A is for Art and Artists

Edward Hicks, Peaceable Kingdom, 1826
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC"
implicit public domain as artist died over 100 years ago
photograph uploaded via Wikimedia Commons

After digging into the draft revisions of New England Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice in the early 1980’s, I felt a sense of unease. There were no references in the main body of the text —or, for that matter, in the Advices and Queries— to art and artists in an medium. Since Friends were encouraged to send questions and concerns to members of the revision committee, I wrote about that concern and two other questions I had to the only person on the committee whom I knew. I received an almost immediate reply. The response to my inquiry about the arts could be summarized as, “Whoops!”  If I had seen the draft the year before, when I was still in England, Friends might have been able to make substantive changes, but there were limited opportunities to do so at that point. As far as I can tell, the only reference to the arts in the 1985 Faith and Practice of New England Yearly Meeting of Friends is the paragraph “Art is Part of Truth,” from Elfrieda Vipont Foulds’ “Living in the kingdom” (William Penn Lecture, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, 1955, p. 14).

It was thus with some trepidation that I opened Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion’s magisterial Oxford Handbook of Quaker Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). There were discussions of music included in numerous chapters. I was delighted, but I began to worry when the index revealed nothing under “art” or “painting,” let alone “sculpture.” To my relief, however, the problem was with the indexing and not with the text itself. With the exception of the omission of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, Roger Homan’s article “Quakers and Visual Culture” was exactly what readers could wish for in both theory and breadth.

Most unprogrammed Friends of my acquaintance have well-developed musical tastes, and a number of unprogrammed Meetings incorporate music into some aspect of their Quaker experience. The visual arts, however, have been a tougher sell, at least in the decoration of Meeting Houses. The concerns early Friends might have had about graven images are not a factor in most people’s personal lives today; the issue is the theological basis of our corporate life. Physical representations of crucifixes and the life of Jesus are as much an outward representation of religion as are the physical sacraments. Even if Friends put aside those concerns, given the wide range of views modern “liberal” unprogrammed Quakers have about Christianity, it is hard to come to a sense of the Meeting as to what kind of representation we should have on our walls. Although Friends' Meeting Houses are not consecrated, the feeling that walls in the Meeting room should be plain —with a few exceptions, maybe, for posters from Friends’ House in London or FGC or FUM, if posted in discreet locations such as the entrance or above the door— is as much a sacred norm as its opposite. (See also the detailed discussion in Homan, 2013, pp. 494-500.)

Expense and permanence are two other issues with the visual arts. If Friends pick a hymn which grates on someone's nerves, it is usually over in five minutes. People who dislike hymn sings altogether can have Meeting for Coffee before Meeting for Worship. On the other hand, a work of art that is donated by someone in the group may end up as a blob on the Meeting House walls for the next twenty years, with Friends not wishing to offend the donor by removing it or, in a vain hope to save face,  moving it to the most inconspicuous location on the premises. At least, that is what many Friends fear would happen. Whether it would is another matter.

There are pragmatic considerations as well, whether with paintings or with other possible outlets for artistic expression in the Meeting House. A colorful area rug, even if safely secured beneath a table, can invite allergies in some people, as can seat cushions, as much as the latter are needed by other individuals. Curtains harbor dust mites. As a result, unless a Meeting is fortunate enough to own a historic property built when one of the few artistic outlets for Friends was cabinet making and Meeting House design and or has both the resident architectural know-how and the money to construct an engaging modern structure, Quakers are all too often left worshipping in rooms with all of the psychological warmth that one might expect from the people who invented the penitentiary.

 

The chapel at the penitentiary, Port Arthur, Tasmania, Australia.
It is designed so that prisoners worshiped without seeing each other.
Although Quakers did not design this particular penitentiary, the English Quaker James Backhouse did visit the area.
photographs ©Kristin Lord 2008

 

Theologically, we are supposed to search for the Light within. I know. But as the Good Book reminds us, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” Some Friends wrestle with leaving ecclesiastical music behind when they join our Religious Society. Speaking personally, I have no shortage of opportunities to enjoy and even make music. What I miss is an attentiveness to a sense of God as expressed in material culture.

