the realm of fable or legend with these words, but it is understandable that his encomium to Penn resonated with the small gathered group, since five of the seven Historical Society founders were descended from old Philadelphia Quaker families. Also, in the 1820s, as these well-to-do urbanites looked about them, they trembled at the character of their rapidly changing city. Rowdy gangs—Death-fetchers, Bloodtubs, and Hyenas—spilled through Philadelphia’s streets. Workers and servants no longer deferred to their betters as the Historical Society founders imagined had happened in the colonial period. Penn’s “greene country towne,” the town of their grandparents and great-grandparents, had become a sprawling, turbulent, heterogeneous city in the early stages of industrialization. The founders hoped that by selecting and collecting the right historical materials—books, manuscripts, and artifacts—they could restore a collective memory that might nurture unity and order as people reflected on a less trammeled, more virtuous, and less materialistic past.
To this end, the Historical Society founders proposed to form an “ample library” of books and historical documents and a “cabinet” (or small room) for the preservation and display of historical artifacts. Working behind the scenes was John Fanning Watson, a banker, amateur historian, and one of the earliest collectors of American material culture. For several years, Watson had been gathering materials for the first history of Philadelphia, which he would publish in 1830, and his most important confidant in this was John Jay Smith, who would shortly become the Library Company’s librarian. Both Pennsylvania Brahmins, Watson and Smith loathed the forces unleashed by immigration, industrialization, and democratization. In Watson’s nostalgic conception, a historical society might spread the values of genteel culture and impart a shared sense of identity among Philadelphians who, in the boisterous 1820s, seemed to be pulling in every direction while forgetting their precious heritage.
FIGURE 4. Francis Place, side by side chalk drawings of Hannah Callowhill Penn and William Penn, HSP. Place, a London limner, captured the couple at about the time of their marriage in 1696, when Hannah was twenty-five and William fifty-one. Seven children came from this marriage. No other portraits of Penn or his wife are known to have been executed. By the mid-eighteenth century, some wealthy Quakers had given up the idea of portraits as signs of vanity and commissioned oil paintings. The Historical Society acquired the crayon portraits in 1957 at a London auction.
Objects, paintings, manuscripts, and pamphlets relating to William Penn and the early Quaker immigrants—what Watson liked to call “the dust of perished matter”—became the most important type of material that the Historical Society’s founders collected. Thus, from its inception, the Historical Society was not simply a neutral gathering place for valuable historical materials but an institution for carrying out certain political and ideological responsibilities, as its founders understood them. In this way, they made a heroic figure of Penn, ignoring many episodes of the founder’s often troubled life and the contentiousness in early Philadelphia that stretched the patience of both Penn and the governors he appointed after he returned to England. Veneration for Penn and early leaders such as James Logan and Isaac Norris flowed naturally from their reading of the past, because they wished to cultivate the memory of a society in which each person knew his or her rank and deferred to those above. The society of their dreams was also one in which change occurred because of the wisdom and work of great leaders. Great men made history; ordinary people followed their lead.8
Many of the first objects collected by the Historical Society were treasured because of their connection—real or purported—to Penn and the early Quakers. The very first acquisition, in 1825, was a medal, based on an original ivory relief portrait carved by a London friend of Penn in 1720. The medal, which was struck for the important Barclay family of Quakers in London about 1731, is inscribed: “By Deeds of Peace / Pennsylvania / Settled / 1681.” This inscription was meant to remind all of the founding vision of a pacifist utopia. In 1827, Thomas I. Wharton, one of the society’s founders and a descendant of an early prominent Quaker family, donated a pewter shaving basin, revered because it was supposed to have been used by Penn. Much later, the Penn family cradle, Penn’s silver and tortoise shell razor and case, and Penn’s Bible found their way to the society’s collections. Everything connected to Penn took on an aura of virtue, and the Historical Society became the unofficial attic of Penn relics. Only a few choice Penn items went elsewhere, such as the founder’s William and Mary secretary desk, which wandered from owner to owner after the American Revolution, when it was sold from Pennsbury Manor, Penn’s country seat, on the upper Delaware River. Finally, it fell into the hands of the Library Company’s mid-nineteenth-century librarian, John Jay Smith, who gave it to the company in 1873.
In cultivating collective memory, paintings have an unusual power to evoke the past, especially portraits of heroic figures or paintings of battlefield scenes. But the Quaker leaders of the Historical Society were hoist on their own petard because the Society of Friends was morally opposed to extravagance and hence regarded portraits as self-indulgent and ostentatious. Battlefield scenes were not simply tainted but repugnant to their pacifist principles. In contrast with Puritan Boston, where scores of merchants and ministers had their portraits painted, Quaker Philadelphia in its presumed golden age left a scant visual record of its iconic figures. Hence, the Historical Society’s first painting, acquired in 1833, was of the young William Penn sumptuously attired in armor. Painted in oil about 1770 after an original executed in 1666, when Penn was twenty-two years old, the portrait displayed the founder clad in the trappings of the English ruling class. One year later, the rebellious young Penn shed his armor and joined the Society of Friends, its members widely regarded in England at this time as dangerously radical for their refusal to serve in the militia, their liberality toward women in religious affairs, and their rejection of hierarchy in churchly and worldly affairs. For more than a century, the Historical Society could display only the armored Penn of his pre-Quaker years. A more peace-loving rendition of Penn, a chalk drawing by Francis Place rendered about 1696 (Figure 4) that shows the founder in middle age, was not acquired until 1957.
The provenance of artifacts often establishes their value in the eyes of collecting institutions. But institutions often get more or less than they anticipated. Sometimes research conducted long after the acquisition of a particular artifact proves its provenance to have been wrongly assigned; and changing notions of what is important frequently reestablish the value of what has been determined to be a fraud. All of this is true in the case of the “Laetitia Penn” doll. A gift to the Historical Society in 1960, the gessoed and painted wood-body doll with glass eyes, fiber hair, and dress of various fabrics over paper was thought to have been carried to America by Laetitia Penn, the founder’s hoydenish twenty-one-year-old daughter, who accompanied him to Philadelphia when he returned to the colony in 1699. A letter written in 1865 makes just this claim. For some time the Historical Society had no reason to question the doll’s authenticity and prized it as a genuine Penn family artifact. However, recent analysis of the style of dress and the construction and painting of the body places the manufacture of the doll more likely in the middle third of the eighteenth century. Seventeenth-century wooden dolls tend to have larger heads in relation to the body than the “Laetitia Penn” doll has, and earlier dolls rarely have the painted lower eyelines of the Penn doll. The Penn doll is very similar to the well-documented “Mary Jenkins” doll, brought from England to New York in 1745. Although it is disappointing that the doll now appears to be unconnected to William and Laetitia Penn, it has taken on new value as a fine example of a rare plaything and as a record of styles in the early Georgian period.
FIGURE 5. William Penn gateleg table, PMA. This drop-leaf table, probably brought from England along with much other furniture to furnish Penn’s manor house at Pennsbury, was a marker of high status in England in the late 1600s. Private collectors own much of the furniture brought across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, and individual pieces associated with early settlers, especially the famous, have acquired special symbolic significance. New techniques
