The tragic darkness in the picture–Quaker Stories for Children

Elin Waring¹

¹ Department of Sociology, Lehman College

Introduction

The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is a Protestant denomination that was founded in England in the 1640s by George Fox. Some of the key features of the religion are its commitment to the idea of that of God in all, pacifism and simplicity. In the United States they are associated with abolitionism.

J.V. Hodgkin was the daughter of a prominent Quaker family in England. She wrote a number of books on Quaker topics. The most famous (still in print today) is A Book of Quaker Saints (1917). The book is aimed at Quaker children and contains a series of historical stories, mainly about individuals who she describes as “early Quaker saints.” In addition there stories of events involving multiple people, such as Fierce Feathers and Children of Reading Meeting. These stories are well-known and widely retold among Quakers.

What do these stories tell us about Quaker attitudes?
Can computational text analysis give us any insights?

Objectives

To identify common elements across the stories.
To identify groups of stories that differ in terms of theme or structure.
To describe how these relate to Quaker ideas.

Methods

To analyze these questions, the entire text was obtaied from Project Gutenburg. Following initial processing it was tokenized to individual words and these were stemmed using the Porter 2 Snowball algorithm.

The original book includes extensive front matter and 32 stories. Each story also included an epigraph. For this analysis only the main story texts were included.

Results

The 11 most common words in the text (after preprocessing) are shown in table 1.

Table 1: Frequency of the top 11 words in the stories
dai	time	friend	word	hand	fox	georg	hous	god	peopl	heart
27	24	17	16	15	14	14	14	13	13	13

George Fox is mentioned frequently as is God, but other terms are also more ordinary, although perhaps what might be expected in stories, such as time, day and people. The word friend is common; in this context this has two potential meanings: Quakers are also called Friends and the ordinary meaning of a person someone is friends with, which might be common in stories for children.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis provides a way to interpret the words used in a body of text, usually as positive or negative. It uses standard lexicons to characterize individual words used.

Overall, 55% of the terms in the stories are characterized as negative using the Bing lexicon. Overall, most of the stories were mainly negative. Only two of the stories were more than 60% positive. That is, the negativeness is not concentrated in just a few stories (indeed, the reverse is true).

The author designated some stories as particularly appropriate for younger children. However, this does not seem to relate to the the sentiment expressed in the stories.

We can also examine how the arc of stories is shaped in terms of sentiment. This figure shows typical examples of four of the graphs. As can be seen, some stories have well defined sentiments and smooth patterns, while others are more scattered.

One thing that might be considered is that in Christian tradition the stories of saints are often focused on martyrdom, suffering and sacrifice. So it may not be a distinctly Quaker characteristic that these stories are predominantly negative in sentiment. As Hodgkin says in the Preface

“For to tell the stories of these lives without the terrible, glorious account of the cruel beatings, imprisonments, and even martyrdom in which they often ended here, is not truly to tell them at all. The tragic darkness in the picture is necessary to enhance its high lights.”

Topic Models

Topic modelling is an kind of unsupervised machine learning that attempts to extract topics from large amounts of text. Two key concepts are coherence and exclusivity. From Figure 2 we can see that 30 topics–the same as the number of stories–has the best exclusivity. The 24 and 25 topic solution have the best coherence. Based on this analysis and other measures the 24 topics solution will be explored further because we are more interested in finding commonalities. For this analysis only terms which appeared at least 5 times in the text were included.

Table 2: Top 5 terms for each topic, 1-12
Topic 1	Topic 2	Topic 3	Topic 4	Topic 5	Topic 6	Topic 7	Topic 8	Topic 9	Topic 10	Topic 11	Topic 12
sand	camm	drawwel	saveri	castl	lamb	mile	swarthmoor	moll	dorca	prison	margaret
judg	fair	quaker	knock	scarborough	periwinkl	grand	fox	jan	hester	jame	bridget
fell	cammsgil	road	smith	mate	hill	sultan	hall	cream	children	suffer	daughter
neighbour	john	sedbergh	hide	jerusalem	shepherd	messag	home	moll’	peter	colchest	yew
hors	chapel	dai	john	leonard	pendl	vizier	georg	lai	breakfast	death	seventh

Table 3: Top 5 terms for each topic, 13-24
Topic 13	Topic 14	Topic 15	Topic 16	Topic 17	Topic 18	Topic 19	Topic 20	Topic 21	Topic 22	Topic 23	Topic 24
newcastl	forest	burrough	amor	ulverston	indian	pure	jame	etienn	joyc	fowler	nayler
primros	mug	london	stoddart	fox	feather	priest	carlisl	brother	cecili	master	grandfath
tower	singl	edward	professor	church	cover	week	tramp	book	tall	voyag	tiger
town	stephen	publish	blood	hand	hoxi	troubl	ey	french	ladi	woodhous	armi
north	soul	citi	captain	justic	arrow	drayton	window	grellet	purefoi	vessel	aunt

Overall the topics identified mainly focus on specific individuals rather than thematic words. This probably makes sense given that the stories are focused on individuals.