There may not be much a Meeting can do about a Meeting House that is an unprepossessing box on the outside except to plant window boxes, but a lot can be done with paint, lighting, plants, and the color and texture of any carpet and upholstery in the Meeting room. There might also be some way to modify benches that are excruciatingly painful to sit in for an hour. I attended a Meeting for two years that had benches like that. The Meeting room was well-proportioned and painted in a color to show off the midday sun, but, oh, those benches. After about a month of sitting there and watching Friends walk in wearing nothing but muted colors and muttering sotto voce about the seating, I saw red and I started to wear red.

Most Meetings that own their own premises have rooms available other than the Meeting room. There may be more flexibility here in terms of visual representation, although Friends frequently do not take it. Quakers have produced visual artists and art projects of some repute. It is high time that more people, especially children and visitors, knew more about their work and their connection to Friends. (Note: the links to commercial websites in this section are not an endorsement of their businesses but are meant to give an idea of the resources available.) Few Meetings have the resources to pick up a reproduction of a sculpture of Sylvia Shaw Judson, whose work graces a number of public and private spaces (e.g., the Chicago Botanic Garden); a number of Meetings, however, have a competent photographer in their midst who could take and have framed a high-resolution picture of Judson's statue of Mary Dyer, who was executed for her faith in 1660, in front of the Massachusetts State House on Boston Common. The Philadelphia Museum of Art sells prints in its on-line store of two paintings of the nineteenth-century Quaker folk artist Edward Hicks of Newtown Friends Meeting in Pennsylvania, who is known for his many versions of the Peaceable Kingdom. Amazing to say, there are still signed prints of Fritz Eichenberg’s woodcuts available. In the UK the Quaker Tapestry Project sells photographs of many, if not all, of its panels; the prints may be ordered in various sizes and shipped worldwide. With a bit of luck it might be possible to locate reproductions of landscapes by the English painter Samuel Lucas or botanical watercolors by Mary Vaux Walcott, the Philadelphia Quaker known for drawing and cataloguing the flora of the Canadian Rockies. (The many copies from the work of the latter shown on the Internet may or may not be in the public domain.)

Meetings are understandably reluctant to accept original offerings from individual members and attenders, given their desire not to offend the artists we have in our midst. Under what circumstances could this reluctance be reconsidered, especially given the number of Quaker quilters who would be happy to produce a wall hanging on a theme chosen by their Meetings? Are there opportunities to take and display high-quality photographs of historic Meeting Houses? Is there someone who knows the traditional Quaker art of silhouette drawings and can do them in First Day School for both wall decoration in those rooms and for parental keepsakes?

Friends Meeting House, Sparta, Ontario, Canada
an excellent example of traditional Quaker architecture
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2013

Interior of Sparta Meeting House
traditional Quaker craftsmanship at its finest
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2013

Some Meetings may be able to consider the work of practicing Quaker artists and/or architects when building or renovating their premises. Not every Quaker community is in the position of Live Oak Friends Meeting in Houston or Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia, with both the need for new facilities and the resources to commission an artist of the caliber of James Turrell, but more Meetings might wish to consider smaller-scale installations of the size of the stained glass designed a few years ago by Tony Serviente for the new Meeting House in Ithaca, New York. (This is different from inheriting stained glass, as did Valley Friends Meeting in Harrisonburg, Virginia, which acquired stained glass by purchasing property owned by another denomination; Kitchener Area Monthly Meeting in Canada has for its part some Art Nouveau green stained glass panes that came with the property.)

 

Rear addition of Friends Meeting House, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA
The addition, containing a Meeting room, was designed by Treat Arnold,
a member of the Meeting.
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2011

Finally, Friends should encourage the artistic education of their young people and find ways to give moral support the careers of Quaker professionals in the field, regardless of whether their works are to the taste of individuals in a given Meeting and whether they have the means to make a commission or purchase. To that end I would encourage Meetings to consider whether they have the resources to support an institutional membership in the Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts. It would be a small way to start righting an old wrong.

