Introduction

In 1828 Mary Hoopes, a sixteen-year-old student at Westtown Friends School, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, copied out a letter written by an anonymous parent to his or her children.¹ Accompanying the letter was an allegorical map entitled ‘A Map of the Various Paths of Life’. Created by American Quaker minister George Dillwyn (1738–1820), the letter and map delineated ‘various paths to happiness’ that a Friend trod from early childhood to old age (see Fig. 1). Ideally, young Friends would choose a righteous path to follow ‘Sure Direction Foot Path’ to ‘Humility Dale’ on to ‘Humble District, enjoying the pleasures of traveling in Liberty Plains’. However, young Quakers who diverged from the right route, distracted by ‘novel flower bed’ and ‘levity walks’, could fall prey to ‘Decoy Theater’, ‘Gambler’s Hotel’ and ‘Forger’s Hole’. They may pass from ‘love Learning Garden, over Manly Hill to Many Friends City’, but they could easily lose their way and find themselves at ‘Temptation Gateway’. Though ‘many a young tradesman’ may be ‘esteemed for their industry and sobriety’, dangers lay ahead, such as taking a detour from ‘Litigation Thicket to Quibble Gap’, which led to ‘the stultifying atmosphere of Self’s Corner’. The map lays out the worldly dangers young men could succumb to, such as drunkenness, gambling and other forms of debauchery. Those who took a wrong turn could find themselves bereft and alone in ‘the Bottomless Pit’. To avoid such a fate, Friends should wisely choose the path to ‘Pentients Pass’, then to ‘wondrous Mercy-gate’, and ‘at last repose in Peaceful Mind Bower, in the vicinity of Happy Old Age Hall’. The letter ended with a parental warning for Quaker children to be on their guard lest they encounter the ‘many crooks and strange paths’ outlined in the map.

Fig. 1.

‘A Map of the Various Paths of Life’, (London: W. Darnton & J. Harvey, 1794), Quaker Collection, Haverford College.

That Mary chose to copy this letter in 1828—when a turbulent and deeply disturbing rift engulfed the American Quaker community—reveals its importance in maintaining spiritual order amidst the chaos generated by what would become the Hicksite Schism. This act may have been Mary’s attempt to invoke the unity and cohesion traditionally enjoyed by members of the Religious Society of Friends. She may have wanted to remind her fellow scholars to follow the right path and avert further division. Or she may have transcribed it to console herself. While this invocation of Dillwyn’s map demonstrates its usage, it is difficult to uncover how often or in what circumstances Friends may have turned to this illustration for spiritual insight, reflection and comfort. A few references exist. For example, in 1805, when Mary Drinker Cope asked her son, Francis, whether while he was at Westtown Friends School he studied his copy of the ‘[map of] the paths of life and where they lead’ we see it in use.² Similarly, Albert Edmunds alluded to the map’s utility in an article published in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography in the early twentieth century. Born in England in 1857, Edmunds emigrated to the United States where he became a librarian at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania during the late nineteenth century. He recalled a dissected version of the map (what we would call a jigsaw puzzle), being ‘a very curious religious game’ that Quaker children played with on Sunday afternoons.³

