England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia Philip Hoare A kaleidoscopic story of myth, Spiritualism, and the Victorian search for Utopia from one of the brightest and most original non-fiction writers at work today.In 1872 there was a bizarre eruption of religious mania in Hampshire’s New Forest. Its leader was Mary Ann Girling, a Suffolk farmer's daughter who claimed to be the female Christ and whose sect, the Children of God, lived in imminent anticipation of the millennium. It was rumoured that Mrs Girling mesmerised her supporters, literally hypnotising them to keep them in her power. Other reports claimed that the sect murdered their illegitimate offspring in their Utopian home at 'New Forest Lodge'.Through Mary Ann's story and the spiritual vortex around her, Philip Hoare takes us deeper into the pagan heart of the New Forest. In the neighbouring village of Sway, an eccentric barrister, Andrew Peterson, conducted s?ances in which the spirit of Christopher Wren instructed Peterson to build a 300-foot concrete tower to alleviate local unemployment. Wren, although dead for two centuries, even issued Peterson with the exact plans for the foundations and the formula for the concrete. It rose like some spiritualist lighthouse towering over the trees, and looming over the Shaker encampment and Mrs Girling's Children of God.At the same time, on the other side of the forest, in the grand country house of the Cowper-Temples, further experiments into the realms of the Victorian uncanny were under way. William Cowper-Temple, a supporter of Mary Ann Girling, vegetarian, anti-blood sport activist and member of Parliament, had joined his wife Georgiana in her Spiritualist quest. A third pair of hands came to the table, those of John Ruskin – the great Victorian artist, scientist, poet and philosopher – who sought the dead spirit of his beloved Rose La Touche. His explorations into the afterlife would eventually send him insane.Through this unique biography of the New Forest Philip Hoare paints a strange, and little known, portrait of Victorian England – a fascinating story of disorder in an avowed age of reason. ENGLAND’S LOST EDEN Adventures in a Victorian Utopia PHILIP HOARE DEDICATION (#ulink_caeb48dd-7f13-5951-bb23-646c03d0d4b0) For Mark CONTENTS Cover (#u5074f192-7a2e-5a9b-bfeb-b024e02d1224) Title Page (#ud3f57c7e-98eb-5dfa-90c5-ac7d1a7c26e0) Dedication (#u4b534b9c-4eac-5311-864f-a6f0ff9027f8) Map (#u51b02893-f48a-52a8-98d7-45e9f84f6c6a) Prologue: A place of royal death (#u05e77e6e-205e-57ae-aa7f-a3410cd77b25) PART I: Green and Pleasant Land (#u2169e23c-3364-5c5d-bef8-dc7e573ed14d) 1 A Voice in the Wilderness (#ucbf78f42-0f6a-5bee-a9d9-5c00cb794411) Into the forest; Mary Ann’s life & visions in Suffolk; the Girlingites’ debut 2 Turning the World Upside-Down (#u5f5390c6-ea59-5fd2-9f5e-c9b09f39f25e) Bunhill Fields & the Camisards; Ann Lee & the Shakers; American utopias 3 Human Nature (#ufc4be0e2-354e-5560-8a38-7487e89209cf) Elder Evans & James Burns; Human Nature & spirit photography; the mission to Mount Lebanon PART II O Clouds Unfold! (#uc418da38-0119-5bd0-8a51-21cd1391794f) 4 The Walworth Jumpers (#u5832e89d-eba5-5687-8373-6f0b721aaa66) Sects, spiritualism, & Swedenborg; Mary Ann at the Elephant & Castle 5 The New Forest Shakers (#litres_trial_promo) Hordle, the Girlingites’ heyday; Peterson & his mesmeric experiments 6 The Dark and Trying Hour (#litres_trial_promo) Eviction & despair; Mary Ann examined on the condition of her mind PART III Arrows of Desire (#litres_trial_promo) 7 The Sphere of Love (#litres_trial_promo) Broadlands & the Cowpers; Rossetti & Beata Beatrix; Myers & Gurney; the Broadlands Conferences 8 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (#litres_trial_promo) Ruskin & the Spiritualists, the Guild of St George & Fors Clavigera; Brantwood 9 The Names of Butterflies (#litres_trial_promo) Rose La Touche, Broadlands & the spirits PART IV The Countenance Divine (#litres_trial_promo) 10 This Muddy Eden (#litres_trial_promo) Isaac Batho’s mission; Auberon Herbert & naked dancing; Julia Wood interned; Girlingites on tour 11 Mr Peterson’s Tower (#litres_trial_promo) A.T.T.P. & Wm Lawrence, pet medium; the tower rises 12 The Close of the Dispensation (#litres_trial_promo) The Census; the rival ‘Mother’; Mary Ann’s stigmata PART V A New Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo) 13 In Borderland (#litres_trial_promo) Laurence Housman & ‘Jump-to-Glory Jane’; Herbert & Theosophy; Ruskin’s last days; Georgiana & the Wildes; The Sheepfold 14 Resurgam (#litres_trial_promo) The quest for Mary Ann & her followers; Peterson’s transition Epilogue: The forest once more (#litres_trial_promo) Source and Bibliographical Notes (#litres_trial_promo) Index (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Praise (#litres_trial_promo) By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) MAP (#ulink_3a5b4e8d-aaf8-5b02-b314-dd3a7ee0e66f) PROLOGUE (#ulink_5df32d5c-8571-5bd9-b3be-1168c9e1e1bc) Early in May 1100 – the exact date is uncertain – the king’s bastard nephew was hunting deer in the New Forest when he was killed by an arrow loosed by one of his own party. Thirty years before, his uncle, the king’s brother, had been gored to death by a stag in the same forest. Both deaths were seen as a judgement on the Norman invaders who had imposed their rule on the land, sweeping aside entire villages to create a vast hunting ground, a kind of royal Eden. An elderly victim of that enclosure cursed the reigning family, predicting their demise within its woods; and so when, later that fateful year, a stray arrow claimed the life of the king himself, it was seen as a death foretold, an ironic end for a man whose father had claimed to love deer more than his own flesh and blood. William Rufus, forty-year-old son of the Conqueror, was named after his florid complexion rather than his hair, which was flaxen like that of his Viking ancestors. Rufus had ruled England for thirteen years: a fair-minded king to many, but to others, especially the Church, his rival in temporal power, a godless man of pagan leanings. Some called him a warlock; others accused Rufus of the more worldly vice of sodomy. In that last year, the Devil appeared to men ‘in the woods (#litres_trial_promo) and secret places, whispering to them as they passed’. One bishop exiled by the king saw him in a vision, condemned to the fires of Hell. In his final hours, these stories began to accelerate around Rufus, as though the forest itself were closing in upon him. As day broke on the morning of 2 August 1100, a monk appeared before the hunting party, relating a dream in which the king had swaggered into a church and seized the crucifix from its altar, tearing its arms and legs ‘like a beast (#litres_trial_promo) … with his bare teeth’. The cross had hurled its assailant to the ground, and ‘great tongues of flame, reminiscent of the stream of blood, spurted from his mouth and reached towards the sky’. Later that day, the Earl of Cranborne went out hunting and met a black goat with the body of a naked, wounded man on its back. The animal said it was the Devil, crying, ‘I bear to judgement (#litres_trial_promo) your King, or rather your tyrant, William Rufus. For I am a malevolent spirit and the avenger of his wickedness which raged against the Church of Christ and so I have procured his death.’ Disconcerted by these portents, Rufus delayed his sport until the evening. Riding with the king’s hunting party was his brother Henry, Walter Tirel of Poix, and other powerful men, jangling arrogantly through a forest they regarded as their private domain. The deer were to be driven towards them and, accordingly, a stag entered the clearing in which the king waited, the long shadows of the summer’s evening cast before him. It was as if the entire affair were choreographed and lit to give it theatricality; shielding his eyes from the rays of the setting sun, Rufus loosed his arrow. As he watched the animal stagger, another appeared, distracting the king’s attention, and ‘at this instant (#litres_trial_promo) Walter … unknowingly, and without power to prevent it, Oh gracious God! pierced his breast with a fatal arrow. On receiving the wound, the king uttered not a word; but breaking off the shaft of the weapon where it projected from his body, fell upon the wound, by which he accelerated his death.’ The horror of the scene – played out in slow-motion, as it were – was counterpointed by its setting: the silent beauty of the glade, the swift arrow seeking its pre-ordained target, the venal king falling to the forest floor. It was a death given transcendence by its victim’s sovereignty, and by the reaction of the royal body to the arrow’s penetration, by which he accelerated his death. And in the multiple perspective of historical record, the act acquired other meanings, as though filmed by another camera. It was claimed that the arrow was aimed away from the king, but was deflected by an oak tree, while others discerned conspiracy at work among those with rival claims to the throne. Over the next millennium, myth and legend gathered round this royal assassination. Some saw Rufus as ‘the Divine Victim (#litres_trial_promo), giver of fertility to his kingdom’, killed on the morrow of the pagan feast of Lammas in order to propitiate the gods. The notion of ritual sacrifice linked William Rufus’s murder with that of Thomas ? Becket; with witchcraft, Cathar heresy and Uranianism – ‘the persistence of (#litres_trial_promo) “unnatural love” as a mark of the heresy’. To others, however, the king’s demise was just ‘a stupid and an accidental (#litres_trial_promo) death’. The oaks still stand that witnessed these deeds, although their hearts have been eaten away by fungus as old as the wood itself, leaving hollow crowns, shadows of their living selves. In the eighteenth century, a stone was erected where Rufus fell, although even this site, near Minstead, was disputed, as if elusive myth rejected hard fact. Here, it was said, a ghostly hart would appear at times of national crises and, like King Arthur sleeping in Avalon, Rufus would wake and fight for his country. The spectral animal was sighted during the Crimean War, again in 1914, and on the eve of the deaths of George IV and Edward VII. It has yet to be seen again. Leaving Southampton, westwards, monstrous cranes straddle the estuary’s upper reaches, where mudflats meet the industrial port on land reclaimed from the sea. The dock wharves are strewn with tank-like containers and row after row of brand new cars awaiting export, shiny from the production line. Electric pylons stalk across this confluence of water and land, while herons pick their way gracefully through the mud and ponies perch on the grassy bank of the dual carriageway, their bodies improbably tilted at right angles to the busy road. In high summer, daredevil lads balance on the old stone bridge beneath the flyover, yanking off their shirts and jumping into the water, the brief arch of their leap caught in freeze-frame by the cars speeding overhead. I once flew over this interzone in a balloon, rising noiselessly from the city’s common at dawn, borne up by a raw flame roaring under the neon nylon tent which billowed between us and infinity. Our wickerwork cradle creaked as we were lifted into the sky and over the park, its green carpet