The Sultan Ahmed Mosque ("the Blue Mosque"), Istanbul, Turkey:
restrictions on the use of graven images and requirements for simplicity
do not necessarily mean abandoning aesthetic pleasures.
photo by Christian Perez via Creative Commons License
(Wikimedia Commons)

 

Edward Hicks, "The Residence of David Twining," 1845-8
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection, Williamsburg, Virginia
uploaded to Wikimedia Commons via the Yorck Project
(artist died more than 100 years ago, presumed public domain image)

Z is for Zebra Crossings (or part of what I learned from British Quakerism)

 

Abbey Road, London, 2004:
the same zebra crossing shown on the cover of the Beatles' album by that name
photograph taken by Will McC/Gallery and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons

Zebra crossings and now pelican, puffin, and even toucan and pegasus crossings: on the west side of “the pond” (i.e., the north Atlantic), highway crossings with such names would be located in a zoo. What the English call a zebra crossing is merely a garden-variety pedestrian crossing, labeled PED XING on US road signs. For some years we have also had all-way traffic stops at some of the busier intersections. We have even begun large scale-imports of vehicular roundabouts, along with lots of appropriately colorful language that hasn’t changed since the time of Chaucer (or perhaps Beowulf). However, we are not yet sophisticated or “clever” enough, as the English would say, to have as wide a variety of pedestrian, bicycle, and equine crossings, let alone such imaginative names for them.

On Independence Day (a.k.a. the Fourth of July), the day on which the process resulting in “two nations divided by a common language” officially began, it is worth considering what I learned from the country from which my own became independent. In particular, I will take a look at just a few of the many insights I gained from English Quakerism. Although there are reasons not to lump a nation-state and its Friends together, my husband has a point when he says that there are no people more typical of (name the country) than Quakers from that country. Anyone who doubts this can take a look at my Facebook page, assuming that I allow them to do it. One can usually distinguish the Canadian, English, and US Quaker commentators at a glance, without looking closely at the names of the politicians —let alone checking the “current cities” of those writing.

Admittedly, my qualifications for looking at “the Mother Country” are a bit rusty, although my bona fides include a degree from a British university. Still, all those days waking up to the front page of the British version of The Guardian on my iPad and following world events on the electronic version of the BBC must count for something. I checked those sites yesterday, I have done so at least three times already today, and, God willing, I will no doubt do so before breakfast tomorrow. So, before I break all the advice in the Advices of every Yearly Meeting and raise a toast with a glass of California Chardonnay to a glorious Fourth, I will honor the special relationship with an afternoon cuppa of Earl Grey.

To wit:

I. To have a single Yearly Meeting without major schisms over more than 350 years allows British Friends to feel a part of the world community of Quakerism without undergoing an identity crisis.

Yearly Meetings in the USA and Canada tend to look at where they stand on the continuum of conservative unprogrammed, liberal unprogrammed, programmed, and evangelical. Several Friendly umbrella groups have institutional members with very different manners of worship and ways of looking at the broader culture. In particular, some North American Yearly Meetings (Baltimore, Canadian, New York, New England, and Southeastern) belong to both Friends General Conference (FGC) and Friends United Meeting (FUM). Painful differences have arisen between the group of dual-affiliated Yearly Meetings and the group of Yearly Meetings connected only with FUM. British Friends may have more uniformity amongst themselves, but they seem to find it easier to agree to disagree about aspects of Quakerism as a global movement.

British Friends have unprogrammed Meetings, which made it have easy for an American with the same worshipping experience to cross the pond. When I have attended Meeting for Worship in England, my hosts are to some degree relieved not to have to explain what we are about to do. On the other hand, I have often felt they were disappointed that I was not from a programmed Friends Meeting or church, as they were hoping to learn more about those branches of Quakerism and to show off what they had to offer.

II. The British tradition of staffing the civil service with people of exceptional credentials is almost certainly related to the thoroughness of the Church Government sections of the three British editions of Faith and Practice published since World War II. This thoroughness has its advantages.

Meeting officers from a wide range of Yearly Meetings elsewhere find the British materials very helpful and sometimes adapt them to their own needs.