Dillwyn’s map came in an intact and a dissected format when it first appeared in 1794 (see Figs 2 and 3).⁴ This map puzzle provides insight into the use of visual imaginary to educate children about Quaker religious practice. Extant copies of the map have survived on both sides of the Atlantic, showing that Friends in England and the United States bought and saved this item. Its endurance reveals the materiality of Quaker spirituality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and raises questions about how Friends interacted with objects. The scholarship regarding ‘the material turn’ in religious studies can help elucidate this relationship. Material religion has not only brought attention to the importance of material culture to practical piety but also examines the connection between humans and inanimate objects in their pursuit of faith. Scholars of this field looked beyond the binaries of subject v. object, human v. non-human to analyse social processes. The interrelationship of people and objects offers new ways to study religion. Sonia Hazard argues that ‘humans and things are fundamentally co-constitutive’. Material artefacts are not afterthoughts to spirituality but essential to it and, therefore, ‘generative of religious reality’.⁵ Or, as David Morgan and Sally Promey state: matter, ‘with its ability to make religion’, elicits ‘distinctive contributions to historical understanding’. Even strict Protestants such as the Religious Society of Friends, who stripped all remnants of Anglicanism and Puritanism from their meetinghouses, still pursued religion through material forms. Scholarship has typically discussed the importance of the Quaker plain style in regard to clothing, housing, furniture and art, but little attention has been paid to the role of children’s play as a material enactment of spirituality.⁶ What did it mean that Friends, who valued ‘Truth’ and abhorred artifice, engaged with a metaphorical image? This allegorical map, as an ordinary, even crude, rendition of an internal process cohered with the Quaker dedication to simplicity.⁷ Furthermore, Dillwyn’s map was a physical manifestation of the concept of Quaker spirituality as a quotidian and lifelong endeavour. It is a manifestation of the Friends’ inner world, as Franz Reitinger asserts: ‘allegorical maps portrayed worlds and regions of the mind … They conveyed mental states and were used as exemplary tools in the articulation of new attitudes.’ ⁸ The map’s production, usage and remembrance provide greater understanding of both Quaker practical piety and the sociocultural context in which it was produced. Using a multidisciplinary approach drawn from religious studies, literary history and cultural geography, this paper will argue that the Quaker religious regimen engendered linkages between believers, texts and objects to construct a comprehensive spiritual identity.

Fig. 2.

Dissected version of ‘A Map of the Various Paths of Life’, Cotsen Children’s Library, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Fig. 3.

Dissected version of ‘A Map of the Various Paths of Life’, 1794, image courtesy of Leicestershire County Council Museums.

Material Education

Using material objects to instruct young children gained currency in the English context through the publications of Charles Hoole (1610–1667). A schoolmaster, Hoole advocated the use of imagery to teach children vocabulary, believing it made learning pleasurable. He endorsed the use of blocks, dice and picture books to teach reading. Through this ‘letter sport’, children visualised words and phrases to build their vocabulary.⁹ Hoole’s educational theory preceded John Locke’s more famous treatise entitled Some Thoughts Concerning Education, published in 1693, which popularised the method of teaching children through play. Locke believed learning for children should be ‘as much a recreation to their play, as their play is to their learning’. This approach would ensure lasting outcomes.¹⁰ Locke’s theory of education had widespread impact throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe and the United States. In addition, it initiated the production of material objects specifically for the education of children.

Maps became a primary teaching tool in the eighteenth century. Booksellers and printers responded to the growing demand for maps by specialising in products for young consumers, such as atlases, map games, playing cards and puzzles. Children acquired knowledge by playing with geographic cards and copying and colouring maps, as well as stitching them out of material. Some girls made their own patterns, while others purchased ready-made maps printed on silk. Female students at Westtown Friends School embroidered globes, and scholars at the Ackworth School, a Quaker institution in Yorkshire, worked a linen sampler of a map of England and Wales in the early nineteenth century. Maps that were cut into pieces—dissected—to be assembled by the child obtained widespread use among educators. Dissected maps were printed on copperplate, hand coloured, mounted on thin pieces of mahogany and sold in wooden boxes. Some had a key sheet accompanying the map. As relatively expensive items, these maps were affordable only for the middling or upper sort in Britain and North America. Some mothers constructed their own cards and games for their children’s use.¹¹ By the early nineteenth century English publishers had produced maps geared to a young audience from alphabetic dissections to allegorical ones, though geographical topics were the most prevalent.

