Was George Fox A Liar? (Alas, The Answer Is Yes.)
For enthusiastic new Friends, it’s something of a sobering rite of passage to learn that many of the great names among the founders are not reliable witnesses in their own cause. However, careful historians have long since proven this to be the case.
One of them was H. Larry Ingle.
H. Larry Ingle, who summer & winter was usually first in line at the local store in Chattanooga where the Sunday New York Times was delivered.
Larry is now retired from a long career teaching history, mainly at the University of Tennessee – Chattanooga. Sometime before 1994, he went to London, and padded down the stone steps of the large Library at Friends House (an imposing structure sometimes dubbed the Quaker Vatican), into the half-lit depths where the earliest Quaker manuscripts and publications were stored. Then he began looking at many of the pamphlets and broadsides from the first generation of Friends. And soon he had made a remarkable discovery:
In the 1650s and 1660s, books and pamphlets were printed on large sheets containing many pages, on both sides. The big sheets were folded into book form, sewed up on one edge for binding, and then the folds on the other edges of the pages were trimmed or slit open for reading.
1666-quaker-pamphlet-women-speaking Except that Larry found many important pamphlets from that period on the shelf with the pages un-slit – that is, they had never been opened or read, not in three hundred-plus years.
For Larry this was deja vu all over again. In the early 1980s he visited a major Quaker archive, and accidentally discovered that none of the original documents about the Great Quaker Separation in 1827 had ever been looked at — which meant that all the available books on the schism were based on third- or fourth-hand sources, and quotes from each other.
This was a stunning example of scholarly laziness and timidity — and an opening for an energetic historian who was not afraid of work. The result was Ingle’s first major book, Quakers In Conflict (1986), today the standard history of the schism.