The Epistles of George Fox, Volume I
The first gathering of George Fox's letters, modernized for today's reader: thirty of his earliest epistles, written between 1650 and 1655, from the years he was building a movement out of the northern fells and the first gaols. Here is the founder as pastor and prophet — steadying wavering meetings, comforting sufferers, and calling the newly convinced to keep close to the Light. A modern English edition with linked scripture and historical references, drawn from Fox's 1698 Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles.
- Thirty of Fox's earliest epistles, written 1650–1655, in chronological order
- The founder's pastoral voice — counsel, encouragement, and warning to the scattered meetings
- Modernized spelling and syntax, with the plain speech kept where it carries meaning
- Linked scripture and historical references throughout · EPUB format
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read50 minutes
- Length11,944 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 50 minutes
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 50 minutes and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 40 minutes to 1.1 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 10,579 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,365 words |
| Total | 11,944 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,365 of the 11,944 words above, and they are part of what you are buying.
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
40 minutes and 1.1 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 50 minutes sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 34–48 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
Before there was a Journal, before there were books of doctrine, there were the letters. From the moment George Fox began to gather a people in the early 1650s, he wrote to them constantly — short, urgent epistles carried by hand across the north of England and into the first prisons, read aloud in barns and kitchens and meeting rooms wherever Friends came together. These were the sinews of a scattered movement: how a convincement was confirmed, a frightened convert steadied, a suffering Friend comforted, a wavering meeting called back to its center.
The Epistles of George Fox, Volume I gathers thirty of the earliest of them, written between 1650 and 1655 and arranged in chronological order — from the first surviving word of 1650, counseling a young convert to “choose the company of the sober,” through the great year of gathering in 1652 among the seekers of the northern dales, to the settled counsel of the mid-1650s. Fox writes here not as the aged organizer of the later years but as the young man on fire: terse, practical, and utterly certain of the inward Light he had found. He tells Friends to stand still in it, to bow down to nothing but the Lord, to prize their time, to keep close to that which is eternal.
This Friends Illuminated edition draws the letters from Fox’s own Collection of Many Select and Christian Epistles (1698), modernizing the spelling and syntax so they read cleanly today while keeping the plain speech where it carries the weight of Fox’s meaning. The distinctive Quaker vocabulary — Truth, the Light, the Seed, the convinced — is preserved, and scripture and historical references are linked throughout. Later years are reserved for a second volume.
