Historical Background: The 18th Century

40 Pages 10112 Words

raphy did not thrive along side the development of secular autobiography. Religious autobiographies obviously continued to be written, but they formed a smaller proportion of the total.
Of the religious autobiographies that were written, the writings of Quakers continue to form the majority. The Quakers had grown phenomenally, so that by 1700 they were the largest by far of the sects dissenting from the Church of England.1 Quakerism itself had also undergone some changes. It had become increasingly conservative; "[e]ven before 1725," writes Luella M. Wright, "the early aggressiveness of the Quakers had shifted to a quietistic view of the place of religion in life."2 No longer do we find records of massive disruptions of Anglican services. Quakerism had also gained a measure of respectability. Gone, for the most part, are the scarifying persecutions described by Elizabeth Andrews and Elizabeth Stirredge. As early as 1712, Elizabeth Webb, an obscure Quaker preacher, was corresponding with the august chaplain of the consort of Queen Anne.
By now, too, the form of Quaker autobiography has become so standardized that there is little room for innovation (Elizabeth Ashbridge, as we have seen, is a partial exception). To some extent, such formulizing follows inevitably from the assumptions underlying the genre; as Luella Wright remarks:
These confessions are unmistakably dominated by a prevailing consciousness of the group mind. The dominance of the Society intervenes between the personality of the writer and the mind of the reader. The Quaker memorandist constantly played a double rôle. As an individual, recounting the events of his life, he stressed those that duplicated the experiences of others within the group; as spokesman for the Society, he subordinated personal episodes in his own life to those shared by the group.3
Quaker autobiography at first seemed precocious in its self-analysis; by the eighteenth century, the fresh psycholog...