It is said that when representatives of the Society of Friends came to Buckingham Palace in 1945 to present a loyal address at the end of World War Two, the king asked who these people were. 'Some call them Quakers, Your Majesty.' 'Oh,' the king said. 'I didn't know that there were any of them left.' According to the protocols of sociologists of religion, the Quakers are a sect, rather than a denomination, and perhaps after three centuries there shouldn't have been any left. But of course there were, and are, plenty of them. The late Bryan Wilson, a taxonomist of sects, was reduced to inventing a special category for the Quakers, a sect which should have turned into a denomination but obstinately refused to do so. Endogamy had something to do with that. Among my many Quaker relations I recall a cousin, orphaned at the age of 54, who said that he supposed that he should now get married. 'But it will have to be to a Quaker, and the trouble is they're all so plain.' (He married a rather attractive Quaker of about his own age.)

LRB 5 June 2008 | PDF Download