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An American Quaker Map's the Paths of Life

Fascinating pictorial allegorical map, illustrating the paths of life available to children (and as a teaching guide to their parents), published in London in 1794.

The map was published by William Darton and Joseph Harvey, also Quakers, who specialized in publishing Quaker works, including those aimed towards children.  The map has been attributed to American Quaker George Dilwyn, author of Occasional Reflections, Offered Principally for the Use of Schools (Burlington, NJ, 1815).

The map begins with Parental Care Hall and progresses outward, offering multiple paths to Happy Old Age Hall, some of which are happy and blissful, others dark and tortured.  

The map is a product of the Quaker philosophy that children were not tainted with original sin and that proper parental guidance and strong (Quaker) community values would lead to a righteous path.  It is also noteworthy that even the worst paths, no matter how diverted, included a route to the desired outcome, even if one had to pass through the Bottomless Pit to reach the Peaceful Ocean via Deep Repentance Valley.

The map was apparently frequently used to create a puzzle to help teach moral values to children, offering a range of routes from Parental Care Hall at the top to – if they chose right – Happy Old Age Hall at the bottom. Should they travel via Dalliance Bench in Off-Guard Parish or Misery Square and Remorse Hedge, or via the Public Spirit Highway to Devotion Grove.

An American edition of the map was published by B. Johnson in 1805 in Philadelphia.

The map has been attributed to George Dillwyn or his brother William, American-born Quakers.  This attribution to George Dilwyn is supported by the following entry in The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume XL, 1916, p. 255, which includes the following entry:

George Dilwyn's Map of the Various Paths of Life—George Dilwyn, of Burlington, New Jersey, was sojourning in London, toward the close of the eighteenth century, and he published there, at the Quaker house of Darton and Harvey, in 1794, a very curious religious game. It was entitled as above, and was a puzzle-map; that is, in pieces of uneven sizes, which had to be put together. At the top was a house called "Parental Care-Hall," out of the doorway of which proceeded paths running to the right and left. Those to the right ended at the bottom in a pale-blue "Peaceful Ocean"; those to the left ran through zig-zag ways to an indigo "Bottomless Pit." "Love-learning Pasture'' was passed in youth, but dangerously near the wrong roads. Just across the boundary between good and evil was "Novel Flower-bed." con- necting with "Love-learning Pasture," but on the hellward side of the line.

Can anyone locate a copy of this forgotten Sunday game?   Albert J. Edmunds.

Later editions of the map are also known, including Map of the Paths of Life (with Description) listed for sale by bookseller Thomas Dash of Kettering, England in 1824, as well as a dissected, cloth-backed edition called The Paths of Life by J H Cotterell in the 1840s.

Rarity

The only other copy to have appeared on the market that we can trace was sold by Bloomsbury Auctions in 2008 for 1,200 GBP, roughly $2,400 at the time.