Admittedly, the fact that the United States has fifty states plus the District of Columbia, while Canada has ten provinces and three territories, all with distinct legal codes, has more than a bit to do with the broad strokes with which North American Friends paint that section of our books of discipline.  Perhaps the greatest difference is the degree of detail with which marriage procedures are discussed. Quaker Faith and Practice of Britain Yearly Meeting has a lengthy chapter about how Quaker marriage procedure fits into every type of marriage license in the relevant jurisdictions. While New England Yearly Meeting’s Faith and Practice has an excellent overview of Friends’ procedure, the legal portion mostly directs readers to the statute numbers for the six New England states.

When British Friends approved marriage equality for same-gender and opposite-gender couples in 2009, they had no trouble envisioning how Quaker marriage would look as part of an updated legal code. Indeed, it is my understanding that when the new legislation was going through Parliament, Friends were sufficiently knowledgeable that they could work with officials on the relevant sections of it. Ultimately, a full update showing both the procedure and the Quaker principles behind it was available on their web page before the new law came into effect. This not only explained Friends’ marriage procedures to Quaker newcomers and the broader community but seemed, at least to this observer, to help demystify to the public at large how changes in the law of the land could work in tandem with religious traditions. Jurisdictions in the United States have fewer types of marriage licenses and somewhat simpler procedures, but showing the “nuts and bolts” of how marriage equality works in those American Meetings that have approved it might help to reassure those who on the fence about supporting it.

III. Whether or not the custom of serving afternoon tea is, in anthropological terms, a secular analogue for the Eucharist, it is vastly more refreshing for the spirit than a quick drink of  “dishwasher” coffee and a much wiser use of resources than a drink after work.

As I indicated in a previous post, my Quaker friends in England took serving tea very seriously, perhaps even more so than their peers outside of our Religious Society. Even thirty years ago, however, there was a range of opinions about what foods should be served with it. One Friend, who had family members living long-term in Washington, D.C., said simply that it was foolish to be doctrinaire about the menu items. Besides, with an American guest she had the perfect excuse to bake her grandchildren’s favorite brownie recipe.

English friends now tell me that cafés selling quality European and North American-style coffee have made inroads in their country. No doubt this has improved the local brew (although I would never know, as I don’t care for coffee). The real benefit to the coffee shop, though, is providing another way for the fellowship of sharing food and drink to be raised to the spiritual — or, failing that, to the aesthetic sublime.

In the USA and Canada,  coffee and tea shops are finally coming into their own as places inviting serious refreshment and conversation and not just opportunities to down enough caffeine to keep awake on the roads.

Of course, our British —and Irish— friends (and some Friends) have also made the food-friendly pub a place for a slow and healthier drink instead of a quick drink, in case one is wondering about other liquid refreshments — but I am not going to go there.

English Portmerion "Botanic garden" teapot
raspberry-yogurt tart a variation of one found in The Stonyfield Farm Yogurt Cookbook
photograph ©Kristin Lord 2013

IV. If Friends in the north of England and Scotland can mount a flower rota (list of names of people providing weekly floral arrangements) in small Meetings in the dead of winter, so can people in Canada and the northern United States.

If we don’t, it is a question of culture and planning. Families in the UK have similar work-life balance issues to ours and often less disposable income, so we have no excuses. (See my previous post on the subject, which was laden with the usual excuses, including the exception —record-breaking cold— that proves the rule.)

V. English Friends know just as well as their compatriots outside the Religious Society that money and good ideas are not the same.

There is a reason that booksellers here can sell the English edition of Homes and Gardens at a minimum of ten dollars a whack and still turn a profit. It is easy to visualize how ideas from their stately homes can look attractive on a budget. Not only that: the editors also show rooms that are genuinely put together on a budget but which —not to put too fine a point on it— do not look cheap.

Friends believe that, while we all have different talents and skills, ideas and insights can come from any source. That idea has been handed down to us from Quakers in seventeenth-century Britain.

VI. Even if the government of the United States has behaved abominably overseas and/or at home, and even if outsiders sometimes look upon the culture of the USA as being the product of parvenus and weapons fanatics, don’t be afraid to show a broader picture.

It is unseemly for anyone to brag. Nevertheless...