falling away as we sailed silently into the air, bumping with the unseen thermals. We drifted over the Civic Centre and its needle tower, built to emulate an Italian campanile, and over the port in whose great dry docks ocean liners were once prised out of their element like stranded cetaceans while workers examined their barnacled hulls. Southampton Water opened out ahead, and in the distance, on an horizon below rather than level with the eye, the Solent and its fluttering yachts held the Isle of Wight in a silvery embrace. For a brief moment, in the hour after dawn, we were caught out of time and space, suspended above the world and the suburban plots whose tenants were just beginning to surface that Saturday morning, waking to see our airy leviathan floating noiselessly over their heads. In that moment ordinary life stopped: all that was below had been disconnected as the lines between us and the earth snapped as we had tugged away from the field and pulled up the anchor. Now we were left to nothingness, in limbo, supported by no more than a thin layer of fabric as we hung in mid-air, dangling like puppets. Then, just as imperceptibly as we had gained this strangely unvertiginous height, the great sphere above us began to lose its tautness. The crimson licking flame diminished, and slowly, with pathetic gasps, the heat and air began to go out of our inflated world. The wind caught us, and we went with it, gliding past the military port at Marchwood and its ordered terrain, then dipping over the wetlands as the ground rushed up to meet us faster and faster until, ordered into landing positions, we crouched down in the basket, backs braced, knees drawn up to our chests like parachutists ready to return to earth. Through the willow-woven cracks, the bright light was dimmed by approaching land. Suddenly we hit the grass, ripping up clods and biting into the field before dragging to a violent halt, our bodies tossed about in the basket like so much fruit. We climbed out on uncertain legs, as though we’d experienced zero gravity and had to reaccustom ourselves to firm ground. But we really were in another world, for we had flown free of the city and into the forest itself. Walking into the woods is like entering a rainforest. In the stillness, which isn’t still at all, birds sing and boughs sigh, unseen in the translucent green canopy above, which filters a subaqueous light. The world is dampened here, muffled by brilliant green moss and held in by sinuous roots, as though the earth were bursting with its own fertility. The forest floor clings to the feet, the senses heightened by the silence; intensely aware of cracking twigs and rustling leaves and rotting vegetation dragged down into the soil by worms and beetles, adding another layer to this fecund, decaying, self-regenerating organism. You must tread carefully here, for you are walking on the living and the dead. Once all of England looked like this; even a thousand years after its enclosure, the New Forest still feels medieval: an ancient domain which ought not to exist at all, and which, ironically, owes its preservation to an invader. It has no physical boundaries to mark its beginning or its end, and yet it encompasses a third of Hampshire. It is barely an hour and a half’s drive from London, but it is a liminal region, for all its apparent accessibility. In the Dark Ages, this was one of the last parts of the country to remain pagan; in the Second World War, witches gathered (#litres_trial_promo) here to ward off an invasion force invested with its own occult beliefs. This place of purity has ever been suffused with the alien: from the Romans and the Vikings, to whom I owe the kink in my little finger, to the gypsies who first came here from Europe five hundred years ago, and who until recently sent their children to school wearing rabbit-skins under their clothes. Even its name is deceptive – ‘forest’ was the word for a hunting ground, rather than woods – and modern visitors wonder where all the trees are. For mile after mile, the eye sees nothing but great stretches of heathland flattened by the sky: the spaces where the woods once were. Calluna vulgaris and Ulex europaeus – the pink-belled heather and the coconut-scented gorse – colonise these gravelly expanses with relentless efficiency. These are tough, hard-bitten plants used to the hooves of the ponies that congregate idly on the verges, their thick hides, shaggy manes and round bellies stolid and unmoving as their big black eyes reflect the cars which occasionally cull one of their number, each sweet stupid victim awaiting its turn. Yet for all its contradictions, or perhaps because of them, the forest is a compendium of myth. It reaches back to an age before the cruel Norman laws which would amputate the fingers of poachers and mutilate their dogs’ feet, to dark woods peopled by Herne the Hunter, a man in stag’s guise, his antlers ‘spreading like mantling (#litres_trial_promo) in the breeze’; and to the wise wild men, strange figures part way between animal, vegetable and human who had their Victorian counterpart in Brusher Mills, the snake-catcher who allowed his reptiles to slither through his beard. A place where the pagan worship of trees conflated with the verdant cross of Christian immortality, ever subject to the immemorial cycle of life, death and resurrection, this new-old forest stands for all threatened wildernesses. It promises a sylvan idyll, the greenwood of all our imaginings, invested with certainty and superstition, hope and fear; a place of sanctuary, mystery and magical transformation, here in the heart of England, our lost and ancient Eden. PART ONE (#ulink_fe9b0195-ebb6-5a26-865e-5a70661eab38) Green and Pleasant Land (#ulink_fe9b0195-ebb6-5a26-865e-5a70661eab38) Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood Where the right road was wholly lost and gone Dante, The Divine Comedy ONE (#ulink_be1d7d9a-b33c-5d9f-b30a-fd4330eedc8b) A Voice in the Wilderness (#ulink_be1d7d9a-b33c-5d9f-b30a-fd4330eedc8b) I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’ John 1:23 When I was a boy, we’d often drive into the forest. With my father at the wheel of our Wolseley and my mother at his side, the world seemed as secure and bound and polished as the big old car itself. I would lie back and look up through the rear window at the trees passing hypnotically overhead. They seemed both remote and near as I looked out for a particular row of pines which reminded me of the day I lost my toy koala bear – his rabbit fur and shiny snout the source of deep solace – on scrubby cliffs above a Dorset beach where, for all the hours of searching, he was not to be found. Now, forty years later, the westbound train crawls through Southampton’s outer suburbs, as if the city’s gravity were reluctant to let it go. This is the rear view, where England turns its back on itself, as if ashamed of its own history. Here the houses look into their few square yards, denying their communality with leylandii and larch-lap; here where subtopian dreams meet suburban reality. Then, gradually, the tarmac gives way to gravel, concrete to grass, allotments to wide heaths where pole-straight silver birch stake out new territory, screening the sky with their filigree bronze branches, standing guard over rutted ground riven with stony rills like frozen waterfalls. This land is open and limitless, laid bare in a way we have forgotten; we know contours only through gear changes, as our towns and cities gather together, seeking safety in numbers for fear of nature and its unpredictable ways. At Brockenhurst, I haul my bike onto the empty platform. The forest station still seems rural, with its two-stop line to Lymington and a waiting room decorated with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, given in memory of her son and intended to beautify this connexion between London and her home on the Isle of Wight. But now visitors are greeted by letters spelt out in ballast on the side of the track Welcome to Brock. Beyond the village, with its butcher selling venison and its stockbroker-belt guarded by expensive cars, the B-road races the railway to the coast, while on the horizon the Island hovers where clouds should be, a lowering landmass separated by the unseen sea. The wind is against me as I cycle over the open heath, and I’m grateful for the descent into the village of Sway, its outskirts marked by a tall stone cross. Remembrance wreaths still lie on the war memorial, their scarlet paper poppies faded by the sun and spotted by rain; propped up on the railing is a discarded hubcap. Dipping into the valley beyond, the lane darkens with tall trees. I turn off into Barrows Lane, where a hand-painted sign announces Arnewood Turkeys, but this is no ordinary farm building. Concrete where the rest of the forest buildings are brick, its classical proportions, domed roof and pillars resemble some strange escape from the Italian countryside. Beside it, in an overgrown field, is a stubby campanile, a plastic bag flapping from its unglazed window. Seemingly unfinished – as if its creator intended to return to his handiwork – this fairytale towerlet labours under an ivy burden. But it is dwarfed by the structure in whose shadow it lies, an eminence impossible to ignore, yet so unexpected that you could pass by without raising your eyes and miss it entirely. Reaching up out of the forest is an immense grey column, rising two hundred feet into the sky. Its very shape seems to change with the clouds – a sun-lit gnomon from one angle, a mad church steeple from another. It is so bizarre that it seems completely detached from its surroundings. Over the road, a hard-hatted engineer perches at the top of a telegraph pole, barely aware of the tower that looms over him, just as I cannot remember it from my childhood visits to the forest. Perhaps it is a mirage, appearing only fitfully. Or perhaps it is part of some vast underground complex, some covert scientific experiment. The stillness of this unnamed country lane invites conspiracy: there is no sign of life, no one to acknowledge or explain this extraordinary structure. Omnipresent but forgotten, it refutes the curiosity of the modern world, as though gagged by its own mystery. As I cycle on, past hedgerows which billow up like green pillows on either side, the tower’s shadow seems to follow me. The houses and cottages multiply as I approach Hordle. Here the roads have names, oddly evocative – Silver Street and Sky End Lane – but it is a disparate place, this arbitrary settlement rescued from the suburbs of nearby New Milton only by the proximity of the forest, whose presence is ever obvious and yet remote. These houses stand just outside its invisible boundaries, yet they cannot but be a part of it, as if its greenness were drawing them in, ineluctably. I cross the busy east – west road, with its traffic hurtling towards Bournemouth, and ride up Vaggs Lane. Here the land is palpably higher, blown by secondhand gusts from the sea. Behind an orchard of exhausted apple trees is a petrified pine stripped of its bark, skeletal, as if lightning-struck. I knock at the door of a nearby house. A young teenage boy in combat trousers appears, restraining a dog. ‘Alright mate,’ he says, his chummy tone undermined by hesitancy and poshness. I explain my mission. He points me back in the direction from which I came. ‘Are they friendly?’ I ask. The boy shrugs: it was an old people’s home before the new owners took over. I retrace my tracks and pull up outside the gates. Opposite is a metal-barred entrance on which a notice has been pasted: NO DUMPING OUTSIDE THESE GATES BY ORDER OF THE DEPT OF THE ENVIRONMENT. Below it is a rusty white van, bits of old car engine, and an assortment of scrap metal and tin cans. The gravel crunches as I walk up to the door. No-one answers the bell, but a pair of dogs growl at the side gate. The house is bigger than it appears from the road, the land around it lush pasture. I peer through the windows and try to imagine what this place was like a century and a half ago, when its inhabitants sought heaven on earth and this country lane erupted to scandal and sensation. Back down the lane I wander into the village churchyard, where gravestones stand shoulder to shoulder, many decorated with artificial flowers. Screwed to a buttress of the building, overlooking an oddly empty part of the churchyard, is a plaque of the kind made by shoe repairers in shopping malls. Yet no trace of Mrs Girling’s grave remains. It is an absence which is doubly appropriate, for her followers claimed that three days after her interment, their leader rose from the dead. Once these fields echoed to one hundred and sixty-four men, women and children speaking in tongues and dancing in ecstatic rites, living celibate, communal lives as they awaited the millennium. Now there is nothing left to show for their utopian aspirations: no buildings, no books, no artefacts; nothing more than this small plastic sign. How could the memory of Mary Ann Girling and her Shakers have vanished so completely? Surely it is no coincidence that just a few fields away, that conspiratorial tower rises over the trees, wreathed in its own dumb mystery. But as I look around me, the bare grass of the quiet Hampshire churchyard gives nothing away. The facts of Mary Ann’s early life are equally unrevealing. She was born on 27 April 1827 in a cottage at Little Glemham, a village in rural Suffolk, between Woodbridge and Aldeburgh. It is a faintly threatening landscape of corn fields and black crows, often over-lowered by rain clouds which sweep in from the east, streaking downwards as if to suck water from the sea and unload it over the unsuspecting countryside. Mary Ann’s family, the Cloutings, lived in a cottage on Tinkerbrook Lane, an undulating country road now empty of the slate-roofed cottages which once lined it, long since consumed by the expanding fields of modern farming. But it is still bounded on one side by the estate and substantial brick mansion of Glemham Hall, and on the other by the river Alde, which widens into marshland before it reaches the sea at Aldeburgh. There, on a shingle spit, stands a pillbox-like Martello tower – the northernmost link in a chain to defend against Napoleonic invasion which stretched along the shape-changing Orford Ness and down the English coast as far as Hampshire. In Mary Ann’s time, the houses of the fishing village of Slaughden clustered round the tower; but like its outer defences, they were long ago lost to the grey-brown waters of the German Sea. Both Constable and Turner painted this watery landscape, but in the early nineteenth century the lives of Suffolk’s ‘wild amphibious race (#litres_trial_promo)’ were also recorded by the ‘poet of the poor (#litres_trial_promo)’, George Crabbe, whose verse discerned the grimness as well as the beauty of this countryside and its people. Crabbe practised as a surgeon in Aldeburgh, and was addicted to opium, but later became a curate and preached in Little Glemham’s parish church, St Andrew’s, its characteristic Suffolk flint-knapped square tower rising over the land and its porch painted in gothic letters, enjoining worshippers, ‘This is the Gate of the Lord’. Inside, a neo-classical chapel and a white marble statue still bear testament to the master of Glemham Hall, Dudley North, Crabbe’s patron. Crabbe made his name in London with the help of friends such as Edmund Burke and Charles Fox; but in 1810 he wrote The Borough, and its tale of ‘an old fisherman (#litres_trial_promo) of Aldborough, while Mr Crabbe was practising there as a surgeon. He had a succession of apprentices from London, and a certain sum with each. As the boys all disappeared under circumstances of strong suspicion, the man was warned by some of the principal inhabitants, that if another followed in like manner, he should certainly be charged with murder’. The story of Peter Grimes – who, it was implied, violated his charges – would provide Benjamin Britten with his opera. Its author – whom the Cloutings may well have heard preach in St Andrew’s – died in 1832, leaving his son, John, to become vicar of Little Glemham in 1840. Like the New Forest, this corner of England has its own peculiarities. Its bleak, rattling coast stretches from Lowestoft to Felixstowe, passing the drowned churches of Dunwich and the ominous concrete bulk of Sizewell’s nuclear reactor which towers over black clapboard cottages that look as though they were painted with pitch. In Mary Ann’s day, the landscape was studded with windmills and church towers, a scene described by M. R. James in ‘A Warning to the Curious’: ‘Marshes intersected (#litres_trial_promo) by dykes to the south, recalling the early chapters of Great Expectations; flat fields to the north, merging into heath; heath, fire woods, and above all, gorse, inland’. James’ eerie story, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll come to you, My Lad’ – with its ghastly pursuer on the beach, ‘a figure in pale (#litres_trial_promo), fluttering draperies, ill-defined’ – was set on this coastline; Dickens’ collaborator, Wilkie Collins, another writer of mysteries, used Aldeburgh for his novel, No Name. And up the river Deben at Woodbridge, Edward FitzGerald, translator of The Rubiyat of Omar Khayy?m, lived as an eccentric recluse, sailing his yacht in a white feather boa, eating a vegetarian diet, and mourning the death of his young friend, William Browne. Parts of the Suffolk coast remain the least populated in southern England, yet its emptiness is as deceptive as the New Forest’s heath. In 1827, the year in which Mary Ann was born, ‘seven or eight (#litres_trial_promo) gentlemen from London’ descended on the burial mounds at Snape, taking ‘quantities of gold rings, brooches, chains, etc’ away after their excavations; a century later, in the 1930s, a Saxon treasure trove would be discovered at Sutton Hoo, on the outskirts of Woodbridge. More recently, a mysterious circle of upturned oaks, reaching down to the watery otherworld of the ancient Britons, was found on the shore. Later, medieval Christianity produced its prophets: Julian of Norwich, the mystic and anchoress who endured ‘showings’ in 1370; and Margery Kempe of Kings Lynn who, thirty years later, was inspired by visions to renounce the marital bed, fine clothes and meat for communion with Christ. Modern science would discern other symptoms in these phenomena, but to the faithful of the fourteenth century, they were signs of a metaphysical universe. They may have been lowly, but the Cloutings could trace their Suffolk roots back to the age of Julian of Norwich, when Wilmo Clouting was born, in 1327. In the five hundred years since, the family had barely moved fifteen miles, from the villages of Laxfield, Stradbroke and Saxmundham, to Orford – where Mary Ann’s grandfather, William, was born in 1760 – then inland to Little Glemham, where her father, also named William, was born in 1804. Born before Victoria ascended the throne, Mary Ann came into a very different world to the one she would leave six decades later. ‘It was only yesterday (#litres_trial_promo), but what a gulf between now and then’, wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in 1860, looking back on his childhood. ‘Then was the old world. Stage-coaches … highwaymen, Druids, Ancient Britons … all these belong to the old period … We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.’ This often flooded corner of England was a remote, self-sufficient community in which lives were lived within themselves, as the reiteration of Suffolk surnames entered in the census and carved on village tombstones – Benham and Folkard, Todd and Barham, Girling and Clouting – suggest. The Cloutings’ was certainly a crowded household. The first modern census, taken in 1841 when Mary Ann was fourteen, records that her father, William, and mother Emma (n?e Gibbs, and born in nearby Benhall), were then both thirty-five. Mary Ann had five younger brothers: John, aged twelve, Robert, ten, William, eight, Henry, six, and Charles, one; her only sister, Emma, was four. Later two more girls, Jane and Susan, would be born, along with another boy, Mark. They lived in a village of some sixty houses with a population of about three hundred, most of whose men were farm labourers like William Clouting, or blacksmiths, coachmen or wheelwrights. Like many such settlements, it had grown up in a haphazard fashion along the road, and its life centred around the parish church and its vicar, John Crabbe, the Red Lion Inn and its patrons, and the Norths of Glemham Hall; a semi-feudal existence which depended on a good harvest and the ability to pay the rent. Yet even this rural backwater was moving into the modern world. In the ‘Hungry Forties’ of bad harvests and poverty, the People’s Charter for universal sufferage became an emblem of the stirring power of the working class. In 1845 the Chartists’ champion, Feargus O’Connor, set up small-holdings in which Shelley’s ‘helots of luxury (#litres_trial_promo)’ could escape industrial tyranny and unemployment in a bid for self-sufficiency; at the same time, railways and new roads spread across the country and provided another network for social change. Meanwhile the Anglican church, despite a similar boom in construction, was threatened by an equivalent growth in nonconformism and a decline in belief. In March 1851, the first religious census held in Britain found that of a population of 17,927,609 (#litres_trial_promo), fewer than half, 7,261,032, attended at Divine Service in chapels and churches; it was estimated that 5,288,294 people who could have gone to worship did not. While evangelism had touched the entire country in the 1830s, science would weaken orthodox religion. ‘It is said (#litres_trial_promo) that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,’ wrote W. H. Mallock in 1877. ‘One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying’. Suffolk’s own Woodbridge Reporter noted, on the occasion of the laying of a foundation stone for a new Wesleyan chapel, that the town hardly lacked the ‘means for spiritual (#litres_trial_promo) instruction. More than a century ago there dwelt in it Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and Sabbattarians, but whether these sects had any public accommodation for performing their religious duties … does not appear.’ Other eclectic beliefs had sprung up in East Anglia, such as the New Lights and the Old Lights, still there in the twentieth century, their black-bonneted adherents walking miles from outlying villages to spend the entire Sabbath day worshipping in their chapels. There were secular sects, too, such as the vegetarian colony which flourished in Stratford St Mary, near Ipswich, from 1848 to 1851, where cultivation of the land was combined with cultural pursuits and an interest in shorthand writing. But family memory indicates that the Cloutings were being drawn to Primitive Methodism, whose itinerant ministers were particularly active here; Mary Ann’s own (#litres_trial_promo) younger brother Mark, a wheelwright, would become a preacher. His sister, however – now a striking young woman, ‘impetuous, strong-willing (#litres_trial_promo) and passionate, somewhat tall, and in figure well made’ – had had little education, and was said never to have read the Bible. She spent her early adolescence in domestic service to local families, and at a house on Woodbridge Road in Ipswich; later she learned the skills of a milliner and dressmaker, working for farmers’ wives and more well-to-do inhabitants of the district. Then, sometime in the 1850s, Mary Ann met – but apparently did not yet marry – George Stanton Girling. Three years older than Mary Ann, George Girling was born in nearby Theberton, another small village, closer to the coast at Dunwich. His parents were menial, but if a photograph of his own son is any indication, he was a handsome man, and like others in the district, probably a ‘half and halfer (#litres_trial_promo)’ – that is, he spent part of his time working on land, and part of it as a sailor. Perhaps that is one reason why they did not wed; or perhaps their union was recognised in some other, nonconformist fashion. While George was away at sea, Mary Ann continued to earn a living by dressmaking, but she seemed restless with her half-neglected married life, and ‘went forth (#litres_trial_promo) in search of fresh and more congenial scenes’. Some reports claim that she made a living selling brandy and other spirits, ‘which she conveyed about surreptitiously, and of which she disposed as opportunity favoured’. Perhaps because of such less reputable interludes, there are great gaps in Mary Ann’s story – not least as self-told, or relayed second- or third-hand. What happened to her in the years between her meeting George and the beginning of her mission? Did she go to sea with him – perhaps even visit America, as some have suggested? Whatever course her life took until then, it was soon to alter in the most dramatic manner possible. By now George Girling had become a fitter in an iron foundry in Ipswich, where the family name was and is well known: a 1920s edition of the Michelin Guide to Great Britain recommends the services of Girling & Dolan’s garage, and notes that the town was renowned for its agricultural implements. The company which employed George made ploughs, while traces of local history reveal other Girlings with occupations as disparate as farm labourers, police detectives and mariners. George and Mary Ann lived close to the docks in a terraced house on Arthur Street, with other iron fitters and mariners as neighbours; their daughter Mary Jane was born there on 6 September 1853. Two years later, at nearby Fore Street – one of Ipswich’s oldest thoroughfares, still partly lined with Tudor houses and then home to dressmakers, carpenters, pawnbrokers and makers of straw bonnets – Mary Ann had a son, William, on 27 December 1855. It was only on 2 May 1863 that the couple would be married, according to the rites of the Church of England, in Lowestoft – significantly not in their home town. But these bare facts hide another story. It was claimed that Mary Ann had lost or miscarried several other children – one account puts the figure at as many as eight. Even in an age of high infant mortality this was unusual; and for some reason Mary Ann felt she was to blame. The bitter toll of dead infants turned her against religion, and for years she avoided any place of worship as melancholy overcame her. Then one day she went to a church – evidence suggests the great docklands parish church of St Clement’s, which towered over Fore Street and the river Orwell – and there heard words which comforted her soul. Convinced that her violent temper had brought judgement upon her, she joined the congregation and became a ‘female missionary (#litres_trial_promo)’ – although she still yielded to her sin of rage. ‘It was after (#litres_trial_promo) one of these outbursts that the climax came.’ For Mary Ann the dressmaker, the real and the imagined were about to be sewn together in a fantastic way, and in the process her body itself would be changed. Years later Mary Ann would describe the precise moment at which the vision came to her, at the age of thirty-two (although some accounts put her age at twenty-one, others at thirty-seven). That night she lay restless in bed – perhaps in guilt for her ‘unsubdued temper’ – and after hours of misery, rose feeling wretched and began to pray for delivery from her sin. Suddenly the room filled with ‘a flash of light (#litres_trial_promo), brighter than the sun’, and she heard a voice say, ‘Daughter! thy sins (#litres_trial_promo) are all forgiven thee’. As she watched, Mary Ann saw its source coalesce before her: a luminous figure which she identified as her Saviour by the nail-marks in His hands and feet. As she came face to face with this shimmering apparition in her Ipswich bedroom, ‘his body became (#litres_trial_promo) more glorious and beautifully translucent, and he looked young and of a benign countenance’. Now he spoke: if she loved him, would she give up something for him? ‘What is it, Lord?’ she asked. ‘Leave the world’s ways, and give up earthly and all carnal usages, and live for me.’ ‘I don’t know that I can,’ said Mary Ann. ‘Do you not love me?’ replied the Lord. ‘And as he spoke, the divine love in his countenance came from his face into her, and the rapid communication of his thoughts to her was such, that her will became his, and she said, “I will do anything for thee, my Lord.”’ And with that, the vision vanished. Mary Ann had never felt such ecstasy before; it sent ‘a thrill throughout (#litres_trial_promo) her organism’, filling her with love for the whole human race. Yet she kept her vision to herself, as if there was something shameful about what she had experienced alone in her bedroom. The modern world might diagnose sleep paralysis, a vivid hallucinatory state with sexual overtones, said to account for d?monic possession from the evil spirits of the Bible to Henry Fuseli’s eighteenth-century painting, The Nightmare, and contemporary claims of alien abduction. Or perhaps, like Fuseli’s friend William Blake, she was able to produce eidetic images of what has previously been seen – in some religious tract or biblical illustration, for example – and which she saw ‘in the literal sense (#litres_trial_promo) … not memories, or afterimages, or daydreams, but real sensory perceptions’. Or maybe hers was an epileptic fit, during which the sufferer may sense a presence in an otherwise empty room, and afterwards assert absolute moral certainty and religiosity, as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus has been explained. Was Mary Ann’s vision a short circuit in her brain, or was this itself a gift? Whatever the truth, for an uneducated woman of a pre-Freudian age there was only one explanation for what she saw, and what came after it. Mary Ann returned to her duties, fired with an undeclared determination; her heart must have been bursting to speak of it, but she told her fellow chapel goers only that they must observe holy lives. Five hundred years previously, Julian of Norwich had written of her own revelation: When I was 30 (#litres_trial_promo) years old and a half, God sent me a sickness, in which I lay three days and three nights … my sight began to fail, and it was all dark about me, save in the image of the Cross, whereupon I beheld a common light … Suddenly my pain was taken from me, and I was as whole as ever I was. Then came … to my mind that I should desire the second wound of our Lord’s gracious gift. In this moment I saw the red blood trickle down hot and freshly and right plenteous, as it were in the time of His Passion when the Garland of Thorns was pressed on His blessed head. And suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. Now Mary Ann received a second vision, although, just as the gospels diversify in their accounts, so her story relies on different writers and her own fluctuating pronouncements; and where one claims six years between her visions, another records just days before the Spirit appeared in the form of a fiery dove commanding her, I have called thee to declare my immediate coming, and it is now the close of this dispensation; a new era is opening on the world, and thou art to be the Messenger. From this point, it seemed, Mary Ann’s life was determined as parable, to be replayed in situations which would reflect biblical events. The heaven-borne message echoed John’s baptism of Christ, when ‘the Holy Spirit (#litres_trial_promo) descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased”’. Yet still she said nothing: Mary Ann lost herself in her work, afraid that a public declaration would subject her to ‘odium and opposition (#litres_trial_promo)’. But the visions continued, more potent than ever. She was taken ‘into a realm (#litres_trial_promo) far above the earth; and she ascended out of it, and beheld a vista of ages; and then she looked at Christ, whose glory illuminated her, and she discovered that she was in a glorified ethereal body’. In this astral experience, the Lord appeared ‘in the form of a man’. This was no dream: like Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus, the vision was as real as she could say. Now the Bible was opened to her, and its written word revealed ‘all its truth concerning the life of the spirit within the tabernacle of the body’. Mary Ann’s eyes had been opened, just as the scales had fallen from St Paul’s eyes. And as with millenarian prophets of the past, her discovery resulted in a literal interpretation (#litres_trial_promo) of St John’s Revelations and its apocalyptic predictions for the end of time. Her visions told her that the Second Coming would happen in her lifetime, and that she was its Messenger, ‘to declare an end (#litres_trial_promo) of sin, and a judgement; and, further, that if she yielded and obeyed, she should not see death … and that as a witness to her call and work, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost should be to those who believed; that they should speak with tongues, and do marvellous works; which would be the seal of her messengership’. It was a mirror of St Paul’s mission, and in order to fulfil her duty, she must leave her home and family ‘and go forth into the streets, declaring the message; and … all who believed must be prepared to do the same’. The cumulative weight of these supernatural events proved too much for a woman’s body already weakened by miscarriage. For six weeks Mary Ann was stricken by a paralysis which twisted her mouth, as if in punishment for her ill-tempered tongue, a God-sent witch’s scold. This physical ultimatum, in her own account, also caused blindness in one eye and seized her body – perhaps the result of a minor stroke. She was faced with a choice: she could either disregard the visions and remain in this helpless state, or obey her holy orders. And so she told the Lord that He must do with her as He would. As