The making and selling of maps built a thriving market in the eighteenth century. Fuelled by interest in the expanding English empire and improved travel, there was a growing demand for geography books and maps. In addition, continued developments in early childhood education—based in Lockean ideals and Enlightenment treatises—led to commercial innovation. English printers and publishers William Darton and Joseph Harvey fabricated Dillwyn’s map. Darton and Harvey were English Quakers who became business partners in 1791. As printers and booksellers, Darton and Harvey embraced the new fashion for selling dissected maps to teach geography and history. Their firm became a premier producer of juvenile ephemera by the nineteenth century. They and their competitors issued dissected maps on a range of topics, from history, geography and economics to natural science, literature and ethics.¹²

The most notable exponent of the use of dissected maps as a teaching tool was Lady Charlotte Finch, the royal governess to George III’s children. Her collection of maps was housed in two mahogany cabinets with thirteen drawers and brass fittings; the one featured here was manufactured in the 1760s (see Fig. 4). As the royal governess, Finch was an influential educator whose pragmatic approach is evident in her map cabinets. She made use of educational toys and dissected maps to teach the royal household’s teeming progeny. Like other teachers, she blended theory with practice to enhance the child’s development. Finch’s approach was probably inspired by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, a French educator and author of Magasin des Enfants, published in 1756. This book defined her method, which combined ‘useful knowledge’ with moral lessons. Through self-reflection and instructive dialogue children would learn how to correct themselves. De Beaumont also sold dissected maps to girls who attended her London school. English educators Maria and Richard Lovell Edgeworth endorsed puzzle making for the young. Adopting Locke’s concept of learning through play, they believed children disclosed their ‘habits of understanding and temper’ when putting together a dissected map. This was learning by doing—having to make judgments to achieve a goal. Furthermore, educational toys such as Dillwyn’s map instilled ‘the habit of reflection and observation’.¹³

Fig. 4.

Map cabinet of Lady Charlotte Finch, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Quaker approach to schooling children typified these educational developments. The primary goal in training young Friends was to produce sensible and useful adults. Learning to read, write and cipher were beneficial; gaining skill in art, dance or music was unnecessary and worldly. A major part of this educational experience was religious and ‘guarded’, meaning students would be sheltered from any impious or deviant ideas. Children’s reading material was limited to efficacious topics. The frequent references to children’s education found in Friends’ meeting minutes is evidence of this concern. Parents were deemed the primary educators of their children, particularly in their religious instruction. They also relied on elders, ministers and teachers to instruct their offspring. The need to maintain this ‘guarded education’ led to the establishment of Quaker boarding schools and select institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, British North America and the United States. As Sarah Grubb, one of the founders of the Ackworth School in England, stated, ‘a religious improvement in the minds of youth’ was a principal aim of Quaker educational establishments. Students were to learn valuable knowledge, such as geography, history and arithmetic, read improving books and engage in solemn study.¹⁴

Renewed interest in children’s education arose in the eighteenth century as part of the ‘Quaker Reformation’. Fearful that the next generation would become immoral and indifferent, this reforming effort pursued strict enforcement of the Quaker Discipline. No longer would members be tolerated who were lax in their ethical, personal, familial, political or economic behaviour. Citations for ‘sectarian delinquency’, which included drunkenness, gambling, profanity, fornication, engaging in military action, non-attendance to meeting and irregular marriages, increased. In addition, Quaker meetings targeted members who repudiated their tradition of pacifism or declined to free their enslaved workers. Those who refused faced disownment. The remnant that remained after this winnowing of the membership worked to encourage spiritual values in their children, such as temperance, simplicity and humility.¹⁵ The intent of this moral education, combined with traditional schooling, was to rear upstanding members who would provide leadership and service to the Society.

Quaker educators published tomes to aid parents in moulding their children’s educational experience and religious training. Parental Instruction in Familiar Dialogues (written specifically for Friends and published in London in 1811), followed a similar format to Magasin des Enfants. It provided sample conversations between a mother and her two children to inculcate Quaker theology and practice. By modelling good behaviour, Quaker parents would show their children the correct way to engage in study, interact with others and attend meeting. Quaker educator James Mott, author of Observations on Children, and Hints to Young People on the Duties of Life, endorsed the Lockean approach. To inspire good behaviour, he counselled Friends to employ reason when admonishing children for errant acts. This rational approach engendered discipline as children internalised self-control. To absorb Quaker values, children should frequently read the Bible. Mott recommended the Psalms as beneficial for ‘meditation and devotion’; the New Testament should be read for ‘doctrine, faith and practice’. Quaker children also read excerpts from the works of the Society’s founders, including George Fox, William Penn, Isaac Penington and Robert Barclay.¹⁶ Children were exposed simultaneously to Quaker theology while learning to imitate the exemplary piety of the founding generation.¹⁷ While reading and writing were primary means to enact the Quaker faith, Dillwyn’s map offered a tangible interaction with a spiritual focus; putting together this puzzle made children mindful of piety and provided them with a moral geography to follow in their spiritual regimen.

