The Life of Sarah Grubb
Sarah Tuke Grubb was one of the most travelled Quaker ministers of the eighteenth century, and she was dead at thirty-four. Born at York in 1756 to William and Elizabeth Tuke, she first spoke in meeting in her twenty-third year, and from that point until her death she was rarely at rest. She crossed Scotland to Aberdeen, made two full circuits of Ireland, worked the western counties and Wales, and in 1788 sailed for the Continent — Amsterdam, the Rhine, Pyrmont, Westphalia, and a long journey south to the French dissenters of Congénies who had reached Quaker convictions on their own. She wrote to the Emperor Leopold the Second on his accession. She founded a boarding school at Clonmel. She died at Cork in the twelfth month of 1790, ten days after being taken ill at the close of a quarterly meeting. This edition presents her journals, her letters, and the testimonies concerning her in clear modern English, with nothing of her voice sanded away.
- Fully modernized English — every long sentence broken, every inversion untangled
- 1,500-word editorial introduction placing her life and travels in context
- 24 chapters with argument summaries, plus a full linked table of contents
- Journals, letters, and the testimonies of Friends who knew her
- EPUB format
About This Edition
She was born Sarah Tuke at York on the twentieth of the sixth month, 1756, into a household that would go on to change the way England treated the insane. Her father was William Tuke; her brother’s family would found the York Retreat. But Sarah’s work went outward rather than inward. In her twenty-third year she stood up in a Friends’ meeting and spoke, and for the eleven years that remained to her she was almost never at home.
A life measured in roads
The arithmetic of her travel is difficult to take in. Scotland to Old Meldrum and Ury. Two complete circuits of Ireland. Norfolk, Cheshire, Westmoreland, Cumberland, the western counties, Wales. Then in 1788, with her husband Robert Grubb, the crossing to Amsterdam and up the Rhine — Krefeld, Düsseldorf, Mülheim, Pyrmont, Minden, Osnabrück, Bielefeld — and the long southern journey to Congénies in Languedoc, where a body of French dissenters had arrived at Quaker convictions with no Quaker to teach them.
She travelled by trekschuit and packet boat and open cart, through weather that would keep a modern traveller indoors, in a state of health that was never good and was frequently alarming. The illness at Sheffield in 1785 nearly ended her. She went back out.
The letter to a king
In 1790 she wrote to Leopold the Second on his accession to the imperial throne — a Quaker woman from York addressing the Holy Roman Emperor on the subject of religious liberty and the treatment of conscience. The letter is here in full. It is characteristic of her: direct, unhurried, entirely without deference to rank, and entirely without insolence either.
Clonmel
She married Robert Grubb of Clonmel in the fourth month of 1782 and settled in Tipperary. There she took up the work that outlasted her personally — a boarding school for Friends’ children, established and governed on principles she had thought hard about. Her letters on education are among the most practical writing in the book.
The end
She set off from Clonmel on the twenty-fourth of the eleventh month, 1790, for the quarterly meeting at Cork. She was taken ill at its close. Ten days later she was dead, in the thirty-fifth year of her age, and on the twelfth her remains were attended to the burying ground by a very large concourse of people. The testimony of the Monthly Meeting for the county of Tipperary, given three months afterward, closes this edition.
About this edition
Every sentence in this volume has been rebuilt for a modern reader. Eighteenth-century Quaker prose runs to sentences of sixty and eighty words, wound through with inversions and nested qualifications; those are gone. What is not gone is her vocabulary of conviction — Truth, the Seed, convincement, First-day, the numbered months — which is bracketed on first use and then left alone, because translating it would translate her out of the book. The result reads at roughly nineteen words to the sentence, with none of the original’s meaning traded away for the clarity.