a result of this epiphany – in its original meaning, the manifestation of a god – she immediately recovered. But later, Mary Ann would claim that the last of her visions left her with a yet more extraordinary legacy. At Christmas 1864 she received the sign for which Julian had prayed. The stigmata appeared on her hands, feet and side, erupting in imitation of Christ’s crucified body. Like some sacred statue brought to life, Mary Ann’s flesh itself bore testament to her Saviour’s sufferings. It was as if these wounds were symptoms of her death, as though she had died and been reborn without sin. Was she a sinful woman, this sometime purveyor of illicit liquor, as yet unmarried in the eyes of the Church, now an evangelist? Records do not tell us, although the guilt Mary Ann may have felt for her children – born dead and out of wedlock – may indicate something for which she needed to atone: a recovered memory, perhaps of abuse within the crowded childhood home. Nor was she beautiful; her face was no lure to lust, and what was interbred emerged in sharp features set awry by harsh experience. Yet she was tall and imposing, with a magnetic stare; as if, in compensation for her lack of beauty, she relied on other means to command attention. There was a sensuality in the way her hair curled in dark locks over her shoulders, although her physical stance spoke against desire and her wide, thin lips bore the memory of paralysis. Her gaunt frame rejected consumption and sexuality in favour of asceticism and spirituality; a visionary aspiration in retreat from the world and its demands. In retrospect, it seems Mary Ann may have suffered some kind of dietary disorder; certainly her body was unnaturally slender. ‘The only emaciated (#litres_trial_promo) being we saw was the prophetess herself’, one witness would note, ‘and her desperate enthusiasm would burn the flesh from any flame.’ Perhaps her passion fed on her body, exchanging the one for the other. In the process, her resolve was stiffened, as if that heaven-sent rictus were a physical reaction to or a prevention of sin, tensing her body against evil. And if she had been a sinful woman, then her sins were forgiven. Her manner, once inflexible and intolerant, was now gentle and generous. Seeing this, her newly married husband gave up his initial opposition – an acquiescence he would maintain throughout all that was to come. Mary Ann explained that having experienced the ‘perfect presence of Jesus’, it was impossible to remain with him, ‘for her spirit being once set free to enter the paradisiacal state, it was not lawful to enter the state of matrimony again’. Instead she became a bride of Christ, and returned to her chapel – only to find that the congregation refused to listen. It is easy to imagine their reaction, faced with this woman whose duty lay at home with her children, yet who chose to lecture them on their sins. Mary Ann burned to communicate the wonder of what she had seen, and rejection merely made the fire glow brighter. Shortly after, she saw a crowd listening to a male preacher on a street corner. Someone asked her to speak, and soon, like Wesley, she had her own audience in the open air. But for Mary Ann there was something more to her commission than human history, and she was reminded of it every day by her hidden, holy scars, as if God’s words were written on her skin. We all reinvent ourselves. We conflate memory and fact, and reinterpret the pleasure and pain of the past to suit the present and form our future. Mary Ann too was convinced of her story, and felt the need to share it – a desire only heightened by the obstacles placed in its way, not least that of her sex. Yet being born a woman was not necessarily a bar to her calling: not only were there precedents for female preachers among the Methodists and the Quakers, but her experience – the loss of her children, her lowly origins – made her message more immediate. It was said that her ‘thrilling, and often (#litres_trial_promo) overpowering speeches had a vivid effect on sympathetic lady hearers, for she observed proprieties of behaviour, and there was nothing coarse or vulgar about her’. And like other female mystics, from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, to Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila and Joan of Arc, she cited higher authority; like the Maid of Orleans’ armour, her visions were a defence against male prejudice. Who could doubt the Word of God, even if it came from a farm labourer’s daughter? The world had always been reluctant to give women a voice; yet more so when their prophecies crossed the barrier between Christian and pagan, between witch and saint. In Yorkshire, Mother Shipton had seen the future from her Knaresborough cave and its dripping well, where I was taken as a boy to see strange objects dangling from a rock ledge, the pale brown mineral-rich water turning soft toys into modern fossils. Around the same time as Shipton made her predictions of telegrams and aeroplanes, the Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Burton, was hanged for prophesying Henry VIII’s death. In Mary Ann’s native East Anglia, the power of magic lingered long after it had faded elsewhere. The eastern counties became home to the Family of Love, a heretical cult imported across the sea from the mirror-lowlands of Holland, which preached that heaven and hell were to be found on earth and that it was possible to recreate Eden through communal living; Ely was declared an ‘island of errors (#litres_trial_promo) and sectaries’, and parts of this countryside were said to be heathen until the draining of the fens in the 1630s – as if the act of reclamation deprived the land of its ancient aquatic spirits. Perhaps devils took hold instead. In 1645, Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, instituted his campaign in Suffolk, when neighbour denounced neighbour and women were walked to keep them awake until their demonic familiars came to betray them. Those who miscarried or whose children were stillborn were accused of sacrificing their offspring. At Aldeburgh, seven women were hanged as witches, and the Borough paid Hopkins ?2 for his work. Had she been born two centuries earlier, Mary Ann too might have been stripped and searched for the devil’s marks – although her searchers would have found Christ’s. Two hundred years after Matthew Hopkins’ reign of terror, Mary Ann left Ipswich to travel the villages around Woodbridge and Saxmundham, the land she knew so well from her childhood and where she thought her words would be heard. As she preached in the open air at Little Glemham, it must have been odd for her young children to witness the change in their mother, leaving the family home for the fields of rural Suffolk. Mary Jane, then in her teens, would assist at the services by teaching and playing the piano, although she was soon to marry; William, however, just six years old when Mary Ann’s mission began, would find himself caught up in her cause. The Primitive Methodists were well represented in these places, and Mary Ann was invited to preach at their chapel at Stratford St Andrew’s. But her unorthodox ideas offended them, and many of those who had listened now refused to hear her increasingly radical ideas. So Mary Ann sermonised in market squares, a soapbox orator in shirtwaist and curls. Unconfined by marriage or maternal duties, she took her message to the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – just as the first British Christians had been lowly peasants who found a new sense of community in their faith, and just as the same common people had been identified as God’s chosen ones during the religious revolutions of the seventeenth century, with its own dreams of ‘utopia (#litres_trial_promo) and infinite liberty’ and a theocracy led by another East Anglian prophet, Oliver Cromwell. In her version of Christ’s elegantly paradoxical beatitudes, which called for the poor to be rich and the downtrodden to be free, Mary Ann promised social justice and heaven on earth. Those who had failed to find a place in the world could find a home with her, by choosing a new family. And in questioning the morality of marriage, she offered women the right to choose God over slavery; to be freed from the shackles of sexual demands and the dangerous burden of child-bearing. Mary Ann had issued a challenge to the nineteenth-century family, even as she sundered her own: it seemed she really was set to turn the world upside down. Girlingism, as it became known, embraced those over whom industrialisation had ridden rough-shod. It offered an alternative way of life almost revolutionary in its aims, although its communist ideas were rooted in Scripture. Consciously or not, Mary Ann appeared to be influenced by sects such as the Family of Love and the Diggers and the Ranters of the Interregnum who took the Acts of the Apostles – ‘And all who (#litres_trial_promo) believe were together and had all things in common’ – as precedent for their communality. In 1649, the Diggers had staked out their allotments on St George’s Hill in Surrey, and although their attempt at Eden, seeing the Second Coming as an earthly return to paradise, lasted little more than a year, the visionary William Everard, whose followers spoke with angels, went on to found other rural Digger communes. These provided patterns for what Mary Ann would attempt. And while she would admit a spiritual kinship with the early Quakers – more extreme in their early expression than in their later quietude – there was another echo to be detected, in the newly emancipated Catholic Church. In 1858, as Christ appeared in Mary Ann’s Ipswich bedroom, another young peasant girl saw the Virgin Mary in a French cave, as if her solemn, beautiful statue had come to life, her robe as blue as the sky from which she had fallen in augury of her Son’s return. Bernadette knelt (#litres_trial_promo) on the ground and seemed to eat the earth: to some, a symptom of psychological disturbance; to others, an indication of the passion of her visions. In an increasingly secular century, it was no coincidence that the visitations at Lourdes and the agitations of the Girlingites registered simultaneously on the spiritual scale. Back in Suffolk, Mary Ann’s mission had a direct and intensely personal effect on another young woman. Eliza Folkard, a carpenter’s daughter from Parham, sang in the Methodist choir, but one day she attended a Girlingite meeting and suddenly got up and began to dance. She then spoke for an hour, describing ‘how she had been (#litres_trial_promo) convinced of sin at the age of 17, but did not give her heart to God until after a long illness’. In a further reflection of Mary Ann’s conversion, she declared that Mrs Girling was truly the herald of the Second Coming, and as she emerged from her trance she embraced her new mother. To others, however, Eliza’s closeness to Mary Ann would lead to the notion that she was in fact her daughter, and perhaps an indication of sin. And where Mary Ann was dark, Eliza had blonde hair, a race memory of Viking invaders: she would become the pulchritudinous face of Girlingism, the angelic obverse to Mary Ann’s darker power. Eliza’s conversion was followed by that of Henry, or Harry Osborne, described as a ‘rough, uncouth (#litres_trial_promo) and illiterate farm-labourer, of