By Brian Walker
Gender, Religion And Radicalism In The Long Eighteenth Century by Judith Jennings. Illustrated. 204pp. ISBN 0 7546 5500. £55.00
This excellent book, sub-titled “The ‘Ingenious Quaker’ and Her Connections”, came my way by chance. I enjoyed reading it.
It is well presented, and beautifully printed. The scholarship is rigorous. The book itself is easy to handle, and the text well written. It is meticulously indexed.
Although a Quaker I knew nothing of Mary Morris Knowles, sometimes called Molly Knowles, nor of her patient determination to live her faith so fearlessly and – more or less – without pretension. Her constancy shines through the text; so does her single mindedness in holding to her beliefs and mounting her attack when forced so to do without bitterness even when wrongly accused, and always with considerable fortitude. A certain tenacity emerges, but one devoid, apparently, of jealousy or pettiness.
Born in 1733 as Mary Morris, Knowles was an accomplished eighteenth century artist and writer who struggled successfully to express her gender within the turbulent ups & downs of George the Third’s feign. That vibrant century with its agricultural and industrial revolutions, the emergence of Wesley and English Methodism, the new sciences, the challenge of slavery, the French and American revolutions, Thomas Paine and other enlightened thinkers, but then the loss of the American colonies – could not have been an easy stage on which a woman might make her case, let alone win it. But Knowles was no ordinary woman. She deliberately cultivated new forms of “polite Quakerism” which stood her in good stead throughout life – not least with non-Quakers. She also knew how to use humour so as to subvert traditional Quakerism.
Knowles was a “middling” woman by way of social standing. But she emerges under the skilful eye of author Jennings (Kentucky Foundation for Women, USA), as a powerful, determined woman who thought for herself and acted accordingly – regardless of class, wealth, or standing.
Because of their commitment to non-violence, their assumption of equality as between men and women, their rejection of titles and honours including clericalism, Quakers who sought social advancement were mostly excluded from-the recognised norms for making progress — the Crown and its royal court, the Church of England, or the military. Their idiosyncratic faith obliged them to find their own way notwithstanding these closed doors.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries many Quakers turned to industry, commerce, or manufacturing for their living. Increasingly, education and science also became an open and creative field of endeavour for many of them. Mainly because of their honesty and plain speaking they performed brilliantly – as the great banking families of Lloyds and Barclays, the manufacturers Carr (biscuits), Cadbury, Rowntree and Fry (chocolates), Clarke of Street (footwear) and many others, demonstrated: Often the entrepreneurs became embarrassingly wealthy as a consequence of their probity and inventiveness. Power came their way, frequently to their inner embarrassment.
Knowles, doubly handicapped as a woman and a Quaker, found her way through force of personality, diligence, and clarity of thought. In not a few instances she helped to create or shape prevailing social conditions.
She chose her own husband when most women did not. Dr. Thomas Knowles was an expert in treating fever, although he would die of it in due course. Their marriage was happy and fulfilling. Knowles was also able to count amongst her personal friends many of the leading Quaker bankers, some of the principle manufacturers and educationalists, many writers and poets. Unusually she was destined to be recognised by the King and became a visitor at court, yet without bending before it.
Her style was to communicate by way of poetry — the heroic couplet more often than not. She travelled widely, enjoyed good health, engaged in music, and a new form of needlework. In the process she developed her radical politics without rancour or bitterness. Moreover, inner serenity and a blend of gender confidence arising from clear religious convictions formed a solid basis for life. By probing these characteristics in the “most minute of particulars” as Ashmole might have observed, Jennings reveals new insights which rarely appear in the lexicon of standard British history.
Knowles’ life was punctuated by a handful of events or occasions which became her “concerns” — itself a special word in Quaker philosophy.
From her twenties she helped to pioneer the new art form of “needle painting”. Later Dr. Johnson was to call her art “the subtle pictures which imitate tapestry”. It changed her life for on seeing examples of her work the Queen, in 1771, invited her to embroider a full size portrait of her husband, King George the Third. It was an outstanding success such that it went into the Royal collection where it remains today. The King, mightily pleased, gave her £800 (sterling) for her endeavours — a considerable sum of money in the eighteenth century. Knowles was also made welcome in court as, a century earlier, had been Wm Penn who founded Pennsylvania but whose father had been an Admiral of the Fleet.
Both “portraits” and “access to the court” must have been problematic for the Quaker needle painter — but once settled in her mind that her independence had not been compromised, Knowles would not.be diverted. She knew that, “Those who tread in Courts tread in slippery places.” Her commitment to political liberty and all that flows from that concept emerges as the constant of her personal morality. Jennings unravels this process with sound analysis.
