Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 24 - L for letters

I could have written about Quaker letters under E for epistles but that is the official side of Quaker communication. As a historian (and, let's face it, gossip) I am more interested in the unofficial  - in letters written between friends as well as Friends - which often give a truer, because more unguarded, view of what is really going on beneath the smooth public surface.

The early organisation of the Society of Friends was based on letters. Hundreds were sent to and from Swarthmoor Hall, home of Margaret Fell and her family, giving encouragement and support both moral and financial. The majority of these letters survive in the Swarthmore manuscripts, held in Friends House Library in London. Letters were the foundation of the networks between family members and between travelling ministers at home and abroad which sustained Quakerism in the succeeding centuries.

Catherine Phillips

18th century Friends often wrote earnestly to other Friends in almost wholly religious terms. They sometimes took the time to copy out their drafts neatly, correcting spelling and adding and subtracting words and phrases, but when in a hurry this could not always be done so we are left with errors, crossings out and much more mundane post-scripts. Writing to Richard and Patience Chester in 1769 Catherine Phillips ends with the following post-script My Cousin pressed forward wth his usual diligence & speed we got to Dimchurch ye Evening we left you and he reached Home ye next day about 11 o’clock ye next morning – had I not been afraid of making him uneasy if he waited for me at Dunstable I should not have chose to have let my Frd P.C. after kindly coming to meet me have returned alone to Dunstable in a Chaise, but I saw he was in too great a hurry to be stopped ... Upon reviewing the foregoing I find that I have indeed committed many blunders but I cannot well spare time to transcribe.

In another letter, mainly about her health, to Priscilla Farmer Catherine concludes Had I strength I wd willingly put ye foregoing in a better dress but I continue very languid & weak I got to Meeting yesterday with considerable difficulty... My Love to all as due. Don’t shew any Body this scrole [scrawl].

Extract from a letter from Samuel Fothergill to Mary Pemberton

One of George Dillwyn's notebooks

It is not only historians that find these letters helpful. Letters that were particularly valued by contemporaries were frequently copied out and kept in commonplace books or journals and this may be the only form in which they surv.ive. Although it is usually the serious religious letters that are treated in this way, with any extraneous material removed, sometimes these valued letters can be quite personal.  The letter which Richard Shackleton of Ballitore in Ireland wrote to Catherine Phillips in 1757, telling her of the sudden death of her close friend and travelling companion Mary Peisley Neale just three days after her marriage, is a case in point. He begins, It’s laid on me by a common  Friend of our’s to send this Messenger of Sorrowful tidings to thee. A Scene has opened little expected by us which as I know will nearly affect thee, as it has us, I am at a Loss how to begin to relate it, and then gives a detailed account of Mary's illness and death before concluding Such was the latter and last end of our Dear Friend concerning whose excellencies I need not enlarge to thee, who not only hast been more a Witness, but art a better Judge of them than I. Catherine obviously did not keep this letter to herself as I have seen several copies in libraries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Matthew Boulton

Informal letters written by non-Quakers can also give an impression of Friends from the outside. One of the most striking examples of this that I have seen is a letter written by Matthew Boulton to his daughter about the death of William Phillips of Redruth, the husband of Catherine Phillips. Boulton knew William Phillips as a business associate as they both had mining interests in Cornwall but he obviously valued him as a man. Writing to a colleague Thomas Wilson in August 1785 he says But alas we have had a sudden & melancholy change in the death of our worthy, good, sincere, Benevolent, hospitable, Charitable, usefull, spirited, good humourd, Religious, pleasant & kind friend, William Phillips. So many adjectives witness, I think, to an unusual depth of feeling.

Today when we communicate more by email or text or through Facebook than by letter, have we lost a way of networking, of encouraging and supporting one another in the things that are eternal as well as in the everyday and of revealing ourselves as we really are?

Top of the family tree

This morning the phone rang as we were getting ready to go to meeting and just for a moment I thought it was my mother wanting something. Then I remembered – she died 6 weeks ago.

She was 92, physically increasingly frail although mentally alert, so in many ways her death was expected. Certainly she herself had been wishing for it for years, but I had somehow convinced myself that she would go on for ever.

She was taken into hospital on a Thursday with a suspected heart attack although the doctors were not sure what was wrong. I was called and sat with her for 10 hours as we waited for diagnoses and decisions. At the time I was anxious, frustrated and exhausted but I am glad now that we had that time together. I held her hand and interpreted between the hospital staff and her deafness and she stroked my head, something I cannot remember her ever doing before, and apologised for all the grey hairs she had given me.

She was admitted for tests but the weekend intervened and the tests were not done. I settled into a visiting routine shared with my son Matt who lives nearby and she seemed to be improving, finding the energy to complain and demand as usual. On Monday, after I had seen her at lunchtime, she saw a doctor she liked who told her they were still not sure what was wrong. My son saw her in the evening and told me she was in fine form, laughing and joking with him. Early on Tuesday morning came the phone call from the hospital I had been dreading for years. “Your mother’s not good. Please come now.” In fact by the time the call was made sudden heart failure had almost certainly already taken her past any hope of resuscitation.

Since I said goodbye to her that morning I have had a lot to do and think about. I am slowly coming to terms with the absence of someone who had gradually needed more and more of my time - two days a week with her and many more hours organising her care and her finances, worrying about her and looking for ways to make her existence more bearable. I miss her and weep at the most unexpected things but at the same time all kinds of possibilities are opening up in the space she has left.

I am an only child and my father died 22 years ago. Now I am at the top of my family tree, the older generation, the keeper of family memories. More than ever I feel a responsibility to write down what I remember, what I have been told and what I can find out. I made a start when I wrote the eulogy for my mother’s funeral, trying to be fair to her and true to our intense and not always easy relationship. Writing this is another step on the journey.