The Journal of John Woolman
The quiet revolutionary whose conscience moved a nation — Woolman's Journal is one of the most influential spiritual autobiographies in American literature, and the document that helped persuade the Quakers to become the first religious body to formally forbid slaveholding.
- 330+ pages
- EPUB format
- Modernized for today's reader
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read3.8 hours
- Length53,558 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 3.8 hours
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 3.8 hours 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 3 hours to 5.1 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 51,995 words |
|---|---|
| Introduction, chapter summaries and notes written for this edition | 1,563 words |
| Total | 53,558 words |
The introduction, the chapter summaries and the notes on people, places and unfamiliar terms were written for this edition. They are 1,563 of the 53,558 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
3 hours and 5.1 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 3.8 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 153–214 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
John Woolman’s Journal is widely regarded as one of the finest spiritual autobiographies in the English language. Charles Lamb called it “the only American book I ever read twice.” It was included in the Harvard Classics as essential reading, and remains continuously in print more than 250 years after its first publication in 1774.
Woolman (1720–1772) was a New Jersey shopkeeper, tailor, and itinerant Quaker minister who became one of the earliest and most persistent voices against slavery in America — not through political campaigns or fiery denunciation, but through patient, one-on-one conversations with slaveholders, always rooted in shared spiritual principles. His method changed the world: largely as a result of his decades of quiet labor, the Religious Society of Friends became the first religious body in America to formally forbid slaveholding among its members, in 1776.
But the Journal is far more than an anti-slavery tract. It is the intimate record of a man wrestling with how to live rightly in a fallen world. Woolman agonizes over whether to accept hospitality from slaveholders, whether his shop is becoming too profitable for spiritual health, whether to pay taxes that fund war, and how to speak difficult truths to people he loves. His radical commitment to simplicity — he closed his business when it grew too successful, dressed in undyed clothing, and refused to ride in stagecoaches because the horses were overworked — makes him a forerunner of modern movements for ethical consumption, animal welfare, and economic justice.
This Friends Illuminated edition presents Woolman’s complete Journal in modernized English, with eleven chapters covering his life from youth in West Jersey through his final journey to England, where he died of smallpox in York at the age of fifty-one. Includes editorial introductions, scripture links, and historical annotations.
