SMITH, HANNAH WHITALL

SMITH, HANNAH WHITALL (1832–1911), author, evangelist, and social activist, was born to birthright Quaker parents in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on February 7, 1832. Frustrations with her slow spiritual progress as a young Quaker girl immersed in the troubled Quakerism of her time cast the only shadows over what she otherwise describes as her "sunshine years." Her early journals give strong intimations of the concepts that later became the central themes of her ministry as a spiritual guide. The unfailing provision of loving—even doting—parents shaped her understanding of the "unselfishness" of the loving God of the Bible, whose unfailing care for humankind she portrayed in both its fatherly and motherly expressions. The love and bounty of her childhood milieu later defined the pivotal point of her understanding of the mature Christian's experience of God: "God is enough!" With these givens, early in her life as an evangelical believer, Smith also concluded that God's infinite love and power would ultimately bring all errant humankind back into his family. The heretical tones of this "restitutionism" sometimes threatened Smith's standing within the evangelical community. However, her adherence to an early promise she had made to a group of English evangelicals to never promote her "heresy" publicly allowed her to develop and maintain the spiritual authority she came to command in these circles.

Smith married Philadelphia Quaker Robert Pearsall Smith (1827–1898) in 1851. Her plans to pursue higher education came to an abrupt end with the birth of the first of their six children (only three survived into adulthood). The rise of spiritual renewal movements within American and British Protestantism in 1859 led the Smiths to embrace the evangelical understanding of the authority of the Christian scriptures over the priority the Friends traditionally had given to the more mystical guidance of each individual's "inner light." The Smiths both professed evangelical conversion and resigned from the Society. After rejecting the rigid biblicism of the Plymouth Brethren, Smith turned to the Wesleyan Holiness revivalism sponsored by a group of Methodist ministers called the National Holiness Association, which shaped her theology and message for the next twenty years. The openness of Wesleyan churches and camp meetings to women's public ministry allowed Smith to quickly become a favored teacher and evangelist. The nonsectarian nature of the revival opened up similar engagements for Smith within the parallel Calvinist-oriented Holiness movement, which was rising in many Presbyterian and other Reformed churches.

European sales of Smith's brief account of the life of her son Frank (1854–1872), who died while a student at Princeton, introduced her to the Protestant communities of England and Europe. The enthusiastic reception of the 1875 publication of her spiritual manual The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life assured her a prominent role in the European revival. (The devotional classic became one of the best-sellers of all nineteenth century publications and remains one of the most widely read guides to evangelical spirituality.) Smith became known as "The Angel of the Churches." She played the central role in an eclectic group of participants at the annual holiness camp meetings held at the Broadlands estate of Lord and Lady Mount-Temple, along with author George Macdonald (1824–1905), African American evangelist Amanda Smith (1837–1915), who had accompanied Hannah to England, and hundreds of Oxford and Cambridge students caught up in the continuing holiness renewal movement. At the Brighton Convention for the promotion of Christian holiness in May 1875, where more than 8,000 English and Continental clergy and lay persons gathered to discuss the theology and life advocated by the Smiths, her teaching sessions on the higher Christian life regularly attracted 5000 attendees.

At the height of the revival's influence, questions arose as to her husband Robert's moral and doctrinal integrity, and Hannah and he abruptly returned to the United States. The work of the previous two years, however, left a formative and lasting imprint on world Protestantism. In Germany, Scandinavia and Switzerland the old pietistic "Fellowship Movements" in the established Lutheran and Reformed churches were revived. In Germany, the Inner City Movement was activated to urban social reform. The Wesleyan free churches on the continent were strengthened and new non-denominational holiness associations were formed, which by the turn of the twentieth century became the source of new European holiness and Pentecostal bodies. The most influential of all such associations was the Keswick Convention, through which missionary and student volunteer programs spread the Holiness/Higher-Life message throughout evangelical Protestantism.

After their return to America Smith and her husband both turned their energies to new interests: he to a position with her family's glass business, and she to raising her children, her writing, and active involvement in social reform while still maintaining a lifetime ministry as counselor to the constant stream of inquirers who contacted her. She was the first president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1874 and was influential in electing her friend Frances Willard (both women had deep roots within the Holiness revival movement) as president of the Union in 1879 on a reform platform which supported women's suffrage as well as temperance. Smith later became the director of the evangelism division of the WCTU, a training ground for women evangelists who were denied a public platform by their denominations. She also introduced Frances Willard to the leaders of the British temperance movement, leading to the organization of the World Christian Temperance Union.

The Smiths moved to England in 1888 to be near their daughter Mary (1864–1945) and her children. Hannah quickly became a featured speaker on behalf of various reform causes in Anglican Churches, free churches, public festivals, and even at Westminster Abbey. The Smiths previous contacts with William and Henry James, Walt Whitman, family members closely connected with Johns Hopkins and other American colleges and universities, along with a circle of social contacts associated with the marriages of her children, placed the Smith family in regular contact with a celebrated circle of artists and intelligentsia. Mary's first husband was Frank Costello (1855–1899), a member of Parliament. Her second husband was Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) celebrated art historian. Her daughter Alys (1867–1951) was the first wife of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Hannah negotiated Russell's first American lectureship through her brother-in-law, a director of Johns Hopkins. Her views on women's higher education strongly influenced her niece Martha Carey Thomas, the first dean and second president of Bryn Mawr College, who became Hannah's surrogate in fulfillment of the educational ambitions that had been denied her. Both of Mary's children whom Hannah reared, Ray Strachey (1887–1940) a social activist, and Karin Stephen (1887–1953), one of the first Freudian psychoanalysts, married into the Bloomsbury circle. William Lloyd Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw, Sydney Webb, Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) and Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) among many others, were frequent visitors at Smith's home. Her children and their spouses and guests didn't hesitate to talk with Smith about her rigid adherence to her Quaker and evangelical mores. An invalid for the last seven years of her life, she remained alert and involved. Her granddaughter Ray Strachey took her in her wheel chair to demonstrate at the Parliament building before a critical vote on women's suffrage. Ray also published Hannah's last work: Group Movements of the Past and Experiments in Guidance (1934), which presented her views and concerns for the numerous religious renewal movements she has participated in or observed for over half a century.

Smith's son Logan (1865–1946), Oxford professor of literature and author of the trivia genre in English literature, shared his home with Smith until her death in 1911.

Bibliography

Dieter, Melvin. "The Smiths: A Biographical Sketch with Selected Items from the Collection." Asbury Seminarian 38, no. 2 (spring 1983): 6–42.

Dieter, Melvin E. The Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century. 2d ed. Lanham, Md., 1996.

Parker, Robert Allerton. The Transatlantic Smiths. New York, 1959.

Smith, Hannah Whitall. The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life. Old Tappan, N.J., 1875.

Smith, Hanna Whitall. The Unselfishness of God and How I Discovered It: My Spiritual Autobiography. New York, 1903.

Smith, Hannah Whitall. Living in the Sunshine. Chicago, 1906.

Smith, Logan Pearsall, ed. A Religious Rebel: The Letters of "H.W.S." (Mrs. Pearsall Smith). London, 1949. Published in the United States as Philadelphia Quaker: The Letters of Hannah Whitall Smith. New York, 1950.

Strachey, Barbara. Remarkable Relations: The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family. New York and London, 1980.

Strachey, Ray, ed. Religious Fanaticism: Extracts from the Papers of Hannah Whitall Smith. London, 1928.

Melvin E. Dieter (2005)