The USA is the home of mass shootings but is also one of two major English-speaking countries with an annual secular Thanksgiving celebration. The other, not surprisingly, is Canada; although the Canadian event occurs about six weeks before its American counterpart, they are similar in most other respects. People who visit either country for an extended period of time tend to miss the occasion when they leave. Perhaps the biggest reason is that, although many religious organizations do something special at Thanksgiving time (and while the American version is connected with the Pilgrims of Massachusetts), the modern holiday has an ethical component that is consistent with the separation of church and state.

Likewise, don’t be ashamed of American achievements in  “high” literature, film, art, music, and cuisine, or of social advancements.

My UK friends have given this kind of example as a parallel: the same time as the British were granting independence to India and other parts of their empire (where the local inhabitants had not always been well treated by the British), they were also establishing the National Health Service for socialized medicine. The NHS set a standard for a number of other countries and was one of the British achievements featured in the opening ceremonies to the 2012 London Olympics.

VI. Finally (here I am speaking both literally and metaphorically), my British friends of all faiths and backgrounds emphasized how important it is to mend fences with all of one’s children, including the obstreperous and overtly rebellious ones — the loud and obnoxious adolescents.

Someday they might do something important.

A moment of pride for people on both sides of the "special relationship:"
the first African-American President and First Lady meet Queen Elizabeth II
at Buckingham Palace in 2009.
photograph by a United States government employee on official business
and thus in the public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)

In any case, you will want to get to know the grandchildren.

Sir Winston Churchill, 1942
photograph by a US government employee on official business
and thus in the public domain (via Wikimedia Commons)
"If my father had been American and my mother British,
instead of the other way 'round, I might have got here on my own."
Churchill to a Joint Session of the United States Congress, 26 December 1941

Y is for Yersinia Pestis (and other plagues and evils)

 

Yersinia pestis bacterium, viewed through a scanning electron microscope
photograph in public domain
source: Wikimedia Commons

 I. The Time Warp, Part I:

Yanking and tugging, my then-boyfriend (who has long since become my husband) and I managed to get my bags from the Gatwick train onto the sidewalk. It was early July of 1981. We were going to spend the night camped out on the seats in the departure lounge at the international terminal, and then I would snag a stand-by ticket for Boston. By having the two of us keep watch over the luggage, nothing would get stolen.

He slept (or it seemed to me that he did); I did not. The next morning, my ticket in hand, we decided to cut up some cheese for breakfast. I knew I had my Swiss Army Knife when we were eating pizza on the train, but that morning it was nowhere to be found. I was very careful of that knife; it was a birthday present from my parents the year before and I was aware that I shouldn’t brandish it too much in public, so maybe it was already in my suitcase, although I had been planning to use it to cut up more food on the plane. I found a plastic knife, and we had our cheese.

By the time I got onto the aircraft, I had searched my baggage three times for the Swiss Army Knife. Upon reflection, I realized that it had probably gone missing on the train, either stolen or lost between the crevices of the seat, when I slipped away for a minute and left it with half a slice of pizza. How I was going to explain that one to my parents was beyond me. However, I did have some money from them for this year’s birthday. If used prudently, I could pick up one item on sale that would be “the birthday present;” the rest would pay to replace the Swiss Army Knife, and no one would be the wiser. If anyone used the original to commit a crime over the summer, I was not in England and I had an alibi. In any case, my fingerprints were not on record.

I settled into my seat on the plane. The flight attendant asked if I would like the day’s New York Times. There was nothing unusual in the news except for one item in an inside page, a follow-up to a piece that we had probably missed because of work constraints.  Some 41 men were suffering from an exceptionally aggressive stain of the rare Kaposi’s Sarcoma, and neither the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta nor anyone else knew what to make of it, except that it was possible that the sarcoma was secondary to something sexually transmitted.

“There is as yet no evidence of contagion,” read the New York Times article. By the end of the year, that statement was proved to have been as tragically naive as later generations would find the thought of the open display or use of pen knives on public transportation. That we were personally unaffected by neither of the ensuing disasters was primarily a question of luck. In the instance of HIV/AIDS, our good fortune was the result of not needing a blood transfusion in those early days of the epidemic and the fact that we happened to be heterosexuals in a low risk pool in England and North America. Those in a high risk pool would have had no idea what they had done to get there — not until months or years later, when the disease was better understood but the damage was already done.