Textual Context

Dillwyn’s map was probably inspired by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. Bunyan’s bestseller, first issued in 1678, charts the spiritual journey of a central character named Christian. On his way to the Celestial City he meets several people whose names personify virtues and vices, such as Hopeful, Pliable, Timorous, Hypocrisy and Mr. Worldly Wiseman. Christian’s trek was both individual and universal, as it typified the difficulty faced by all Protestants on the road to salvation. Bunyan’s vivid language appealed to Friends because it illustrated the real-life struggles of average people. In addition, the author created his own ‘Map Shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation’ in the 1660s. This image depicted an excursion along one of two pathways that proceeded through a series of circles that contained appropriate biblical citations to alert the traveller to be mindful in their practice (‘which strengthens faith’, Ps. 119:49) and cautious in their actions (‘who worketh blindness of heart’, 2 Cor. 4:4). The pilgrimage ended when the traveller either arrived at the gates of heaven, to be greeted by an angel, or at the gates of hell, where they were met by a fire-breathing beast. Bunyan built upon the work of early modern theologians and philosophers who created visual schematics to outline their beliefs. These charts inspired Bunyan’s own map with some variations. Bunyan emphasised an emotional rather than rational approach, both to maintain biblical primacy and to attract non-literate viewers.¹⁸

This graphic theology continued with the cartography craze of the eighteenth century, when some publishers included a map of Christian’s journey in later reproductions of Bunyan’s book. An early version appeared in a 1790 edition of Pilgrim’s Progress crafted by John Wallis Jr. Dillwyn, who lived in England at the time, may have come across a copy (Bunyan’s book was popular with Friends).¹⁹ Like Dillwyn’s map, the Pilgrim’s Progress one was geared to a young audience; its subtitle was ‘Designed as a Rational Amusement for Youth of both Sexes’. This map (Fig. 5) chronicled the movements of Christian, who trooped from the ‘Slough of Despond’ to the ‘City of Humiliation’ and onto the ‘Valley of the Shadow of Death’ and the ‘Country of Conceit’, which are similar to (or in the case of ‘Vanity Fair’ the same as) the toponyms utilised by Dillwyn. Both maps show paths outlining the progress of the pious traveller. Believers took many twists and turns, encountering temptation and finding support in their passage through this earthly existence. While this geography was conveyed in a visual format, it was not representational. As Christopher Hill avers, the movement expressed in Bunyan’s text was a psychological trek internal to the believer, which corresponds with the interior spirituality of Friends.²⁰

Fig. 5.

Untitled allegorical map of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Leeds: John Binns, 1790), Album, British Library, Alamy stock photo.

Christian’s spiritual voyage in Pilgrim’s Progress epitomised the Protestant pilgrimage. Life as a journey was not a new phenomenon when Bunyan’s book was published in seventeenth-century England. As both metaphor and allegory, life as a journey had a long history within western culture reaching back to the ancient world. It was evident in the Bible, and medieval literature and art abound with this narrative framework. The Bible directed believers to follow the Lord: ‘he will teach us his ways and we will walk in his paths’. While pilgrimages became a casualty of the Protestant Reformation, vestiges remained. Instead of physically migrating to a holy site, Protestants voyaged inward in their minds and hearts to affirm and experience faith. Bunyan’s tale and Dillwyn’s map served as Protestant versions of pilgrimage, which was an internalised trip one could return to repeatedly rather than an episodic act, travelling in difficult conditions over long distances. Pilgrimage tales became a subgenre of religious literature in the early modern era. Bunyan’s story was one of many Protestant writings that utilised this motif; some wrote to refute his version, while others wished to capitalise on his success. These Nonconformist texts existed in dialogue with one another, which characterised the intertextual reading of Protestants.²¹

