Category: Quaker history
“There’s something I want you to do for me, Horace, some day: I am going to ask you to make particular inquiries. There was a fellow over there on the Market Street lines: I knew him well—loved him—and he me, too, I am sure: Joe Adams was his name. He was a starter there. Occupied quite a humble, working, laboring man’s position there—what they call a starter. We used to be on good terms together. He was an asthmatic fellow—had a wife and family: it has struck me—is Joe still alive? You can ask—make inquiries in my name. It has been now full a year and a half since I saw him last—full that—probably two years. I have completely lost track of him. You know, the months pass and pass. I have been in this room now nearly a year—and even before that for some time I was not getting about at all.” I asked him for some description. “Oh! he was a sandy-like man—sandy hair—all that goes with that: not tall or strong—asthmatic, as I said—and sickly completed, too. Joe was Quakerish—showed it in his looks and way. He was born on the outskirts—his parents died when he was quite young; he was taken in by a Quaker family—inhibted their ways, had them to the last.” Said he desired “to report” himself to Joe if still alive.
– With Walt Whitman in Camden, Friday, May 3, 1889.
In the same issue of Journal of Hygiene and Herald of Health which featured Thomas Proctor’s recollections of Whitman, attached to the previous post, we find New York Unitarian Robert Collyer skipping without a beat between the “basest things… depravity” at the the boy’s school, Rugby, and the innocent boyhood pranks of the great Quaker humanitarian, Isaac T. Hopper. What gives?
Hopper sublet his Brooklyn apartment to David and Lydia Child during the period in which Lydia penned a queer tale of two Quaker brothers with one wife between them. Years ago, I speculated that David was actually Hopper’s lover. I believe Hopper was lampooned as Friend Goodwill in CF Biggs’s Trippings of Tom Pepper. The fictional Goodwill was a Quaker missionary who takes a lady of the evening into his own home for reform, either in ignorance or denial of the fact that the working girl is actually seaman Tom Pepper in drag.
Moral Health of Boys.—When Dr. [Thomas] Arnold went to Rugby the school was in a frightful condition, and it was considered clever and manly to do the basest things, and then to deceive the master about them. Arnold never for one moment appeared to believe that he was being cheated. He said, practically, “Boys, I will not believe in your depravity;” and then presently the boys were all saying, “what a shame it is to lie to Arnold, when he always believes you!” and then the man’s faith in the boys burnt up all the faithlessness in their hearts. Isaac T. Hopper—one of the noblest men, in his way, this country has ever known, and in nothing more wonderful than in his perfect love of and trust in peace and good-will—was a most extraordinary child. The way that little fellow would astonish the Quakers who came to see his folks was a marvel. His pranks with pins and twine, and even gunpowder, can not be told. I have no doubt that many a Friend went away feeling that if ever the unnamable incarnation of evil did get bodily into a boy and stay there, that little Hopper was the “all-possessed.” But one thing was steadily there through all the pranks the lad would play, and that was a certain quick reproof of conscience—the good striving with the evil ; and a wise mother was there to believe, as all wise mothers do, that what was good was very good and the evil was never very bad, and that by God’s good blessing on the boy, and her wise and loving care, it would all come right; and so she found that at last the mischief of a child who was only mischievous because had more energy than he knew what to do with, became the strength of a man among the noblest and best of the good in this age. It is but one instance in a thousand of a nature so full of life in our children, that we don’t know what we shall do with it. Yet, while we are fretting and foreboding, but still doing the best we can, the unslumbering providence is
” From seeming evil still educing good,”
touching the conscience when we do not know it, opening the new nature in his own ways to the new heavens and new earth. So we must welcome little children—the new creation on which and in which the whole future world rests; give them a great welcome, and take care when they come that we do not destroy what they bring with them from God. Robert Collyer.
Robert Collyer. Moral Health of Boys. Journal of hygiene and herald of health. Vol 48, February, 1898, No. 2, 15. Digitized by Google Books.