'If I Restore Thee, Go to Pennsylvania' — A London Girl's Voyage into the Quaker Ministry
“I never was more easy and contented in mind, with regard to outward things, in any station of life, than when I was a servant.” — Jane Hoskens
Born 'in London, the 3d day of the first month, in the year 1693-4, of religious parents' who raised her strictly in the Church of England; her landing in Philadelphia in the third month of 1712 'in the nineteenth year of my age' confirms a birth in March 1694 by the modern reckoning. The census hypothesis of 1693 is the Old Style year.
'In the sixteenth year of my age' a sore sickness 'nigh unto death' brought her sins to remembrance and the words 'if I restore thee, go to Pennsylvania'; the year is inferred from her age, as she gives none. Her father forbade the voyage and remarked 'the girl has a mind to turn Quaker'.
Sailed with Robert Davis, a Welshman, who paid her passage on her bare promise; 'we arrived in Philadelphia the 16th day of the third month, 1712'. When Davis tried to bind her as a servant for four years to a stranger he 'had recourse to the law, and by process laid me under confinement', until four Plymouth families paid his twelve pounds and took her as schoolmistress for three years.
Heard Thomas Wilson and James Dickinson preach under the trees at Plymouth; Wilson spoke of the captive maid and afterwards said of her, 'she will meet with sore trials, but if she is faithful, the Lord will fit her for his service'. About this time she first 'spoke a few words' in meeting after six or seven months of anguished refusal.
After a fever at Benjamin Head's and the English Friend John Danson's charge to the Lloyds to 'make her your adopted child', she became upper servant and housekeeper to David and Grace Lloyd of Chester. The printed text says 'It was in the year 1710, I came to David Lloyd's', which cannot be squared with her 1712 landing and three years' service at Plymouth; the date is given as printed.
With a certificate from Friends she travelled with Elizabeth Levis of Springfield to Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, and in 1725 to Barbados; Thomas Chalkley wrote the two 'sober young women' a letter of encouragement dated Frankford, 1st of twelfth month 1724/5.
Travelled with Abigail Bowles of Ireland through Delaware, the Eastern Shore, Virginia, Cape May, the Egg Harbours and New Jersey, 'about one thousand seven hundred miles'.
Sailed from the Delaware capes on the ship Dorothy on the 13th of the third month 1727, landed at Bristol, visited London and 'divers parts of the nation', crossed from Whitehaven to Dublin in 1728 and visited most meetings in Ireland, and returned to America on the 13th of the twelfth month 1730.
Nursed David Lloyd through his last sickness; he 'departed this life' on the 6th of the second month 1731, 'and in him I lost a father, and a sure friend'. She stayed with Grace Lloyd, no longer as a hired servant, until her marriage in 1738; her husband is not named in the account.
Went a second time to Barbados with Rebecca Minshall in 1742/3 and on to Rhode Island and New England; in 1744 to Maryland, Virginia and Carolina with Margaret Churchman, 'a time of gathering'; and in 1747 paid a second visit to England and Ireland, 'attended with some of the heaviest and most painful exercises of any I had ever before experienced'.
With Susannah Brown of Philadelphia visited New York, Flushing, Rhode Island and Nantucket, was lamed going ashore and detained eight or nine weeks at Boston, and on Long Island was seized with an illness in which 'my understanding being so clouded, I could not recollect where I was'; she calls it her fourth visit to New England 'and likely to be my last'. The account breaks off here without a death date.
When she and Elizabeth Levis 'met with some discouragement' over the Barbados voyage, Chalkley, hearing of it from Grace Lloyd, wrote them from Frankford in 1724/5 a letter printed in her memoir, addressing 'Elizabeth Levis, and Jane Fenn' as 'dear maidens' and 'two innocent young women' and promising 'if you go, I believe the Lord will go with you'.
In 1714 she heard Wilson preach under the trees at Plymouth on the captive maid and on God's calling women as well as men to preach; at dinner afterwards he 'fixed his eyes upon me' and said, 'She is like the little captive maid I have been speaking of this day... if she is faithful, the Lord will fit her for his service'.
Came into the province with Thomas Wilson in 1714 'on a religious visit to the churches'; she was present at the great open-air meeting they held at Plymouth.
Her own account, written 'to commemorate the tender dealings of a merciful God, in visiting my soul in the days of my youth', from her London childhood and 1712 emigration to her ministry in the colonies, Barbados, England and Ireland; printed with Thomas Chalkley's letter in the Friends' Library, volume 1 (Philadelphia, 1837), where it breaks off mid-sentence after the New England journey of 1756.