MDMD2: The Forms of You

[Dave Monroe]

"Resolutely a-beam, pronouncing the forms of You consciously, as if 
borrowing them from another Tongue." (M&D, Ch. 3, p. 16)

>From Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (rev. ed., New 
York: Penguin, 1990 [1982]), Ch.  4, "Keeping Life Going," pp. 143-84 ...

   "In Georgian much more than in Stuart times, religious communion 
generally cemented pre-existing social bonds....  Rarely did religious 
affiliation create independent social adhesion where none had existed 
before.  Fringe sects, however, promised just this....  The most stable 
group whose religious protocols created a tight community set apart were the 
Quakers.  Rather like the Jews (of whom there were about 10,000), Friends 
segregated themselves by their distinctive, aggressively humble manners, 
antiquated sombre dress and plain speech ('theeing'), and above all by the 
requirement of marrying in.  Those who married out were thrown out, as were 
culpable bankrupts.  Quakers were not proselytizers; they became closed and 
quietist and declined in numbers from about 38,000 in 1700 to about 20,000 
in 1800.  But this evaporation left them socially more select: the 
proportion of merchants and professional men rose, while that of artisans 
declined.
   "Friends were in a quandary.  Their origins lay in persecution and in 
George Fox's noble egalitarianism; they rejected war and despised the 
insolences of rank and the idiocies of Vanity Fair.  There were no Friends 
in high places.  Yet in the workaday world many were bankers, corn-dealers, 
brewers and arms-manufacturing iron-masters, with money coming out of their 
ears ....  They contained these contradictions by scrupulous plain dealing 
(Quakers pioneered fixed-price retailing), industriousness, loyal support of 
other Friends, family solidarity, philanthropy and blamelessness.  The 
long-standing family firms ... form a muster of undissipated industrial 
talent unmatched elsewhere in the eighteenth-century world.
   "Religion in Georgian England rubber-stamped social, power and property 
relations, generally ingrained already.  Denominational boundaries 
sanctified social divides more than they cut across them.  Stuart religious 
fervour had sowed dragons' teeth, producing sectarian strife, civil war and 
visionaries awaiting the Second Coming.  Georgian piety by contrast ambled 
along with society.  Yet this detracts neither from religion's sincerity nor 
its importance.  Religion was still the language people spoke in earnest, on 
oath.  For all the self-congratulatory rationalism of the Enlightenment, it 
was Christian zealots who were the selfless reformers of abuses ... prisons 
... the slave trade.  What first galvanized large sections of the workforce 
into self-help and self-respect were not polite letters, Enlightenment 
rationalism or Deism, but Methodism and New Dissent....  Religion was still 
the idiom of the people, though its accents and dialects were many.  By 1800 
English piety was decisively shaped by social rank.  Denomination itself had 
become a litmus of social position." (pp. 182-4)

Again, on "aggressively humble manners ... and plain speech," see not only 
...

Bauman, Richard.  Let Your Words Be Few:
   Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among
   Seventeenth-Century Quakers.  NY: CUP, 1983.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=772&sort=date

But cf. the Royal Society ...

Shapin, Steven.  A Social History of Truth:
   Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
   England.  Chiacgo: U of Chicago P, 1994.

[my excerpts from this haven't been archived yet, apparently ...]

Note the Quakers' "antiquated sombre dress" vs. Dixon's "red coat of 
military cut, with brocade and silver buttons, and  matching red 
three-corner'd Hat with some gaudy North-Road Cockade stuck in it" (M&D, Ch. 
3, p. 16)...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=600&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0109&msg=772&sort=date

On "containing contradictions," cf. the Calvinist Dutch Republic ...

Schama, Simon.  The Embarrassment of Riches:
   An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the
   Golden Age.  Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1988.

On "Stuart religious fervour" et al., cf. ...

"... Oedipa found herself after five minutes sucked utterly into the 
landscape of evil Richard Wharfinger had fashioned for his 17th-century 
audiences, so preapocalyptic, death-wishful, sensually fatigued, unprepared, 
a little poignantly, for that abyss of civil war that had been waiting, cold 
and deep, only a few years ahead of them."  (Lot 49, Ch. 3, p. 65)

And on "persecution," "family firms," et al., see ...

http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/pynchon/inferno.htm

But keep in mind, Richard Milhous Nixon was a Quaker (if not quite a friend) 
as well ...

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