Cadbury’s represents the heyday of British industrialism and remains a familiar global brand. Guided by Quaker Capitalism, employees at Cadbury’s Bournville factory took part in recreational and educational activities. In the first decades of the twentieth century sports, leisure, and entertainment were part of day-to-day Cadbury’s life. Creativity flourished. Amidst this culture of Work and Play, an astonishing amount of factory theatre was staged involving tens of thousands of Cadbury’s employees. Home-grown Bournville casts and audiences were supplemented by performers, civic leaders, playwrights, academics, town planners, and celebrities, interweaving Birmingham’s famous Quaker industrialists with the city’s theatre culture, visual artists, wider, national entertainment cultures, and ground-breaking approaches to mental and physical health and education. Theatre in the Chocolate Factory uncovers stories of Bournville’s theatre and the employees who made it, exploring industrial performance and positioning theatre and creativity at the heart of Cadbury’s operation.

In many ways, the entire Cadbury’s enterprise was rooted in a commitment to the ongoing education and development of all staff. Education programmes created and sponsored by the firm sought to do more than secure accrual of knowledge, and that recreational activities that foregrounded learning new skills were understood to be as important as the content of more formal educational curricula. Both were viewed as self-development opportunities. As 1926’s Work and Play asserted, ‘the worker acquires in himself sharpened faculty and fuller capacities derived from his experience [in participating] in those activities, and a larger knowledge of men and affairs’. Chapter 6 details the range of educational opportunities on offer to employees, alongside those that the firm supported that were not exclusively for their own staff – including the Day Continuation Schools and Fircroft and Woodbrooke Colleges, and considers the use of drama as an innovative pedagogic tool at Bournville and performances staged for, and as, learning.

Chapter 6 focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell’s late long novels Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters: An Everyday Story (1866). Our accounts of English provincial realism occasionally short-circuit these fictions because of Gaskell’s sometimes subtle and sometimes overt presentation of Christian theology; this chapter claims them within the genre of realism by focusing on their formal commonality with other realist novels and reverent natural history: the reverence for minute details and for the commonplace subject. Like natural history, Gaskell’s novels focus on, and show reverence for, the quotidian world and event; the chapter argues that behind the observation and rendering of the details of everyday reality there is reverence, and that the form of the novel (its “reverent form”) demonstrates a persistent religiosity. The chapter connects Gaskell to Charles Kingsley and explores her Unitarianism as illuminative of the presentation of the Quakerism and the overt natural theological references in Sylvia’s Lovers.

Already a noted theorist and agitator on behalf of religious toleration in England when he turned his attention to American colonization, William Penn (1644–1718) played a central role in the development of liberty of conscience as a fundamental element of legitimate government. This chapter explores the foundations of Penn’s understanding of liberty of conscience and the important role he saw it playing as a foundational social, political, and legal principle. After an overview of Penn’s life and career, the focus turns to Penn’s role in the tolerationist movement during the 1670s in England and the main components of his theory as it developed over the course of his public career; his defense of representative institutions like juries and Parliament; his understanding of fundamental law; and his defense of “civil interest” as a social bond for uniting a religiously-diverse population like England and, later, Pennsylvania. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of the founding documents and early history of Penn’s colony.

John Dickinson (1732–1809) was a Founder of the United States whose jurisprudence was greatly influenced by Quakerism. Although he never joined the Religious Society of Friends, Dickinson adopted the basic tenets of their religion, particularly the belief in the Light of Christ in the conscience, which caused them to consider all people spiritually equal, regardless of gender, race, or socio-economic status. The strong and outspoken Quaker women in Dickinson’s life—his mother, wife, daughters, and a range of other female friends and relatives—influenced him to advocate for women in his legal practice and in his work to found the nation. Among the leading Founders, Dickinson was the only one to press for women’s rights, making him an early feminist.