Another influence on Dillwyn was Stephen Crisp (1628–1692), an English Friend who authored his own allegorical tract entitled A Short History of a Long Travel from Babylon to Bethel in 1691.²² Crisp’s story describes the expedition of an unnamed narrator wishing to reach the House of God. Beguiled by unscrupulous guides and tormented by all of manner of beasts, the pilgrim wandered through mountains and valleys guided by ‘the Light’, which patiently waited for him as he struggled through literal muck and mire. The Light at times shone around him and he ‘walked in the shinings of it with great fullness of spirit’. As he continued his excursion, people who envied his progress tried to pull him off the ‘narrow way’, while others engaged him in conversation so he could no longer follow the Light. Undeterred, the traveller finally reached his destination, the House of God, called Bethel. He found the household orderly and clean and its inhabitants meek and reverent; there was ‘no quarreling, no contention, and no high or hot words’. Despite his former ‘labours and disappointments’, this pilgrim achieved joy and contentment in his ‘heavenly habitation’.²³ Once he became a member of the household he was asked to educate youth about the true path.

A contemporary of Bunyan, Crisp served as an itinerant minister among early Friends in England and Holland. While the two men shared some commonalities, their differences in doctrine are evident in their versions of the believer’s voyage outlined in these respective publications. The male characters in Bunyan’s and Crisp’s narratives mirror each other and yet take different trajectories. In the first instance, in Bunyan’s tale, Christian travelled from ‘the City of Destruction’ to the ‘Celestial City’, while Crisp’s protagonist journeyed from Babylon to Bethel. Bunyan’s character, like Crisp’s, encountered others who attempted to waylay his progress, such as when Christian met two giants named Despair and Diffidence. Conversely, while Bunyan’s main character was accompanied by others and ended his journey when he reached the city of God, Crisp’s unnamed pilgrim toured alone and his travels did not end upon his arrival at Bethel but continued when he was called upon to bring children to the Light. Bunyan’s structure went from the collective to the individual, while Crisp’s started with the individual and ended with the collective, emphasising the singular path of each believer as well as the expectation that they would contribute to their religious community.²⁴ In addition, human figures appeared in the Pilgrim’s Progress map, but no inhabitants are found on Dillwyn’s; this absence allowed the user to visualise themselves wandering this spiritual space in a solitary exercise. Crisp tailored his publication specifically to fellow Friends, emphasising the need to ‘spiritualise’ daily life as well as follow one’s own path. This treatise became a bestseller in the transatlantic Quaker community.

Moral Maps

The ‘vogue for allegorical cartography’ began in seventeenth-century France with the hugely popular ‘Carte de Tendre’ (Map of Tenderness), published in 1654 by salonnière Madeleine de Scudéry. This map depicts various sites of love that the wanderer could visit, with names such as Assiduité (Attentiveness), Obéissance (Obedience) and Probité (Integrity). One of three paths could be followed, which ended in mutual affection or growing indifference. This interest in maps outlining the contours of love was transported to England and exhibited in, for example, Robert Sayer’s 1748 A Map or Chart of the Road of Love, and Harbour of Marriage and Joseph Johnson’s 1772 New Map of the Land of Matrimony. As a literary trope, metaphorical mapping appeared in English literature, most notably in Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene, a ‘Protestant allegory’ (first published in 1596) that included a knightly quest to attain salvation amid moral and political perils. Thus, a ‘lexicon of geography’ had become part of common speech during the seventeenth century.²⁵ This geographic sensibility continued as allegorical maps developed into a means of moral instruction. Puzzles and games with ethical themes appeared in eighteenth-century England. In 1789, William Darton published an allegorical map labelled ‘Dissected Emblems, Suitable for the Instruction of Youth of All Ages, Designed to Impress upon Their Mind as Love to Virtue, and Hatred to Vice’. Darton’s major competitor, John Wallis Jr., fashioned a moral map entitled ‘An Allegorical Map of the Track of Youth, to the Land of Knowledge’ in 1796. In the same period, ‘The New Game of Virtue Rewarded and Vice Punished’ entailed children moving their playing pieces around a board of thirty-two spaces of both virtues and vices, winning by attaining virtue. ‘The Mansion of Happiness’, invented in England and first published in the United States in 1843 by W. and S. B. Ives, had a similar format. Victory came when a player obtained traits such as temperance, honesty, humility and piety.²⁶

