In his autobiographical The History of the Life of Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker Thomas Ellwood describes a decisive encounter with his aggressively anti-Quaker father, Walter Ellwood. Reflecting on his life from a delicate youth to an adult Quaker, Thomas’s History was published in 1714, about a year after he passed away, his funeral attended by ‘a large company’ of Quakers. In the decisive moment I wish to draw our attention to, Thomas runs from the family home, bent on attending a Quaker meeting, and unable to take any more of Walter’s intolerance towards his faith. Walter pursues Thomas, determined to stop him engaging in Quaker worship. Describing his and Walter’s parting, Thomas does not record them exchanging words; rather he dwells on their bodies as they move on Walter’s ground: chasing and copying each other, spurring each other on. As the son disobeys his father, he revels in representing the superior power of his youthful body; readers might laugh at Thomas’s slightly patronising recollection that Walter, venerable Justice of the Peace and patriarch, ‘held to it for a while’:

‘A fair Course we had.’ If we did not know the context, we might read this encounter as a friendly race, dance, show of kinship through bodies mirroring each other, act of intra-familial mockery, or two people expending energy for the fun and exhilaration of it. It is striking that Thomas slows his narrative to focus narrowly on the complex (inter) play of he and Walter’s bodies in the midst of sectarian and familial strife.

Thomas uses textual features – specifically polyptoton and the stop and start of meaningfully linked clauses – to represent the rhythm of his and Walter’s bodily interactions.