‘Delia… comes across Sampson’s Meeting for Worship, held in an old barn’ Photo: Jon Evans / flickr CC.
Sampson Rideout, Quaker
Kate Macdonald considers the life and work of Una L Silberrad
Una L Silberrad (1872-1955) is almost forgotten today, though she was a prolific novelist from the Edwardian period to the second world war. She was notable among her peers for being unafraid to experiment by mixing genres and styles. She wrote novels about modern women, science and business, but a more unusual interest was writing about Quakers.
In her novels set in the later seventeenth century she called them Dissenters or Seekers as well as Quakers, preferring to use the historically correct terms. Her historical plots tended to follow similar patterns: of a decent and honest man (sometimes with a hidden past) who finds himself tangled up with the swashbuckling affairs of a lady of slightly tarnished reputation (who is sometimes the protagonist), aided by the good sense of a dogged and justice-seeking Dissenter.
Her 1911 novel Sampson Rideout, Quaker is set on the borders of Wiltshire and Dorset, rather than her usual territory of Essex or the North Country. It shares a motif with John Buchan’s early novels from the 1890s, of hurried journeys over rough ground, on foot, horseback or in carriages, usually on a matter of life or death. This was probably why Buchan, a publisher until the first world war, selected Sampson Rideout, Quaker for Thomas Nelson’s sevenpenny series, after the success in that series of Silberrad’s novel of tortured love in suburbia, Ordinary People (1909), and her novel of political future fiction, The Affairs of John Bolsover (1911).
A Quaker from Shaftesbury
The Silberrad family believes that Sampson Rideout, Quaker was based on the nearest thing to a romance that is known from Una L Silberrad’s life, and that it concerned a Quaker from Shaftesbury. It is written in a consciously antique style:
At this time Sampson Rideout was turned thirty, of the people called Quakers, and though not perhaps of the Plainest sort, yet one who was fully convinced of the Truth and who lived to his convictions and was willing to testify to the same, even to the suffering of loss if need arose. He was still unmarried, and something ignorant of women and their ways. He was also, perhaps, a little austere – at least for himself – as are those whose natures take a strong bit.
So, on his first introduction in the second chapter, we have a traditional romantic hero of the classical kind: youngish, his own master, austere but with pleasing indications that he will be brave and headstrong when roused.
A sturdy Anglican
Silberrad was not a Friend, rather a sturdy Anglican, but her interest in and knowledge of the history of Quakers and other Dissenters is evident. Sampson Rideout, Quaker is dedicated to ‘J H F, A – Member of the Society of Friends and the best man I know’. Whoever he was, I hope he was pleased with the novel, because it is one of Silberrad’s best: dramatic, a page-turner, beautifully written, original and very satisfying. It is the story of the lively and bold Delia, lady Falkirk, and her effect on the men of Salisbury when she arrives to see about a matter of business left unfinished by her late husband.
She annoys a justice of the peace, Roger Belor, by refusing to allow him to appropriate her piece of land, and she causes Sampson Rideout, the local dyer of cloth, to reconsider how he pays heed to gossip. She enrages a wicked lord, Brackley, because she does not want to marry him, and she delights the rascal Darius Leventhwaite, a thief and now the foreman in Rideout’s dyeworks, because she is beautiful and does not care about her reputation. She also infuriates and cows the ladies of Salisbury because they cannot ignore her high rank or her dubious reputation, and she dresses far better than they can, with half their effort.
An invisible bond
When Delia’s carriage turns over, Sampson Rideout offers to take her on his horse to the next village to find a blacksmith. It is well known that riding pillion with a strange man at the beginning of a novel is as good as a marriage proposal, but he is merely courteous. When Delia gets lost while exploring near her father’s old manor of Ashcombe, she comes across Sampson’s Meeting for Worship, held in an old barn, and sits with them, entranced by their silence. Her presence on that occasion prevents the Meeting being broken up by Roger Belor’s men:
And with that, feeling, no doubt, that he had effected a dignified exit and saved his reputation with his men without inconveniencing her ladyship, he stalked out, leaving behind the same silence as he had found.
For a little after he had gone the Quakers sat as before, absolutely as before, and so still that, when the tramp of feet had died away, the waft of the swallows’ wings could almost be heard at the open door. Thus till the Meeting ended. There was no word spoken to show the ending, no prearranged sign of closing, nothing outward to mark the end – only all at the same time stirred. It was like the parting of an invisible bond, making each separate again. The place once more was a barn, and the people separate humble folk with their separate hopes and fears.
This is an excellently written romantic novel in the true meaning of the word: the romance of adventure rather than romantic. It is also a carefully observed representation of early Friends and their imagined lives. Silberrad is very respectful of Quaker traditions and beliefs, but allows the Quaker characters to be human, drawing affectionate, rounded and compassionate portraits of Quaker men and women.
Sufferings for truth
Like other early feminist writers of this period, she made an effort to reject the marriage plot for the female characters, and gives one young Friend the freedom to follow her concern. Unlike her contemporaries baroness Emma Orczy and Alice and Egerton Castle, who wrote deliriously frothy costume novels of eighteenth-century romance, Silberrad based her historical plot on the sufferings for truth by Dissenters in the late seventeenth century. The narrative voice suggests that the story was based on a Quaker diary and local legend: there is no reason why this should be true, but perhaps Friends in the Salisbury area might know better?
Had I a publishing imprint of my own I would make sure this novel of Silberrad’s was the next to reappear in print. I have managed to get her finest novel, The Good Comrade (1907), reprinted by Victorian Secrets (Edwardian adventuress steals secret explosive formula in place of a blue tulip bulb), and The Affairs of John Bolsover (1911) has been reprinted in a scholarly edition of Edwardian speculative fiction by Pickering & Chatto (Political Future Fiction, 3 vols, ed. Kate Macdonald, 2013).
Silberrad’s other Dissenting titles include The Wedding of Lady Lovell (1905, short stories), The Second Book of Tobiah (1906, short stories), Keren of Lowbole (1913, alchemy in Essex), The Inheritance (1916, witchcraft in Yorkshire) and The Honest Man (1922, jewel theft in London and Kendal). Sampson Rideout, Quaker is probably available only through libraries and print on demand dealers, but I do recommend that you track down a copy. It is an excellent read.
Kate is a literary historian and her blog is katemacdonald.net.