While ‘moral maps’ were commonplace, the ‘Map of the Various Paths of Life’ was specific to Quakers. As a material object, the imaginary landscape denoted the pathways open to Friends. As an artefact of Quakerism, it represented an interior spirituality that was often silent, individual and unseen. Moreover, it exemplified the Quaker approach to spirituality as an active, daily undertaking. It discloses one example of how Friends interacted with material objects as a means of practical piety; it materialised Quaker spirituality for the moral edification of youth. It offered a series of meandering pathways (some curving paths, others circuitous trails) that believers could follow, with their ‘pure eye’, to advance and retreat repeatedly before reaching their earthly end. For example, children who chose the wrong way after leaving their parents’ protection wandered down ‘Careless Backway’ where indulgence, mendacity, shame and violence reigned. This zigzagging path had stops at the towns of ‘Lyington’ and ‘Mobbington’, which hosted cockfighting, bull-baiting, tavern haunting and thievery, where the errant Friend devolved into impoverishment and criminality. However, there were possibilities for escape, but walking toward a pious life was challenging. One had to pass through several districts, including ‘Distress Borough’, ‘Poverty Maze’ and ‘Fearful Waste’, before reaching ‘Humble District’ and ‘Serenity Province’.

Dillwyn’s map communicated in ‘graphic language’ to inspire the behaviour of observant Friends. As one scholar contends, cartography is the means to meditate one’s relationship to an allegorical landscape: ‘not only do they (maps) help to visualise spatial dimensions of the imaginary world and orientate oneself in that world, but they also serve to give plausibility to the world as a whole’.²⁷ Furthermore, maps are a form of communication between the user and the maker; therefore, the ‘Map of Various Paths of Life’ provides insight into George Dillwyn’s conception of Quaker spirituality. A minister, Dillwyn had a keen interest in education. He was a friend and companion to the English educator Sarah Grubb. They travelled together on ministerial missions when he lived in England, and the two probably discussed childhood education. After Dillwyn returned to the United States he published Occasional Reflections, Offered Principally for the Use of Schools in 1816. The book included aphorisms for students to write in their copy books. Arranged alphabetically, these short phrases could be easily copied by small children: ‘A good man’s talk is in his walk’, ‘be steady in virtuous pursuits’ and ‘a good education is a fair portion’.²⁸ These sayings expressed the Quaker approach to religious practice and educational pursuit.

This map as a material object focused Quaker piety. Playing with the Dillwyn map and copying the parental letter affirmed Quaker spiritual ideals. By delineating Quaker piety, Dillwyn mapped the joys and sorrows Friends would encounter during their terrestrial journey. The spatial and visual representations could be used and remembered to guide one’s steps toward grace and away from iniquity, as one traversed a topography abounding with danger and safety, risk and reward, worldly disorder and spiritual repose. Friends navigated a terrain that could provide succour as well as engender sin. They could go down several avenues that led to trouble and discontent (to ‘Misery Square’ in ‘Poverty Maze’) as well as consolation and peace (from ‘Great Method’ to ‘Notable Walks’). If the Friend remained on the righteous way (through the ‘strait gate’), they attained liberty, harmony and comfort; those who strayed encountered despair, disorder and poverty. The hazardous ramble evident in this image demonstrated the need for the pious to be ever watchful and to sustain faith through their earthly ordeals.²⁹

