But who was she? What sort of a person might have had the moral courage to do as she does and the education to write well and regularly in a diary? I decided that she would be a Quaker.
This choice allowed her to be well educated, since Quaker girls in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia could receive strong educations at Friends’ schools. It allowed her to be outspoken, too; some nineteenth-century Friends were principled fighters for social justice. Their numbers included the legendary reformers Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. Among Quakers, the keeping of intense and lengthy journals was not uncommon. And I was drawn to the Religious Society of Friends because of its founding principles: that everyone can have direct access to God, and that all carry the light of God within. The Friends’ Meeting for Worship can be a time for cultivating a relationship with that Inner Light, an invitation to radical thinking and spiritual exploration. This milieu, and then an alienation from it, could have given rise to the woman who’d sprung up in my head.
As for that alienation, it was necessary for Lilli to be isolated in order for the plot to unfold as it does. But the interplay between her family and their Meeting is meant to serve the needs of the novel, not to show the history of any actual family or Meeting. Could such events have occurred? Perhaps. The Friends’ Discipline of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—a set of principles and behavioral guidance that is referred to in the novel as the Discipline—gave stern instructions on how to deal with members who strayed. Yet some Friends would likely have reached out to sustain others who were struggling as Lilli’s family was. As is true in fairy tales, however, the adventure can only begin in earnest when a character steps outside the zone of safety.
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The distinctive speech of Quakers (also called Friends) appearing in this novel may be of interest to readers. The Religious Society of Friends is a worldwide network of local meetings, or churches. When the religion began in seventeenth-century England, British people used the informal “thee” and “thou” when talking with peers, and they used the more formal “you” when talking with individuals of a higher social status. But Quakers, in keeping with their revolutionary position that all souls are equal before God, refused to follow this custom. When speaking to any individual, they used only “thou” and “thee.”
Such choices in language—what Friends call plain speech—spread with the religion across the globe; some Friends today continue to speak in this way. By Lilli’s time, in 1880s Philadelphia, the use of “thou” and “thee” was fading, although “thee” seems to have lasted longer. I chose for Lilli and her family to follow the custom of using “thee,” both to reflect their greater observance and to be true to Lilli’s role as a teacher (since teachers were charged with encouraging their students to use plain speech). When Lilli records what non-Quakers said, however, she records their use of “you.”
Other features of Friends’ speech that show up in Lilli’s diary include the use of people’s given names without titles (but only if she learns the person’s first name) and the use of numbers to indicate days and months. This is done to avoid honoring the non-Christian gods that our usual days and months were named after.
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As for Lilli’s home, because of my interest in a storied and Quaker-influenced area called Germantown, I decided that Lilli and her family would live there. This former township became a part of Philadelphia in 1854. The first American document protesting against slavery was signed in 1688 by some of its Quaker settlers. To visit its sites is to encounter American history in a moving and genuine way. Germantown holds 579 properties within its National Historic Landmark and National Register of Historic Places designations, among them Johnson House, a station on the underground railroad; the birthplace of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women; and the Germantown White House, where George and Martha Washington and their household members lived and worked in 1793 and 1794.
I took small liberties in my depiction of 1880s Germantown. When Lilli passes along the main street in a carriage, for instance, the order of the streets she passes is not quite the actual order. The Appleton estate and Lilli’s childhood home are invented, though they are in sections where such places could have been located. If one visited Germantown, one would find the meetinghouse, the burial ground, the school where my imaginary Lilli studied and taught, train tracks and stations, and other sites, but much in the environment (including waterways) has changed dramatically. In the case of Angela and Victor’s home in an Italian enclave, Italian families did live in that area from about that time; the industriousness I report was apparently not unusual; the block on which I’ve placed them had no water lines or hydrants to help put out a fire; and a coal yard and train tracks sat close by.
The same combination of actual and fictional applies to the novel’s scenes in downtown Philadelphia. Albert’s office and apartment buildings are invented. Broad Street Station stood until 1953 by the still-standing and wondrous City Hall. The chapel in which Lilli considers the story of Job was inspired by a small and stunning chapel in the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, in a building on Chestnut Street completed in 1885. Little remains of the vast public hospital and almshouse complex in West Philadelphia that was long called Old Blockley. The smells of Blockley’s interiors are based partly on a doctor’s recollections of the period. And while Blockley’s practices regarding foundlings varied over time, and the appearance of its nursery is imagined, its dangers were all too real.
Between 1860 and 1864, nearly 82 percent of Blockley’s foundlings died. In 1880, all foundlings died, per an investigative committee’s 1882 report on rampant atrocities and thefts by those entrusted with running Blockley. One section of that report concluded that “the deaths of these infants was [sic] due to ignorance and neglect” and noted with horror the “barbarous cruelty” that allowed for “the abandonment of helpless infants to die for want of ordinary care.” Fortunately, it appears that, in the month after the fictional Lilli rescued Charlotte, those responsible for foundlings at Blockley started boarding out the infants with nursing women, hoping for better outcomes.
As is depicted in the novel, corruption at Blockley was extreme, per the vigorous 1882 investigation; in response to its findings, the superintendent fled to Canada and had to be brought back to face charges. And the unclaimed bodies of paupers were indeed ferried across the Schuylkill River and sold to medical students for dissection. (What changed, in time, was that this practice became legal.)