‘We read the words of eight Victorian Quakers, sharing longer extracts between two or three readers.' Photo: courtesy of Alice Collins
Eye - 30 June 2023
No politics please, we’re Quakers
On 21 May almost forty people packed the upstairs room at the Sheffield Central Meeting House, as ten Friends took to the floor to read the words of the Victorian Quakers Pen and Pencil Club.
Alice Collins, of Sheffield Central Meeting, told Eye that the extracts were written in 1887, at the time of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
She writes: ‘Set up in 1868 by James Barber and Daniel Doncaster, the club had twenty-seven original members, including women. They drew up rules from the start and continued to meet once a month for the next forty years, discontinuing in 1908 as numbers dwindled.
‘Contributions varied widely: reviews, travelogues, poems, funny incidents often accompanied with beautiful hand-drawn illustrations.
