Sketches of the Life of Jane Pearson

Jane Pearson was born Jane Sibson at Newtown, near Carlisle, in 1734 or 1735. Her father died while she was still very young, and her upbringing fell to her mother, who raised her carefully in the discipline of Friends. It did not take at first. By her own account she was drawn strongly to gaiety, and the memoirs that follow are in large part the record of what it cost her to be turned from it.

In 1757, at about twenty-two, she married John Pearson of Graysouthen, in Cumberland. Seventeen years later he was dead, and she was a widow with a house full of children. Some of them died young. The rest died grown. She outlived every one, and she wrote about it without ornament.

What makes these sketches unusual is not the outward story but the inward one. Jane Pearson first appeared in public testimony about 1773 and continued in the ministry for some forty-two years, yet the private papers she left behind are preoccupied less with her service than with her fear that she might be deceived in it. She writes of long stretches of spiritual darkness, of “inward conflicts” and “searchings of heart,” of speaking in meeting and then doubting whether she should have opened her mouth at all. She sought evidence of final acceptance under what her editor called accumulated discouragements, and did not pretend she had found it before she had.

She travelled less than many recorded ministers, and said plainly that she did not apprehend much travel to be required of her. What she did undertake she recorded: Westmoreland and Lancashire in 1777; Westmoreland, Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1779; and in 1787 a long southward journey through Lancashire, Cheshire, Shropshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Somersetshire, Devonshire and Cornwall. Afterward she removed to Whitehaven, where she spent the rest of her life, diligent in the attendance of meetings and, by the account of those who sat with her, remarkably powerful in prayer.

She died on the morning of the twentieth of second month, 1816, about eighty-one years of age, and was buried in the Friends’ burial-ground at Whitehaven five days later. Her last letter had asked a friend to look over her papers when she was gone and dispose of them as he thought best. He published them in 1817, together with a specimen or two of her verses and the Testimony of Pardshaw Monthly Meeting, which is included here at the close of her own memoirs.

This is a book for the diffident and the dejected, and its editor said so. Jane Pearson was modest, doubtful of herself, and frequently in the dark; she was also faithful for four decades, and at the end she was given the assurance she had spent a lifetime looking for. That is the whole argument of the book, and she makes it by simply telling the truth about herself.

This Friends Illuminated edition presents the complete 1817 text in modern English, with archaic constructions resolved, scripture references linked, and the people, places and meetings of eighteenth-century Cumberland identified for the present-day reader.