Likewise, we were nowhere near an airport on September 11, 2001. Amongst our immediate circle, one of my old friends from high school decided at the last minute not to fly from New York to a conference in California; another high school friend, a banker whose office was in another part of the Trade Center complex, also happened to be out of harm’s way. In terms of both the 9/11 attacks and the HIV/AIDS epidemics, many, many others were not so lucky.

II. The Time Warp, Part II:

 

I feel a similar sense of unreality reading the 1665 portion of The Journal of George Fox. I do not mean to imply that his circumstances were similar to my then-boyfriend’s and mine in the summer of 1981, only that all of our situations may look out of kilter through the lens of history. In late 1664 and 1665 (pp. 474-500 in the Nickalls edition), George Fox was playing a game of cat and mouse with judges in the north of England, while Margaret Fell had been imprisoned with a sentence of praemunire, indefinite preemptive detention. He was once again in trouble for refusing to take the oath to the King, on the grounds that he was following the Biblical injunction for his “yea” to be “yea” and his “nay,” “nay.” The judges described in the Journal did not wish to imprison him; it was becoming clear that Quakers were not causing civil unrest, and from the vantage point of the Crown it was more worth their time to use the loyalty oath as a way to imprison Roman Catholic dissidents, thus helping secure Protestant hegemony. Nevertheless, the authorities had not yet accepted the Quaker movement, or other Protestants, for that matter. At different points Fox tied up the courts by noting what we nowadays might call “accidental-on-purpose” errors in the indictments or the transcript of the oath itself. 

Scarborough Castle
photograph by Humphrey Bolton of geograph.org.uk
uploaded from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license

Ultimately, George Fox was imprisoned in Scarborough, and other Friends were banished, in an episode that would have appeared to some members of the broader public, even at the time, as cruel and pointless. It seems especially pointless —indeed, it looks like absolute lunacy— when we consider that the real danger in England that particular year was far to the south, in London. That danger came in the form of the plague.  The type of plague that devastated the population of London and its suburbs from 1664-1667, primarily from the spring of 1665 through the late winter of 1666, is now widely considered to be pneumonic plague, deriving from a form of the bacterium yersinia pestis. Yersinia pestis infects fleas and closes their foreguts. When they try to feed by biting a human being, they regurgitate the yersinia pestis bacterium into the wound, thus infecting the person. The fleas are carried by rodents. In the pneumonic form of the plague, transmission occurs between people, through droplets spread by coughing; the mortality rate of untreated pneumonic plague is close to 100 per cent.

In the outbreak at the time of George Fox, the carrier was the black rat (rattus rattus), which traveled in maritime cargoes to England from the European continent. According to the Diary of Samuel Pepys and other sources, it was identified in Amsterdam in October of 1663 and arrived in London in May of 1665.  It quickly defeated any attempts at quarantine. Before the pandemic petered out in the first half of 1666, somewhere between 75,000 and 100,00 people had died in London and its immediate vicinity out of a population of about 460,000.  Determining the number of victims was complicated by the lack of a central secular office keeping statistics of births and deaths. London relied on parish registers for its weekly Bill of Mortality, a system which was highly inaccurate given the number of people in the city who interred their dead elsewhere or who were not Anglicans registered in a local parish. This latter number included Roman Catholics, Baptists, Jews, Friends, and others. It was well known at the time that Quakers did not report the deaths of their own group to the parish registrars (cf. Samuel Pepys’ diary note of August 31, 1665); instead, they kept records of their own and used their own burial grounds for a number of plague victims, including some who were not Friends and whom they may have nursed and buried to their own detriment. Like others, Friends were heavily hit by the plague. Because of Quaker business contacts with the Netherlands, Friends were reasonably well informed by the standards of the day. George Fox (pp. 493-4) refers to a plague-infested ship sailing to Barbados that included Quaker passengers; the captain was a ruthless man who kept the Friends below deck, suffering the loss of most of his seamen in the confined quarters. (For the overall demographics and death rates of Friends during the period that includes the plague, see Gill Newton and Richard Smith, “Convergence or divergence? Mortality in London, its suburbs and its hinterland between 1550 and 1750,” Annales de démographie historique 2013/2 no. 126, pp. 17-49; and John Landers, “London’s mortality in the “long eighteenth century”: a family reconstitution study,” Medical History, vol. 35, suppl. S 11, Jan. 1991, pp. 1-28.)