In 1776 Knowles met James Boswell and then the formidable Dr. Samuel Johnson over dinner. Others were present including John Wilkes and his supporter Arthur Lee as well as other radical Whigs. Their host was the liberal Quaker Edward Dilly. Typically, Knowles was the only woman present.
The American colonies were a major subject for debate — but so therefore were religion and liberty — especially women’s liberty on which subject Johnson was decidedly negative, complex and, at times, contradictory. He placed individual liberty lower than social cohesion and so had little sympathy for the American revolutionaries.
Knowles’ position was the opposite – she abhorred slavery. Being a Quaker she held it self evident that “that there is that of God in every person”. The Quakers were largely responsible for forming the Anti-Slavery Society which continues the work today.
Her argument with Johnson and Boswell embraced the case of a young Jamaican woman — Jane Harry — who had decided to quit the Church of England and was later to attend Quaker meetings. Eventually Harry was disowned by her adopted family and was looked after by the Knowles. Knowles directly disputed Johnson’s position. She defended the right of the Jamaican to choose her own religion. She also rebuked Johnson for his negative attitude towards Quakers whom he disparagingly classified as “deists”. The dispute thus laid between them was to rumble on for decades.
From the outset of their many encounters Knowles steadfastly claimed that Boswell took no notes during much of the argument as to her own contribution, nor when they met again to dispute much the same range of subjects. She maintained that Boswell only wrote later in respect of her contribution from memory. She asserted that he had paraphrased her contribution, getting it wrong in the process. When Boswell and Johnson visited her in 1790 so as to read to her Boswell’s narrative of her earlier meetings with Johnson, Knowles declared that “It was not genuine”. It contained too many “fabrications and suppressions”. Subsequently, she published her own account. Boswell refused to recognise its authenticity.
It is within the interstices of the arguments which continue over the years that Jennings is able to unveil and pin-point aspects of gender, morality, liberty, freedom for colonists, the social limits of toleration (Harry), the meaning of death, of Quakerism and the like, which other historians have tended to ignore — except with passing reference. Knowles’ analysed issues painstakingly. She drew radical confusions consistent with her spiritual beliefs. Henceforth, Knowles would speak and write carefully, but without restraint and largely in contradiction to what the Doctor claimed, or judged. She gave no quarter whatsoever.
In June 1788, for example, to take but one typical example, Knowles crafted the verse,
‘Tho various tints the human face adorn,
To glorious Liberty Mankind are born:
0, May the hands which rais’d this fav’rite weed (tobacco)
Be Ioos’d in mercy and the slave be freed!’
Here is what Jennings calls “a female expression of the radical commitment to “glorious liberty”. Knowles viewed liberty as the birthright of all. For her, liberty encompassed politics as well as religion, “liberty had become a rational, non-sectarian, universal, human right”, she wrote. We still need to understand that insight two centuries later. She advocated the freeing of all slaves. She practised and extolled the virtues of her Quakerism; she promoted the virtues of liberty and tolerance, especially for women.
Knowles discussed Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man Part 1 with her close Quaker friend, Anne Seward. She also quoted from Paine’s Age of Reason that the Quaker taste presided at the Creation “what a drab world we should have had.” (1794) Two years earlier Seward & Knowles had discussed Paine’s Rights of Man Part 11 when the former criticised “Paine’s pernicious and impossible system for equal rights.” This radical difference between the two women gave rise to “sharp tension” for Knowles supported the French Revolution and whole- heartedly approved of Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Motherhood and a happy, secure marriage were critical to Knowles’ understanding of life. She secured and held on to lifelong friendships, not least within the Society of Friends, but also well outside that community. Her verse, her wit, and her fearless but consistent honesty, transcended even her feminism.
The French Revolution as well as lesser issues were dissected, debated and fought over when necessary. She never backed off. Issues included deism, water baptism, wealth, beauty and public fame, all of which featured in her verses, as well as in her discussions with friends and those experts or commentators whom she met.
At the end Knowles, now a rich woman, carefully arranged for The transfer of 50 — 60 thousand pounds prior to her death to her son, George, by way of a “Deed of Gift”. Prudent to the end, yet despite having practised “polite Quakerliness” all her life, she was finally assailed by doubt as death approached. She died on the morning of 3rd February 1807, aged 73 years.
The real virtue of this riveting analysis of a highly intelligent woman who could and did match any man or alleged “expert” who came her way is in the light it shines on the way the great issues of the day were meticulously discussed in homes and saloons, in court and coffee houses by otherwise ordinary men and women. Many of the issues she tackled through her verse, the exchange of letters, or by debate remain to be resolved 200 years later. But as a guiding light Knowles, an extraordinary woman, can be trusted and followed.