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Religious Melancholia and the York Retreat 1730-1830

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Religious Melancholia and the York Retreat 1730-1830 Religious Melancholia and the York Retreat 1730-1830 Jonathan Paul Mitchell Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Theology and Religious Studies January 2018 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his/her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement © 2018 The University of Leeds and Jonathan Mitchell The right of Jonathan Mitchell to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Dr. Rachel Muers and Prof. Mark Wynn for their trust, patience, friendship and generous advice. Thanks to the librarians at Borthwick Institute for Archives in York, Quaker & Special Collections at Haverford College Philadelphia, Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College Philadelphia, and Leeds University Library Special Collections. Particular thanks to Celia Caust-Ellenbogen at Friends Historical Library for the transatlantic proof reading and document supply service, and for the kind encouragement. I also gratefully thank the Wellcome Trust, Borthwick Institute and Haverford College, for their valuable digitisation and cataloguing projects which made their wonderful archives so easily accessible. Thanks to my family for their trust and understanding, and to Wendy, Fiona, Sasha, Lisa and Cesare for their invaluable friendship and care. This work was supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/L503848/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities. Abstract This thesis will examine the hitherto understudied area of Georgian Quaker spirituality, and bring it to bear on the historically significant York Retreat asylum. The York Retreat opened in 1796 to serve the Quaker community. It was managed by the Tukes, an influential family of Quaker religious leaders. Georgian Quakers had a rich and idiosyncratic introspective tradition and spiritual life. Their spirituality entailed a depressive piety which escalated to despair, restrictive eating or suicidality in several narratives from Georgian Quaker religious leaders. It was common for Georgian Quakers to interpret these episodes of affliction from the perspective on religious melancholia common to several other radical dissenting movements, in which such episodes were seen as a divinely ordained trial that would ultimately add to the gravity and authority of the afflicted, and prepare them for a religiously orientated life. Yet this concern with religious melancholia has escaped the notice of previous writers on the York Retreat. The thesis will first examine Quaker worship, the cornerstone of Georgian Quaker practical theology. It will then show how religious doubt, despair and affliction were intrinsic and causally efficacious parts of Georgian Quaker narratives of spiritual progress, before examining accounts of religious distress in Quaker biography and at the York Retreat. This thesis therefore provides an alternative narrative on the early years of the York Retreat. The York Retreat will not be approached as a site of innovation in secular humanistic psychiatry, but as a relic of dissenting modes of experiential religion and religious melancholia. In so doing, the thesis will show that assumptions around a link between Quaker spirituality and the ‘moral treatment’ regime are unfounded; the liberal humanism of contemporary Quakerism has been imputed onto the history of the York Retreat by supporters and critics alike. Instead, it will be shown that Quakers gradually incorporated narratives of nervous affliction into their accounts of religious affliction, reflecting the long- running embodied aspect of religious distress, at a time when it was not unheard of for the devout to be supported in religious reconciliation and bodily healing from within a madhouse. Abbreviations FHL Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, USA FHR Friends Hospital Records, Haverford College, Haverford, Pennsylvania, USA BIA Borthwick Institute for Archives, University of York, England FH Friends House Library, 173-177 Euston Road, London, England LUSC Leeds University Special Collections, Leeds University, England The King James Bible is cited throughout Contents Introduction – Religious Melancholia and the York Retreat .................................................... 1 Depression, Despair and Melancholia – A Note on Terminology .................................... 5 Chapter Summary ............................................................................................................ 8 Methodology – Taking Religious Experiences Critically and Seriously .......................... 12 Chapter One - Three Methods of Worship in Georgian Quakerism ...................................... 18 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 18 Silent Worship in Early Modern Context ....................................................................... 22 Recollection .................................................................................................................... 25 Salvation and the Fallen Human Condition ................................................................... 27 Silent Waiting ................................................................................................................. 31 Quietist Prayer ............................................................................................................... 36 An Excursus into Quaker Apophasis .............................................................................. 40 Watchfulness ................................................................................................................. 42 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 45 Chapter Two - Depressive Georgian Quakers; From Being Reborn in the Spirit to Dying Daily to the Self ............................................................................................................................... 49 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 49 The ‘Day of Visitation’ .................................................................................................... 52 Falling from Grace .......................................................................................................... 56 Marks and Signs and the Single Eye to God ................................................................... 59 Inward Light, Self Denial and Puritan Subjectification ................................................... 62 ‘Dark Nights of the Soul’ ................................................................................................ 67 Depressive Georgian Quakers ........................................................................................ 71 The ‘Humble Hope' of Eighteenth Century Quakerism ................................................. 74 Evangelical Quakerism ................................................................................................... 78 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 79 Chapter Three – Quaker Religious Melancholia .................................................................... 82 Introduction ................................................................................................................... 82 Fanny Henshaw .............................................................................................................. 85 Jane Pearson .................................................................................................................. 93 Secret Conversions ......................................................................................................... 97 A Quaker Suicide - The Death of William Crotch ......................................................... 103 Conclusion - Moving on to the Retreat ........................................................................ 111 Chapter Four - Samuel Tuke and The Description of the Retreat ........................................ 114 Religious Madness at the Retreat ................................................................................ 115 Tuke’s Description of the Retreat in the Context of Mad Doctoring ........................... 119 Samuel Tuke’s Quakerism ............................................................................................ 123 Nonconformity and Religious Melancholy in the Early Nineteenth Century ............... 127 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 130 Chapter Five – Ministers and Converts in the York Retreat; Conversion and Constitutional Weakness ............................................................................................................................. 132 Mark Holman Shepherd ............................................................................................... 133 ‘Cousin Hannah’ - Hannah Middleton .........................................................................
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