While London was buckling under the weight of the plague, George Fox was trying to keep from becoming a statistic of the conditions in Scarborough jail. The warden himself, Sir Jordan Crosland, was well disposed toward him; it was the squalor in which Fox was forced to live that nearly did him in. In the middle of 1666, as the plague burned itself out, Fox learned that only an entreaty to the King would have a hope of securing his release. John Whitehead and Ellis Hookes, together with Esquire Marsh, went to Sir John Birkenhead, the Master of Requests, in August to see about having Fox released. Birkenhead obtained the order to free him, which he sent to Crosland up in Scarborough. George Fox was released on September 1, 1666, having been given a letter of safe passage by the warden. Fox and Crosland remained on good terms for the rest of Crosland’s life.

September 1 was to be the last day of calm that the English people were to see in the year 1666. On September 2 a massive fire broke out in London, consuming much of the city over the course of three days.

It would be lovely to say that George Fox, a man ahead of his time in several major areas of religious and social thought, was a visionary in his understanding of the fire. Unfortunately, that would not be true. Fox had had a vision of such a conflagration: “And then I saw that the Lord God was true and just in his word that he had showed me before in Lancaster Gaol. <The people of London were forewarned of this fire>: yet few people laid it to heart but grew rather more wicked and higher in pride.” (p. 503, as edited by Nickalls) Fox, however, did not entirely succumb to the sentiment that the people of London had received their just deserts. When he learned the details of the fire, he noted with sympathy the many people of both sexes (Friends and others) who went naked or in sackcloth, which he took as signs of repentance and not trauma, as we might today. Fox then proceeded to condemn the authorities, who tended to whip, imprison, or otherwise abuse these devastated men and women.

In many respects, we are all people of our time, whatever that time is. During the great plague of 1665 Londoners, like others who suffered from the bubonic or pneumonic plague from the late Middle Ages through the Early Modern period, killed cats and dogs in the tens of thousands, with the thought that these animals had spread the disease. We now know that rats carried the fleas and that cats in particular were one of the few types of assistance available. Likewise, although we have all been taught to view Schadenfreude as morally reprehensible, it is understandable that Fox would feel some perverse sense of Divine justice.

The New York Times article from July 3, 1981 describing what we now know as AIDS-related sequelae is also a product of its period. Indeed, we hope that future generations will look back at ours and consider our scientific knowledge to be primitive at best. In particular, tomorrow is not too soon for an exponential increase in our ability to deal with Ebola, a pestilence that is even more pernicious and terrifying than pneumonic plague.

As far as the Swiss Army Knife is concerned, many of us who carried them with us in our carry-on luggage when we flew a generation ago wondered what the authorities were thinking when we were allowed to do it. On the other hand, our pride in airport security —whether justified or not— is as much a deadly sin as the pride George Fox perceived in the Londoners in 1666.

We are all proud. To provide a rather petty example, for nearly 33 years I managed to securely move my replacement Swiss Army Knife (i.e., birthday present number two) from my purse or briefcase to my checked luggage. I felt rather pleased with myself after all this time. Then, after I used it to clip a snagged fingernail en route to a wedding reception a few days ago, it turned up missing. It’s not in my purse, camera bag, briefcase, or car. My father would hardly be upset this time; he had to replace his after it was confiscated at the entrance to the Smithsonian. My husband had to give up his knife last year when he ran out of time at airport security to mail it back home. I bought him another of the same type for an anniversary present.

 

The Great Fire of London, with Ludgate and Old St. Paul's
anonymous artist, ca. 1670
Yale Center for British Art
painting in public domain
uploaded from Wikimedia Commons