Mindful Practice

As a habitual activity, children’s play could be used for religious purposes. Toys, games and puzzles became educational devices for parents and teachers to enhance children’s spiritual knowledge. Moreover, this map served as a mnemonic device to help Friends be mindful of their spiritual path and the daily and hourly need to address ‘the inner monitor’. Putting together Dillwyn’s dissected map—probably in silence—taught children that faith was a journey and attention to their belief and behaviour was paramount. By playing with it they could visualise ‘the strait gate’. They could imagine themselves in a countryside filled with hazardous traps and protective havens. Quaker spirituality included a relationship with text, whether through this letter and map or the published and unpublished documents circulated by Friends. Reading was a spiritual encounter that provided insight, guidance and solace. Early Quakers pursued book collecting and publishing and kept accounts of their activities through diaries, letters, journals and commonplace books. Through writing, reading and publishing, Friends obtained a ‘spiritual literacy’ indicative of their experience. Friends exchanged books, circulated unpublished diaries and disseminated letters through a network of family and friends. This interchange supported Quaker piety as objects were used to cultivate friendships, preserve kin relations and affirm spiritual community. Material engagement was part of the Quaker practice of mindfulness. ‘Centering’ one’s mind, to ‘keep one’s attention fixed upon’ a specific topic, was the means to mindfulness.³⁰ Furthermore, mindfulness as essential to Quaker spirituality came about through reading, writing and conversing as well as worship, prayer and meditation. Being self-aware enabled the believer to stroll the ‘dreary wilderness’ and find consolation, despite their often ‘tribulated path’. Conceived as an internal journey of the heart, mind and soul, the Quaker religious regimen necessitated constant attention. To access God through prayer and meditation, to gain a mystical connection with the Holy Spirit, demanded mindfulness. Friends’ plain style constructed a faith that was reticent and reflexive.³¹

The mind was a subject of great interest to many European writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding addressed the mind’s regulation. Locke and the Friends shared an interest in how to train the mind. For Locke, ‘the good ordering of the mind’ was necessary to knowledge acquisition, while for Friends it was compulsory for spiritual insight.³² The God-given ability to reason compelled human beings to exercise their minds to the extent of their abilities. Friends incorporated reason as a useful ‘gift from God’ with truth derived from the Inward Light, making revelation and reasoning compatible. Quaker Lindley Murray’s tome The Power of Religion on the Mind embodied this ideal. After reading his chronicles of co-religionists, Quakers would come to ‘just and seasonable reflections on the state of our own minds, and a sincere and reverent application to the greatest and best of Beings, for the aid of his Holy Spirit, to enlighten and animate us, and to conduct us safely through the paths of life!’³³ Locke’s initial interest in writing his essay on human understanding was to investigate the nature of practical religion. He wished to use human reason to understand religious faith, to bring rationality to bear on spirituality and create moral consensus among believers. Locke was familiar with and influenced by Richard Allestree’s The Whole Duty of Man, which was one of the most popular devotional manuals in the early modern Atlantic world. By training their minds, Christians could avoid temptation by keeping biblical directives foremost in their thoughts. To overcome sin, one had to ‘possess’ one’s mind fully’ to recognise its ‘heinousness’. Allestree went on to assert the value of ‘imprinting deep in our minds the loveliness and benefits of meekness without the ugliness and mischiefs of anger’. To circumvent these sinful behaviours, one had to ‘mortify all peevishness and forwardness of mind’. He recommended exercising one’s mind spiritually while performing mundane tasks, such as getting dressed in the morning (a practice adopted by Quakers).³⁴ By accentuating the role of the mind in cultivating piety, process and product became equally important.

How one pursued spiritual life required habits of thought and action. Locke and others emphasised the need for habituation, especially its role in preparing the mind for proper functioning. As part of the new philosophy of the seventeenth century, routines and rules were valued to train the mind for its apposite vocation. Locke declared that understanding came not from ‘natural faculties’ but from ‘acquired habits’, and Christians had a moral duty to train and regulate their minds through customary pursuits. These conventions of intellectual enterprise reflected the common view that Christians had to engage in habitual activity to express their faith. English philosopher Damaris Masham maintained that regular habits must be fully integrated into individuals before their minds were prejudiced by immoral ideas and activities. The nonconformist Isaac Watts (who was popular with Friends) suggested ‘daily requests to God’ through the process of ‘reading, study and conversation’. Consistent activity helped the believer open themselves up to God, so they could learn how to guide their thoughts with ‘safety and ease through all intricacies of a difficult object’. John Mason, another nonconformist, believed routine would improve the mind through religious contemplation. He recommended that believers read efficacious books and converse with ‘good company’ to ensure virtuous thoughts. Friends endorsed this approach by restricting the reading materials available to their children as well as modelling appropriate behaviour in meeting and suitable conversation in household gatherings.³⁵

