with unmarked graves. The aforementioned system of discipline, overseen by elders and the Meetings, created a distinctive partition from mainstream society: Quakers could not attend theatres, balls or concerts, and the Society was rigorous in their attitude towards debtors (indeed, the latter was one of the most common reasons for which members were ‘disowned’). They prayed largely in silence, their Meeting Houses were unadorned, and Quaker spirituality had its own unique vocabulary: ‘discerning’ for the uncovering of truth, or ‘convincement’ for conversion, for instance. While the Quaker stance on slavery eventually aligned with a mounting social consensus in favour of abolition, their radical pacifism and opposition to all violence and trade in arms remained (and remains) unusual.

Yet – as Barton’s friend Thomas Clarkson explored in his sympathetic three volume Portraiture of Quakerism (1806) – these apparently strange aspects of identity coherently expressed a deeply held theology. One element of this is simply a radical Christianity: a commitment to truthfulness, benevolence and a desire to stand against the world in the name of simplicity. This impulse goes back to the earliest days of Fox. Another derives from perhaps Quakerism’s most distinctive theological concept: the inward Light. Each believer has an inward guide and spiritual sense which means religion is levelled among equal individuals. Quaker Meetings are silent, non-hierarchical and anti-ceremonial because they are acts of jointly waiting and listening for the prompts of the inward Light, rather than the performance of set external forms under the auspices of a priestly figure. Due to this privileging of individual inwardness, the theology of the Society of Friends has sometimes shifted the authority of Scripture to a subsidiary place.

As already noted in the introduction, this potential tension between the Bible and the Light became one key conflict between established Quaker orthodoxy and the rising tide of Evangelical Christianity in the nineteenth century. Others included the importance of sacraments (especially baptism) to the new style of faith, and the Evangelical emphasis on conversion and growth versus Quakerism’s cultural introversion and birthright membership. Schisms were triggered within the Society of Friends on both sides of the Atlantic in the face of Evangelical influence, and many left the Quakers – these included all of Barton’s closest relatives. Quakerism would thus be reshaped and altered in Barton’s lifetime, especially from the 1830s onwards when British Friends split sharply over the so-called Beaconite Controversy. However, despite its strong scriptural sense, Barton’s poetry is best seen as an expression of the more classical tenets of the denomination, and the poet’s own opinions (see the contextual material) are relatively clear in adhering to the faith of his ‘father’s house’.

Note on dates: in some places within the text, the reader will find Barton’s own rendering of dates in Quaker form. Due to the pagan origins of the names of the month, Quaker practice was to refer to months by number (e.g. 1st Mo. = January).

¹‘Art III. – Essays on the Principles of Morality, and on the Private and Political Rights and Obligations of Mankind. By Jonathan Dymond’, Quarterly Review 44 (January 1831), p. 83.

²SPL, p. xv.

³‘The Round Table. No. 19’, Examiner 402 (10 September 1815), p. 587. See ‘The Friends: Letter to the Editor of the Examiner’ in the contextual material for a response likely penned by Barton.

⁴Barton himself wrote in 1820 that his Poems were ‘an experiment how far a Quaker Poet might hope to win attention’. See William Jerdan, The Autobiography, 4 vols (London: Arthur Hall, 1853), III, p. 116.

⁵See C. Brightwen Rowntree, ‘Friends’ Schools at Ipswich (1790–1800) and Colchester (1817–1917)’, Journal of the FHS 35 (1938), pp. 50–64.

⁶‘Reminiscences of Bernard Barton’, The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of Instruction and Recreation 159 (11 January 1859), pp. 27–30.

⁷Letter of 2 July 1825, Lamb, p. 736.

⁸The Spenserian stanza (ABABBCBCC, with a lengthened final line) originated with Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) but enjoyed a Romantic-era revival, especially among the second generation poets. See my own ‘Poetics at the Religious Margin: Bernard Barton and Quaker Romanticism’, Review of English Studies 70, no. 295 (2019), pp. 509–26, which includes a discussion of Barton’s use of the stanza.

⁹‘Art. XVIII. Poems by Bernard Barton’, British Review 20 (December 1822), p. 408.

¹⁰E. V. Lucas, Bernard Barton and his Friends: A Record of Quiet Lives (London: Edward Hicks, 1893), p. 181.

¹¹SPL, p. 49.

¹²Lucas, p. 12.