Table 4: Topics in Multiple Stories
Topic	title
2	VII. THE PEOPLE IN WHITE RAIMENT
2	VIII. A WONDERFUL FORTNIGHT
5	I. ‘STIFF AS A TREE, PURE AS A BELL’
5	XXVI. RICHARD SELLAR AND THE ‘MERCIFUL MAN’
7	XIV. MILES HALHEAD AND THE HAUGHTY LADY
7	XXVIII. SILVER SLIPPERS: OR A QUAKERESS AMONG THE TURKS
13	XV. SCATTERING THE SEED
13	XXIII. BUTTERFLIES IN THE FELLS
19	II. ‘PURE FOY, MA JOYE’
19	XI. THE JUDGE’S RETURN
24	IV. TAMING THE TIGER
24	XX. THE SADDEST STORY OF ALL

Of the 24 topics, six (Topics 2, 5, 7, 13, 19, and 24) were the top topic in more than one story. None were the topic topic in more than 2 stories.
Reviewing the pairs of stories that are grouped together they do have similarities. For example:

The stories in Topic 2 are both about the period of time during which George Fox initially gained many followers and are optimistic and positive in tone.
The stories in Topic 24 are both about people who are acting well outside of the realms of acceptable behavior, but who ultimately reform.

Next Steps

The next step of this research will be to analyze the epigraphs associated with each story. The similarities and differences with the text of the stories will be explored.

Other collections of Quaker stories that are not always presented as stories of saints and may be from different time periods will be analyzed and compared to the Quaker Saints.

Conclusion

Quantitative analysis of the text provides a distinctive way of analyzing the Quaker stories. This analysis may also give us insights into the kinds of stories that might have been thought of as appropriate for children of different ages. In 1935 a collection The Children’s Story Caravan and in 1962 an abridged version Friendly Story Caravan with just 18 stories published. A 1990 edition contained just 18 stories. Many of the same incidents and people are included in these later works, but some are excluded. Overall the idea of what kind of stories would be most appropriate for children seemed to change dramatically over those 80 years. This may reflect societal change in ideas about children.

Frost (1971) discussed the Quaker practice of treating children as “little adults” and its theological basis. Although his focus was on an earlier period, this may be reflected in the creation of a book that is not specifically for children. However, Hodgkin’s designation of some stories as more suitable for children under age 9 may reflect some mixed feelings about this in the early twentieth century. Compton’s work, which is much more recent, describes one child recalling being very upset about one particular story and

Selected References

Crompton, Margaret. n.d. “Spiritual Equality in the Experience of Quaker Children.”

Frost, Jerry W. 1971. “As The Twig Is Bent: Quaker Ideas of Childhood.” Quaker History 60(2):67–87.

Hodgkin, L. V. (Lucy Violet). 1917. “A Book of Quaker Saints.” Https://Www.Gutenberg.Org/Files/19605/19605-h/19605-h.Htm. Retrieved May 14, 2024 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19605/pg19605-images.html).

Selected Packages used

Roberts, Margaret E., Brandon M. Stewart, and Dustin Tingley. 2019. “stm: An R Package for Structural Topic Models.” Journal of Statistical Software 91 (2): 1–40. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v091.i02.

Roberts, Margaret, Brandon Stewart, and Dustin Tingley. 2023. Stm: Estimation of the Structural Topic Model. http://www.structuraltopicmodel.com/.

Robinson, David, and Julia Silge. 2023. Tidytext: Text Mining Using Dplyr, Ggplot2, and Other Tidy Tools. https://github.com/juliasilge/tidytext.

Silge, Julia, and David Robinson. 2016. “Tidytext: Text Mining and Analysis Using Tidy Data Principles in r.” JOSS 1 (3). https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00037.

Wickham, Hadley. 2016. Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer-Verlag New York. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org.

Wickham, Hadley, Winston Chang, Lionel Henry, Thomas Lin Pedersen, Kohske Takahashi, Claus Wilke, Kara Woo, Hiroaki Yutani, and Dewey Dunnington. 2023. Ggplot2: Create Elegant Data Visualisations Using the Grammar of Graphics. https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org.