In what ways was Penn an advocate of middle class morality? According to Wikipedia, “William Penn was an English writer, religious thinker, and influential Quaker who founded the Province of Pennsylvania during the British colonial era.” Penn is best known for being the founder of Pennsylvania, and for being one of the first ever champions of expressive freedoms in the American colonies. In fact, the name Pennsylvania is actually derived from “Penn’s Woods”. This term refers to William Penn’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn, a British naval officer. Founding Pennsylvania was actually Penn’s greatest accomplishment. He was also one of the most important people to influence religious freedom in the states. William Penn also wrote a book of aphorisms called “Fruits of Solitude”.

What is middle class morality? According to Wikipedia, “The term middle-class values is used by various writers and politicians to include such qualities as hard work, self-discipline, thrift, honesty, aspiration and ambition. Thus, people in lower or upper classes can also possess middle-class values, they are not exclusive to people who are actually middle-class.“

In what ways was Penn an advocate of middle class morality? In his book the “Fruits of Solitude”, he includes numerous aphorisms with several themes, such as ignorance, pride, luxury, truth, discipline, apparel, promising, knowledge, master, servant, respect, passion, patience, religion, and several others. Aphorisms are usually short and memorable, so you can easily remember them. They are also clever and must sound plausible to the reader. And they usually always have a moral lesson to them, however, in Penn’s “Fruits of Solitude”, this is unfortunately a rare occurrence. Some of his so-called aphorisms follow some or even none of these rules. It is rare when there is an aphorism that we find in his book that is a true aphorism. Penn’s evidence of living in a middle class morality is manifested through his book “Fruits of Solitude”. In this book, he makes it perfectly clear that he is fully content with taking “the middle path”. He encourages the reader to achieve satisfaction by taking “the middle path” for all goals in life. He gives examples around the themes I mentioned earlier. He tells us to chose to be in the middle between rich and poor, luxury and rags, things like that. He tells us these things so we want to choose the “middle path” so that we can have a healthy balance in life. In fact, one of the themes regarded in this book is ‘balance’.

He was a Quaker leader, so he took religion very seriously. Religion actually took up the longest section of this book. He recommends a lot of spiritual advice to his readers, which all ties into his spiritual outlook, which was majorly Protestant. He urged his readers not to ‘stuff’ themselves, which concerned all aspects of middle class Puritan life. He thought the middle road to be the safe road in life. This idea of middle class morality was constant throughout his observations. He truly believed the middle road to be the best and safest road to be on in life.