Quakers regarded piety as a conscious, everyday endeavour. Pious practitioners were to learn ‘to know and distinguish between the Divine voice and every resemblance of it that may arise in the imagination’. Only through stable, firm and calm deliberation could the believer make ‘progress in the soul’. Regular habits were necessary to retain the appropriate mindset. Quaker parents and elders regularly examined youth to ensure they remained on the path to righteousness. Robert Pittsfield hoped that young Friends would take advantage of every opportunity to ‘restrain and regulate the passions’ so they could ‘receive any impressions of divine good’.³⁶ Caleb Swayne advised his children to ‘study to improve both in good principles and in good practice’. Mary Drinker Cope told her son William to ‘watch over thyself—fearful of being puffed up or beguiled by flattery’. While she found a ‘principle of divine goodness’ in his ‘youthful mind’, she encouraged him to engage in ‘self-examination’ to avoid being ensnared by ‘pride or vanity’. Other mothers affirmed that their role as parents was to ‘form’ their children’s ‘mind to virtue’ and to lead them toward an awareness of the world to come. One Quaker elder counselled a friend’s children that careful behaviour would yield ‘peace & comfort in your own minds for well doing’. He went on to recommend that they read William Penn’s No Cross, No Crown, ‘for the power of religion on the mind’ was incalculable.³⁷

Conclusion

Material objects held religious meaning and served as conduits for spiritual enlightenment among Friends. Their practices of piety included textual engagement as well as somatic interaction to monitor spirituality. ‘The Map of the Various Paths of Life’ is evidence of the importance of material culture to Quaker religiosity, and its inclusion in the history of Quakerism expands our appreciation of piety as a textual, tactile, visceral and visual experience. Through corporeal and conscious activity, Quakers experienced their faith in multiple ways, remaining vigilant and faithful through unending spiritual labour and ‘the daily exercise of watching unto prayer’. The multivalence of Quaker religion is evident in its phenomenological character; it encompassed not only belief but also ‘objects, practices, spaces, bodies, sensations, affects and so on’.³⁸ The Quaker plain style dictated simple dress and speech, decorous movement, humble demeanour and emotional equanimity. This holistic approach engulfed all aspects of human experience: work, home, school, family, friends and the secular world. In every area of life, the ‘fellow traveller’ was to bring a Quaker sensibility to their thoughts, words and actions, and, I would argue, visual and material interactions, as with Dillwyn’s map.

Maps have manifold connotations and serve varied purposes. They construct meaning, enhance identity and encourage remembrance. Additionally, they signify a ‘semantically dense range of meaning making’ through human/non-human contact. Visual artefacts could be ‘elements of devotion’, ‘markers of social status’ or ‘domestic adornments’. Dillwyn’s map embodied all these attributes. Whether to induce mindfulness, tutor children or decorate classrooms, this object reveals the depth and complexity of Quaker religiosity. In the wake of the 1827 schism (which has been studied more as a difference of belief than practice), Friends embraced lived religion. Hicksites not only rejected the creeds endorsed by their Orthodox opponents but also advocated for a religion that was ‘an inward, practical, experimental work; and the good word of life [as] something to be felt, handled, tasted and easily understood’.³⁹ For Mary Hoopes in 1828, ‘A Map of the Various Paths of Life’ served as a warning of spiritual danger and a recollection of the social harmony once enjoyed by the American Quaker community. For some Friends, this sensate simplicity—evident in Dillwyn’s dissected map—comprised the practical piety they pursued during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.