Crafting Captivity: Quaker Identity, Editorial Practice, and the Transatlantic History of God's Protecting Providence

Abstract: This essay reinterprets Jonathan Dickinson's God's Protecting Providence (1699) not simply as a captivity narrative but as a foundational work of early American Quaker literature. Drawing on a rediscovered manuscript and the text's transatlantic publication history, it examines how Quaker theology, collective authorship, and editorial intervention transformed Dickinson's account of shipwreck and survival into a spiritual narrative of faith and endurance. Emphasizing core Quaker principles, pacifism, inward spirituality, and communal humility, it explores how these values shaped both the narrative's content and its reception. Organized in three parts, the essay analyzes the collaborative construction of the text, the editorial reframing of the original manuscript, and the narrative's extensive republication across linguistic and geographic boundaries. It argues that God's Protecting Providence functioned simultaneously as a devotional manual and a vehicle for Quaker identity formation, offering moral instruction to Quaker readers and social credibility to broader publics. Through its circulation, the text helped articulate a distinctly Quaker worldview within early American and Atlantic literary traditions.