Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 36 - R for 'To the Reader'

My subject for a second post on the letter R has been particularly difficult to discern so I have decided to go off at a bit of a tangent. I have already written about  Piety Promoted and its companion volume the Annual Monitor. Here is a rather plaintive cry from the editors of the Annual Monitor of 1843, Samuel Tuke (1784-1857) and Sarah Backhouse (1803-1877) of York, to their readers, which echoes some of the feelings I have about writing an alphabetical blog every week.

'Simple and easy as the compilation of this little annual volume may appear, and limited as really is the amount of literary talent which it requires, the Editors feel that the right conducting of it calls for much judicious care and discrimination, - the responsibility for which they would gladly, if a suitable opportunity of doing so had offered, have thrown into other hands.'

Samuel Tuke

Samuel and Sarah had taken on the responsibility as executors of the co-founder (with his wife Ann) of the Annual Monitor, William Alexander. In spite of their misgivings they continued as editors until 1852 when the task was 'thrown' into the hands of Benjamin and Esther Seebohm for the next ten years.

Of course I do recognise that my task of writing this Quaker Alphabet Blog is entirely of my own choice and I really have no grounds to complain whatsoever. After all I have only committed myself to one year!

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 35 - R for Martha Winter Routh

Silhouette of Martha Routh

Martha Winter was born in 1743, the youngest of the numerous children of Henry and Jane Winter of Stourbridge, Worcestershire. She was carefully educated at home but was troubled about her religious state from an early age. Although convinced of the truths of Quakerism she found it difficult to stand by those testimonies that marked her out, in speech and dress, as different from the friends she made in the day school she attended who were not Quakers.

Around this time two Quaker travelling ministers came to visit families in her area. They reminded the children that they should not deviate from their parents' principles when their parents were not there and Martha resolved to change her behaviour and use plain speech with everyone. She wrote to  one of her best friends at school hoping that she would not be offended by the fact 'that I could not any longer give her the title of Miss, but must call her by her proper name, as well as the other girls, though I should love them no less but rather better, because I knew it was acting contrary to the mind of my parents, and the way in which friends spoke to one another.' Her schoolmates made no comment on Martha's change and treated her just the same, which greatly relieved her mind. 

Catherine Payton Phillips

From the age of fourteen Martha felt a calling to the Quaker ministry but she resisted it for many years, although some Friends were aware of her struggle. Catherine Payton Phillips, who lived locally, took a great interest in Martha and when she was seventeen recommended her for the post of assistant to Anna Coulson who had a boarding school for Friends' children in Nottingham. Eventually Martha and one of her sisters took over the running of this school.

After her father's death when she was 26 Martha's struggles with her call to the ministry affected her health and eventually became evident to all around her, although she could not confide in anyone. It was only when she was apparently at death's door that she talked to her sister and was gradually enabled to take up the burden of ministry when she was 29 years old. She began to travel in the ministry in 1775 when she accompanied Ruth Follows on a tour of the northern counties and Scotland. Martha gained much from her association with older and more experienced women Friends and in later years was glad to pass her own experience on to younger women.

In 1776 Martha married Richard Routh and the couple moved to Manchester. Richard was also a minister and the couple travelled extensively both together and separately. They had no children of their own but adopted one of Martha's nephews as a son. Unfortunately he was killed in a bathing accident while Martha and Richard were attending the Monthly Meeting at Warrington. At the time Martha told her husband, her aunt and another Friend that she knew inwardly that he was drowned, a premonition that was proved right on their return home.

Between 1794 and 1797 and from 1801 to 1805 Martha, sometimes with her husband and sometimes with a succession of female companions, was in America. In 1804 Martha came with her husband to New Bedford, Mass. with the intention of making their home there, but he died while travelling later that year in New York and she returned to England alone. Her health declined but she continued to travel and to attend the Yearly Meeting each year. In 1817 she was in London for this purpose when she was taken ill and died aged 74. She was buried in Bunhill Fields burial ground.

A Beaver Hat worn over a cap

Her experience when young led Martha Routh to adopt more moderate views than some of her contemporaries, She agreed with William Savery that in matters of dress 'no standard could be fixed, that countries differed in some small matters, but that plainness was still plainness in all places and wished Friends to keep to the true simplicity without formality.' In one matter of dress Martha even set a fashion as she is credited with the introduction of the 'plain bonnet' among American women Friends, who had until then worn beaver hats over their caps.

Quaker Alphabet Blog Week 34 - Q for QUIP

In any Quaker Alphabet blog for Q there is a plethora of choice when it comes to acronyms, of which Friends are perhaps too fond. When it came down to it, however, there was really only one I could choose. QUIP - Quakers Uniting in Publications - is a group that I am proud and happy to belong to and work with. Both the principles behind it and the people I have got to know through it have influenced and helped my personal spiritual development in a major way and I would like to make it better known among Friends.

QUIP is an organisation set up in 1983 to allow publishers and booksellers to meet, talk and exchange ideas and expertise. When I first encountered it in the 1990s Chris Skidmore and I had just set up a small desk-top publishing business, the Sowle Press, to publish books about Quaker history, spiritual autobiography and editions of neglected Quaker works from the past. We started going to QUIP's annual conferences and this took me to the USA for the first time.

A 'Quaker Tapestry' panel for QUIP

QUIP is an international body with members in the Americas, the UK and Europe. It also covers all the varied approaches to Quakerism, both evangelical and liberal. This might have led to awkwardness between people from different religious backgrounds, but given a common purpose - as Quakers put it, publishing the truth - in my experience that has never been the case. In fact QUIP meetings were where I learned in more depth about the range of Quakers in the world family of Friends and got to know some of them as individuals. I hope that QUIP has made me less insular in my attitudes and I do try to communicate that as much as I can.

As well as being an organisation for publishers QUIP, in partnership with Friends General Conference, has also produced some books itself. Perhaps the most influential of these have been the two 'youth' books, Whispers of Faith in 2005 and Spirit Rising in 2010. These anthologies allow all Friends and others (not just the young) to hear the voices of a wide range of young people from many countries and a great diversity of traditions expressing their spiritual experience in their own words.

The process of producing these two books has helped QUIP to embrace a new direction, including writers as well as publishers and investigating how best to use new ways of publishing and communicating. Several of the recent conferences have been following aspects of this new way of doing things.

Whenever I talk about QUIP I usually find that very few Quakers in the UK have heard of them, but if you want to know more I recommend  you to visit their website or read the inspiring report of the last conference written by Sarah Katreen Hoggatt, one of the editorial board for Spirit Rising, and find out!