William Cowper and the Friends in England and America

Abstract

In his rather unsympathetic study of Cowper, Walter Bagehot wrote : " He is the one poet of a class which have no poets. In that once large and still considerable portion of the English world, which regards the exercise of the fancy and the imagination as dangerous—snares, as they speak—distracting the soul from an intense consideration of abstract doctrine, Cowper's strenuous inculcation of those doctrines has obtained for him a certain toleration. . . . Most poets must be prohibited. . . . But Cowper is a ticket-of-leave man. He has the chaplain's certificate. He has expressed himself ' with the utmost propriety/ The other imaginative criminals must be left to the fates, but he may be admitted to the sacred drawing-room, though with constant care and scrupulous surveillance."1 Beneath this tone of banter, Bagehot is right in his analysis of the phenomenon of Cowper's popularity with a certain class of readers. His words are particularly to be borne in mind when we come to account for the affectionate regard in which the Poet has been held by the Society of Friends. Cowper appears to have had no social contact with the Quakers of his day. There are only a few slight references to them in his Letters. When the Poet and Mrs. Unwin were preparing lodgings for the reception of Lady Hesketh in 1786, a Quaker family in Olney rendered some assistance that was appreciated. Mrs. Unwin was conferring on the subject with one Maurice Smith, when his wife called out, "Why dost thee not take the vicarage? . . . We will furnish it for thee, and at the lowest rate; from a bed to a platter we will find all." A little later, on June 12, 1786, he again wrote to his cousin: "My friend the Quaker, in all that I have seen of his doings, has acquitted himself much to my satisfaction. Some little things, he says, will perhaps be missing at first, in such a multiplicity, but they shall