Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Thomas Corbyn, Quaker merchant.

The remains of Thomas Corbyn (1711-91), wholesale and manufacturing chemist and druggist, lie in a copper coffin at Bunhill Fields, London. No inscription marks his burial place, nor has any portrait ofhim been found. Vanities ofsuch a kind would not have been to his taste, since he was not only a Quaker, but one ofthe plainest Friends of his day, not only in dress--he wore clothes of a uniform liver colour from head to toe-but in his relentlessly sober conduct. His parents were both Quaker Ministers, as was his wife. He himself became an Elder at an unusually early age, and for the rest of his life he took a prominent part in the Society's affairs, and a zealous role in enforcing its discipline. By the time of his death he could be described as "Pope Corbyn", unofficial head of the Society in London.' Corbyn's contemporaries recognized his piety, probity, and virtues as husband, parent, and friend. They noted his custom oftaking poor apprentices without fee,2 and his readiness to join with others in relieving the London poor in times of crisis.3 But even fellow Quakers could find him over-strict, or, at worst, authoritarian and bigoted. To the young Betty Fothergill he was "a little too severe in his notions"; she felt a keen sympathy for his daughter, "an extremely fine girl .... tho deprived ofevery advantage from dress".4 His exclusive concept of the Society of Friends as the Lord's people, and his readiness to cast out the less than perfect, earned him a rebuke from his fellow