pugilistic tendencies’ – a useful person when danger threatened. In fact, Harry was a thirty-one-year-old widower and shoemaker; but in this gallery of types, he became Mary Ann’s right-hand man, completing the trinity that she presented to the world – and introducing new rumours about their own relationship. Within eighteen months Girlingism had fifty adherents, for whom it was compulsory to receive ‘the Spirit, or the baptism of the New Life’ and to practise celibacy, without which they could not be accepted by the Saviour on His return, ‘which was expected to be sudden as the lightning’s flash’. Anyone joining the group had to give up all their worldly goods; from there on ‘the old ties of husband, wife and lover were to be lost in a fraternal bond’; they were now all brothers and sisters, living ‘a pure and holy life’. Mary Ann was known as Sister: her sororial title was levelling and egalitarian, but it also gave her a sense of pre-ordained mission. As a universal relative, she cast off her wedded status and assumed a new role, that of a secular nun or religious nurse. This was neither an unusual self-discovery, nor a disreputable one: the most famous sister of the age, the high-born Florence Nightingale, had recently entered imperial iconography as the Lady with the Lamp, inspired by her own three visions of Christ; while the empire itself was ruled over by a matriarch queen from her seaside home on the Isle of Wight. But it was also the coming era of the New Woman, and Mary Ann would be seen as part of these powerful moves towards a new female identity: ‘She stands forth (#litres_trial_promo), in this age of “woman’s mission”, fearlessly to lead and encourage a pure society based upon the inward law of her nature’, claimed one new age magazine; although a more hostile account saw her as ‘a curious growth (#litres_trial_promo) of the “Women’s Right” genus, from a theological point of view; and when she stretches her bony arms, in all the warmth of native eloquence, she reminds one of a pious scarecrow tossed in the winds of fanaticism and superstition and set up as a terror to evil doers in the way of religious enthusiasm.’ A woman’s power was still to be feared; and like those new women, this universal sister’s tenets, intended to create an alternative clan, were not entirely welcome as they sundered families and married couples and separated children from parents. When a later visitor asked Mary Ann, ‘Why not procreate? (#litres_trial_promo)’, she replied that the earth was already too full. Such sentiments echoed those of Reverend Malthus, who believed mankind was doomed if it continued to reproduce without check. But they also threatened the defining unit of an age which relied on reproduction. The family yoked the workers of the industrial revolution to the demands of capitalism; Mary Ann directly opposed that economic adhesion. For such a person of such a background and of such a sex to set up such a challenge was unacceptable. Mrs Girling made a travesty of her married name, and in the process became an anti-woman. There were other reasons to fear Girlingism: it created tensions not just between families, but between communities. In an era of insecurity and high unemployment – exemplified by the agricultural strikes which hit East Suffolk in the early 1870s as the newly formed Agricultural Labourers’ Union clashed with the Farmers’ Association – men lost their jobs because of Mary Ann. In the market and barrack town of Woodbridge, her teachings began to concern clergy and upset landowners, anxious at her effect on their flocks and labour force: ‘Many of the males (#litres_trial_promo) were discharged from their situations, and others suffered loss in a variety of ways’. To some it seemed they had lost their senses to religious mania, and were suitable subjects for the local lunatic asylum at Melton – an establishment of more than four hundred disturbed souls, their occupations, listed next to their initials in the 1871 census, representative of Mary Ann’s constituency: farm labourers and their wives; factory girls and seamen’s wives; soldiers and needlewomen; chimney sweeps and policemen’s wives; brush makers and lime burners; or simply, in the case of ‘V. F.’, a ‘loose character (#litres_trial_promo)’. They were the psychiatric casualties of an industrial era, the kind of minds susceptible to a woman who might have found herself similarly incarcerated. Or perhaps Mary Ann evoked an older belief, when people had laid votive offerings in the lakes and rivers, reaching down to that elemental world beneath their feet. Whatever the source of her power, it seemed there was a primal force gathering around this prophetess, one which would invoke spirits and provoke opposition. One man bet his friends that he would shoot Mary Ann on a certain night – although in the event the would-be assassin himself converted and became a Girlingite, a miracle taken by her followers as proof that their leader was protected by God. That which did not kill her made Mary Ann stronger, and in this sensational narrative – something between penny dreadful and missionary tract – she had become a symbolic, almost revolutionary figure. A later image of Mary Ann depicts her as an androgynous angel from some Renaissance woodcut, wearing indeterminate, anachronistic dress, her head encircled by a band in simple recognition of her sacred mission. Her stare challenges the viewer and imbues the portrait with the air of an icon. This idealised Mary Ann is far from what we know of her true features; more Joan of Arc as seen in a Victorian picturebook than the face of a farm labourer’s daughter. But equally, it could be an advertisement for the latest nostrum, lacking only the caption, Mother Girling Saves. Girlingite meetings took a set form. Bible verses were read and debated, followed by prayer. But then came the strange dancing and trance-like speaking in tongues which Eliza Folkard had exhibited, and which were already attracting crowds. These shaking fits earned the sect the nickname Convulsionists, although they preferred to call themselves Children of God, from St John’s gospel, ‘… to all those (#litres_trial_promo) who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of flesh nor of the will of man, but of God’. Like the Corinthians in the wake of St Paul’s mission, they would ‘jabber and quake’ when in the spirit, led by Mary Ann herself, leaping from foot to foot while waving her arms as if beckoning while she exhorted the Lord’s name. To some these antics resembled the dance of a savage; others watching the ‘springy, elastic movements and considerable waving of her arms … could hardly resist the comic aspect of the scene’. Soon enough these rites attracted the attention of the press, and on 20 April 1871 a headline appeared in the Woodbridge Reporter & Aldeburgh Times: MOBBING A FEMALE PREACHER. The accompanying story may have been the first occasion on which Mary Ann’s name appeared in print; it was certainly not the last. Reporting on a case heard at the Framlingham Petty Sessions by F. S. Corrance, the local Member of Parliament, and two clergymen – the Reverends G. F. Pooley and G. H. Porter – the newspaper gave details of five young men, William Goldsmith, James George, Samuel Crane, James Nichols and John Barham, who were charged by a farmer with ‘riotous behaviour in his dwelling, which is registered as a place for religious worship’. At first it seemed a matter of mere youthful high spirits. The farmer, forty-eight-year-old Leonard Benham of Stratford St Andrew, worked 138 acres – belonging to the Earl of Guildford – where he employed three men and a boy, as well as two household servants (one of them being twenty-year-old William Folkard, a kinsman of Eliza’s). But Benham was also a member of the Children of God, and had resolved to support Mary Ann ‘at any cost’. He would pledge his entire family – his wife Martha, forty; his daughters Ellen, twenty, Emma, thirteen, and Mary Ann, then four years old; together with his sons Arthur, then aged sixteen, William, fifteen, and George, just five – to the cause. That Sunday afternoon, a meeting had been held in Benham’s house which was attended by the five defendants – not by invitation. As the Girlingites prayed, one of the young men, John Barham, began to talk and laugh. When asked to be quiet, he replied by singing and hallooing, with his friends joining in. ‘I went to the door and stood near them,’ Leonard Benham told the court. ‘They said, “Take your sins off your own back, we won’t believe you, you’re a liar.” I told them mine was a registered house. They told me not to daubt them up with untempered mortar’ – an obscure metaphor which would pursue the Girlingites, along with mobs hurling slack, or slaked lime. The hooligans then began pulling off his wallpaper, and declared that ‘they would be d—if they wouldn’t kiss Mrs Girling before they left’. Failing in this, they tried to kiss another member of the congregation, Robert Spall. ‘Not being able to do that, they said they would kiss Mrs Spall, but did not attempt to do it.’ That night the gang came back to finish what they’d started. ‘What a pity it is you young men come here and make a disturbance,’ Benham told them. ‘The law is very stringent about this, and you’ll hear something from me about it.’ But Nichols strode into the room and began shouting and stamping, while Goldsmith mockingly held up a stick to which he’d attached a red handkerchief, saying, ‘This is a flag of distress.’ He then began to declaim a text of his own, and sat down to light his pipe. Crane, also smoking, cried, ‘Pinpatches and sprats at three pence a quarter.’ The scene turned violent as the gang began to break up the furniture, with Barham sitting on the window-sill shouting, ‘My wife has run away with a man that has three children, and when she comes back I’ll be d—if I have her again.’ The mob had tailored their insults to the Girlingites, and their actions had the air of a concerted assault rather than the casual vandalism of bored young men with nothing better to do on a Sunday night in a small country village. The explanation became clear when Benham told the court that such meetings were held every three weeks at his house. ‘We have two or three places where we worship under the head of Mrs Girling. Singing hymns is part of the services, which were usually well attended. I have never seen anyone on the floor fainting. Mrs Girling has a husband and two children at Ipswich. The rooms will hold one hundred people.’ Mr Jewesson, acting for the defence, asked, ‘You’re one of the disciples, ain’t you?’, his biblical overtones somewhat undermined by his grammar. ‘Yes, and thank God for it,’ replied Benham, who proceeded to give intriguing details of the sect and the power of their leader. ‘There is silence generally when Mrs Girling reads the word of God … It is customary for any person to pray who likes. I never saw two or three praying at once – one stopped till another had finished. Mrs Girling was the only one that read and expounded.’ He admitted, modestly, ‘I am not sufficiently high to read and expound the Word of God; I wish I was.’ It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to his stature or his spiritual status. Mary Ann had first come to his house eighteen months ago – ‘Eliza Folkard sometimes expounded, but not publicly’ – and although he had never seen anyone faint at any of these services, ‘I have seen them fall under the power of God.’ As an elder of the Children of God, Benham sought to counter some of the more extraordinary rumours already gathering around them. He told the court that their services differed little from those of other dissenting chapels: ‘It is just the same with the exception that other people give out a text while Mrs Girling only expounds the word of God.’ Yet there was the sense of something other at work, not least in the shape of Mary Ann herself and the transcendence to which she aspired. ‘By our people I mean the people who follow Mrs Girling. We subscribe money amongst ourselves. We only provide Mrs Girling with clothes and boots. We pay nothing for the rooms; I give mine gratis.’ ‘You speak of falling down,’ remarked Mr Corrance, ‘when does that occur?’ ‘Very often, sir,’ replied Benham. ‘We see people fall down by the power of God.’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Corrance. ‘They go into a trance, sir, and can see all things that are going on around them. We allow them to remain till they come to themselves.’ Benham insisted that they never disturbed anyone: ‘We have never recognised these roughs as part of our congregation … They are the Devil’s congregation, and ours are the children of God.’ This testimony was supported by key figures in the movement: Alfred Folkard, Eliza’s father; Cornelius Chase, a twenty-seven-year-old coachmaker, and Isaac Batho, postmaster and shoemaker, both of Benhall; and Sally Spall, wife of Robert, a machinist from Hascheston, with whom Mary Ann had been staying during her missionary work. Sally Spall bore witness to the ‘kiss of charity’ which had prompted the gang’s sarcastic amorousness. ‘It is usual to kiss each other indiscriminately?’ Mr Jewesson asked Mrs Spall. ‘Yes, sir,’ she replied. ‘Both males and females?’ inquired Mr Corrance. ‘Both, sir.’ ‘Men, women and children, I suppose?’ prompted Jewesson. ‘Yes, sir.’ This sounded decidedly immoral, so Mr Hill stepped in, acting on behalf of the Girlingites: ‘I suppose it was only a brotherly and sisterly expression of affection?’ ‘That’s all,’ said Mrs Spall. ‘You don’t rush into just anyone’s arms – it is only the members of the congregation?’ ‘It’s a salutation, I suppose,’ remarked the Reverend Pooley. ‘Just so, sir,’ said Mr Hill. Mary Ann was as much on trial here as any of her potential assailants. ‘The members of this sect were led by a woman,’ Jewesson was reported as saying, ‘of whom, without imputing anything wrong to her, he might say that it was to be regretted she should leave her husband and children, and put herself forward in the way she did, creating as she must necessarily do so, a disturbance wherever she went.’ Thus Mary Ann was portrayed as a troublemaker, a woman who, by her very sex, sought to disturb the status quo. Jewesson went on to claim that his clients had gone to the service as potential converts, ‘and the confusion which took place was not caused by them or anyone connected with them’. It was a lame excuse. Hill said his client was willing to drop the charges if his expenses – and the fine – were paid there and then; and in an extraordinary intervention which to some seemed to compromise the impartiality of the Bench, Mr Corrance himself advanced the required sum for the defendants. A legal resolution had been reached, but the wider question of the Girlingites and their freedom to worship remained. The Woodbridge Reporter may have been a local paper, but it reported on national issues: ‘the Rights of Women (#litres_trial_promo)’; ‘Spirit Rapping Extraordinary in Woodbridge’ (which turned out to be a skit advertising alcohol); Primitive Methodism; the vaccination debate; and emigration, ‘a subject uppermost in men’s minds now’. Disturbing events across the Channel – the ‘Literary, Scientific, and Artistic (#litres_trial_promo) Communists’ in the Paris Commune – sat alongside reports of riots in Dublin and an apocalyptic editorial on cholera, ‘the most destructive of human diseases’, whose invasion no ‘“streak of silver sea”’ could prevent. Amid such signs and wonders – as if plague and famine might yet sweep the land, just as the sea could break its defences – the appearance of a local prophetess was of more than a little interest; especially when her crusade provoked a riot at the Mechanics’ Institute in Woodbridge. Mechanics’ institutes were established in the 1820s as educational centres for artisans. Often used for lectures on sectarian beliefs and spiritualism, they provided the working man with ‘an opportunity (#litres_trial_promo) to ride the wave of the new pseudo-sciences’. On 2 May 1871, the Reporter noted that ‘some printed handbills (#litres_trial_promo) circulated in the town announced that Mrs Girling would preach the Gospel in the Lecture Hall, on Tuesday evening, at half-past seven’. Such advance publicity ensured that the hall was packed, with a crowd of one hundred clamouring for admission, and ‘a great number who went were not prompted with the desire of hearing the Gospel preached …’ Mr Joseph Cullingford attempted to address the crowd, ‘but was frequently interrupted. Mrs Girling stood on the centre of the platform, and by her side was … a Miss Folkard from Parham.’ While many were still trying to get in – some by forcing the door – others were trying to get out, overcome by the heat and noise inside. It was the first indication of a mass reaction to the Girlingite gospel: a frightening spectacle to some; to others, rather farcical. Mr Cullingford tried to leave the hall, but as he did so the door was suddenly locked, leaving his coat tails trapped and the unfortunate man ‘subject to the rude remarks of the roughs for some time’ while he banged on the door unheard, such was the furore within. Meanwhile, Mary Ann had begun to speak. She told the audience that she lived at 58 Victoria Street, London Road, Ipswich, at which point a voice piped up, ‘Where is your husband?’, to roars of laughter. Mary Ann replied that she had his permission to speak the Word of God. Indeed, on the night of that year’s census, Mrs Girling was not at home with her husband, her seventeen-year-old daughter Mary Jane, now a dressmaker, and her son William, just fifteen but, like his father, already employed in the iron works. Instead she was roaming Suffolk – not preaching, but practising, as she declared. She was about to read from the Book of Revelations when a loud noise was heard outside and the door burst open, releasing Mr Cullingford’s coat. ‘Outsiders rushed in, insiders rushed out, jostling with each other, and a little fresh air was obtained by this indecorous breach. With some difficulty the door was shut and locked, but the interruption continued.’ Mary Ann said she’d been in worse places in Ipswich, but had never experienced such a disturbance. This merely made matters worse. ‘Where’s Osborne?’ went up another shout. ‘Are you going to mesmerise us?’ ‘Sit down!’ ‘Go home!’ ‘Look out, Osborne! no harm sleeping with a saint.’ The hall-keeper tried to eject some of the troublemakers, but his efforts only resulted in an increase in the riot, ‘and the noise and disturbance that ensued were indescribable. A stone was thrown through one of the back windows and nearly hit a person on the head.’ At this point it was decided that it would be better to call off the entire service. The gas was turned out, and in the darkness Mary Ann made her escape through a rear exit, running across the fields towards Bredfield. In the meantime the police finally arrived, in the shape of Superintendent Fitzgerald and three or four officers. They cleared out the remaining roughs, who then went to the nearby Sun Inn where they thought the Girlingites had sought refuge, and where they ‘saluted Mr Banyard with a handful of slush, which they threw into his face, and the doors were kept shut two hours’. Mr Phillips, the local magistrate, was sent for, and the Reporter concluded that ‘Such a disgraceful riot (#litres_trial_promo) has not occurred in Woodbridge for a very long time. We are informed that proceedings will be taken against some of the parties concerned in it.’ It seemed Suffolk had joined battle with Mary Ann’s blasphemy; but what appeared to be a popular uprising was more likely organised by disgruntled squires determined to rid the county of such unsettling influences. While Phillips blamed Mrs Girling for the uproar and called for police intervention, Superintendent Fitzgerald said that as he understood the meeting ‘was for religious controversy, he did not think he had any right to interfere nor to send any of his men so long as personal violence was not resorted to, nor any injury to property done’. Girlingism was to become the focus for contemporary concerns about religious freedom, pursued with a ferocity which was a legacy of the English Revolution. In the Reporter, ‘A Lover of Fair Play (#litres_trial_promo)’ bemoaned ‘a lot of blackguards being encouraged to injure our property and howl down free discussion’, and thought it ‘very unseemly, to say the least [that] a Magistrate could … advance the money to pay the fine of one of those worthies to prevent him from going to prison. I can only hope he is in the habit of showing the same sympathy when a poor wretch is about to be sent to gaol for killing a partridge or a hare … Mrs Girling and her friends will not be silenced by mud and riot and brawling’; rational debate was the only way to ‘expose her folly and delusions’. And while a ‘Lover of Civil and Religious Liberty’ asked, ‘Will you tell me which is the worst of the two – heathenism in Madagascar, or heathenism in (so-called) Christian England?’, another ‘Layman’ declared that Mary Ann had been ‘misrepresented and ought to be heard’. As she was. On 1 June at Dallinghoo, Mary Ann preached at Mr Cooper’s cottage: the congregation numbered twenty, five of whom were police constables, and two females fainted during the service. Landowners complained that the police ‘would have been (#litres_trial_promo) better employed in their own parishes looking to the public-houses … rather than being in a labourer’s cottage with this fanatic, who, with her disciples, declares she can never die, and, therefore, requires not mortal protection’. The Reporter meanwhile ‘deplored that such opinions (#litres_trial_promo) as Mrs Girling enunciates should “delude” even a Suffolk labourer; but orthodoxy is not the test of citizenship, and her success in these parts shows that they must be included amongst the dark regions of the earth’. The imperial sway represented justice, whether in the remoteness of Madagascar, or in East Anglia. Just when the readers thought they’d heard the last of the Children of God, came the headline: MRS. GIRLING AGAIN! William Brooks, a labourer, and William Leggatt, a cobbler, both from Charsfield, were charged with having assaulted John Cooper of Dallinghoo, a gardener. Around 9.30 pm on a summer evening, in the meadow next to his cottage, Cooper confronted some men throwing stones and rotten eggs at his door, and then proceeded to throw them at him. Leggatt, standing behind a tree, hit the gardener over the head with a stick, and when Cooper said, ‘I know who you are’, Brooks struck out with a bigger stick, shouting, ‘You old b—, I’ll split your head.’ ‘My head was tender several days from the blow,’ said Cooper. He said he couldn’t understand why the gang were there, but his testimony showed precisely the reason: Mary Ann had been conducting services at his cottage for the past two months. His evidence was a further insight into the sect’s practices: ‘We only sing, pray, and read the Bible,’ Cooper told the court. ‘It lasts one and a half hours, we sometimes stay as late as eleven, we have been as late as three or four o’clock in the morning at other places. I call myself a child of God; I belong to Christ. Mrs Girling has no particular name for the sect. We greet each other with a kiss. Mrs Girling kisses them all; she did on that occasion. My wife was present; she was kissed. I kissed Mrs Girling, and the men as well; that is our general salutation – kissing each other.’ This was decidedly unEnglish behaviour – men kissing men and persons to whom they were unrelated. Cross-questioned, Cooper painted an even stranger picture. ‘We never had any seized with hysteria or fits, or carried out at mine. Some persons do see visions and are overcome by the Word of God, but that is not hysterics. I never saw any person in hysterics. When they are taken up we let them remain the Lord’s time; we set them up; we use no hartsthorn …; we give them no brandy and water; we never tried what effect a pail of cold water would have by throwing it on them.’ Hartsthorn was a solution of ammonia, used as smelling salts, and originally made from the shavings of antlers. Cooper’s description evoked pagan rites and folk magic, as well as scenes of possession unseen in Suffolk for two centuries, and the magistrates decided it was time to put a stop to this nonsense: ‘If these services were met with silent public contempt and disgust they would drop, but while they were opposed in the manner they have been, the leaders of them would endeavour to claim sympathy as being the subjects of religious persecution.’ Leggatt and Brooks were each fined 1s and 12s 8d costs. But a curious sidelight is revealed by the census: Leggatt was the nineteen-year-old stepson of a David Spall. Not only was he related to the Spalls, who had converted to Girlingism, but in the same village, Charsfield, his forty-six-year-old uncle, also a shoemaker, was a minister at the Baptist chapel. Meanwhile, Henry Osborne would marry Eliza Barham, his second wife, whose kinsman had harried Leonard Benham. This was a close-knit, internecine society whose families had been divided by faith, and it is not hard to see, in this light, why the reaction was so extreme in rural Suffolk: Girlingism pitted brother against brother, sister against sister, and Mary Ann had exhausted the temper of the county. She would claim that a new vision prompted her departure, but the threat of violence was a forceful factor, while an invitation from an elder of the Bible Christians, who had asked her to preach in London, provided a good excuse (#litres_trial_promo) to leave. Or perhaps, as the sea ate away at the Suffolk coast, she too was in retreat from its depredations, seeking a new life and a new communion in the ever-growing metropolis. Whatever her reasons, that summer of 1871 – which would prove to be a heady season for Victorian utopians – Mary Ann, her flaxen-haired chorister Eliza and her pugilistic cobbler Harry, left Suffolk to take on the capital itself. TWO (#ulink_8584dbe2-c8f2-574d-852a-9408068cd3cd) Turning the World Upside-Down (#ulink_8584dbe2-c8f2-574d-852a-9408068cd3cd) These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also … Acts of the Apostles, 17:6 Each day in London, I walk over a path of broken gravestones, slippery with moss and imprinted with the sooty shadows of long-decayed leaves. Most of the inscriptions have been eroded over the years, but one word remains – Memory – and every time I walk over it, the letters are slowly reduced by an infinite degree. Bunhill Fields is a residual city square of lawn and plane trees, enclosed by tall buildings, as though part of the forest had been left behind as a museum of extinct specimens. But the reason for the survival of this ancient site is evident from its original, uncorrupted name: Bone Hill. Since 1315, layer upon layer of London’s dead have been laid here, a compost of 123,000 bodies. During the pestilence of 1665, Bunhill was registered as a plague pit; instead it became a burial place for religious dissenters, who chose this unconsecrated ground beyond the city walls. Its tight-packed headstones, obelisks and urns mark the resting place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and Isaac Watts. William Blake is also interred here, although his bones do not lie under his memorial, but in an unmarked part of the cemetery nine feet down in a common grave, as if even now, the mystic who saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye and who lived in the poverty of Jesus remains as elusive as his visions. This is a shadowy place, even at noon. Over one grave grows an oddly suburban privet hedge, trimmed in the shape of a table-top tomb; some stones assume the shape of coffins themselves, while others mimic Egyptian temples. They bear laconic elegies – Affection Weeps – Heaven Rejoices – or more morbid epitaphs: the unfortunate Dame being a victim of dropsy. But perhaps the most famous presence here is buried on the other side of the City Road, where Wesley lies next to his house and chapel. From there pilgrim tourists spill out into the narrow alley that runs through Bunhill, mingling with the office workers taking a shortcut through the necropolis, all of them unaware that these fields once witnessed sensational events. On 15 September 1784, the first hot-air balloon to ascend from English soil rose from the Artillery Ground abutting Bunhill Fields. It was piloted by Vincent Lunardi and watched by the Prince of Wales and 150,000 others. Monsieur Lunardi ate chicken and drank wine as he surveyed the scene from his gondola, the first to broach the space above London and look down on its warrens of streets and churches. It was an experience for which history had not prepared him, seeing a city so reduced (#litres_trial_promo) on the great scale before me, that I can find no simile to convey an idea of it. I could distinguish Saint Paul’s and other churches, from the houses. I saw streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. It was an enormous bee-hive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself, and the transition from the suspicion, and perhaps contempt of the preceding hour, to the affectionate transport, admiration and glory of the present moment, was not without its effect on my mind. Lunardi’s view was that of the eye of God; in his ascent, he seemed to have broken some natural law and assumed the divine, looking down on this vast still life, its numinosity directed by himself. This was eighteenth-century science fiction, a triumph of technology over nature; confirmation of an age in which Man took central stage and perhaps even superseded the Creator Himself. It was also a public spectacle: Lunardi’s vehicle was exhibited in the Pantheon, Oxford Street’s hall of brash attraction, and drew great crowds, some sporting the latest fashion in balloon hats; even Blake was inspired by Lunardi to write his verse ‘An Island in the Moon’. The new invention caught the imagination of the young Shelley, too, who saw it as a means of discovery, both physical and philosophical – The balloon (#litres_trial_promo) has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable … Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa? – why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided silently over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery for ever. – but his optimism was counterpointed by Horace Walpole, who hoped that …these new mechanical meteors (#litres_trial_promo) will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom. Walpole’s vision presaged Zeppelin raids and firestorms; Shelley’s, a socialist utopia. Later, stranded in Devon yet keen to pursue his radical campaigns, the poet made miniature silk balloons and sent them over the moors laden with his Declaration of Rights, little airborne devices of sedition suspended by spirit flames, invested with their own subversive futurity, ‘Twinkling (#litres_trial_promo) amid the dark blue depths of Heaven’. Two generations later, in 1850, the architect, artist and aerialist Philip Brannon displayed the remarkable properties of the hot-air balloon above Southampton. He produced an image of the town from ‘a framed point (#litres_trial_promo) about 400 feet above Hill Farm’, the same site from which my own flight would begin. Brannon’s painting, made from a photograph, was part chart, part panorama; in other images he would envisage a utopian Southampton laid out in imperial avenues, while his guide to the town described an urban Eden in which antediluvian monsters had become a kind of sideshow: The Whale (#litres_trial_promo) and Grampus have been captured in Southampton Water, and on such rare occasions there have been of course the usual arrangements for sightseers. Small shoals of Porpoises often visit the estuary; and the visitor from inland counties may be pleasingly surprised, as he walks the Quays and Platform, to see at a short distance from the shore many of these singular fish rolling and springing on the surface of the water, then disappearing, and rising again at another point to renew their awkward gambols. But back in the London graveyard over which Lunardi had floated, events born of yet more fantastical dreams had taken place. The dissenters buried in Bunhill Fields were heirs of the Interregnum, when it seemed ‘that the world might be (#litres_trial_promo)permanently turned upside down’. Among them was one Jane Leade, a widow and prophetess whose followers, the Philadelphians – named after the future city cited in Revelations – expected the millennium. In communion with the spirit world, Mrs Leade issued tracts such as The Sign of the Times, Forerunning the Kingdom of Christ and Evidencing what is to come, but she died, still waiting, in 1704, by which time new prophets had arrived in London with their own eschatological gospel. Just as Bunhill lived in the memory of the years of the Beast, of famine, plague and fire, so forty years later, the French Prophets seemed to augur a new apocalypse. The Camisards (#litres_trial_promo) were Protestant insurgents from southern France who took their name from the black shirts they wore in their nocturnal raids. They were heirs of the Cathars and their Gnostic heresies – rejecting organised religion, seeing men and women as equal before God, believing in mystical knowledge attained through divine revelation – and since the 1680s they had conducted a guerilla war directed by visions. Attended by a strange ‘aerial psalmody (#litres_trial_promo)’ when hymns were heard in the heavens, ‘many fell down as if dead … affected with sobs, sighs, groans, and tears’. Eyewitnesses said that they looked like ‘persons moved by a power outside or above themselves’. To others they resembled victims of St Anthony’s Fire, a nervous disorder caused by ergot, a fungus on wheat, which in medieval times had its own relationship to the apocalyptic Dance of Death. One Camisard experienced nine months of ‘sobs and mental agitation (#litres_trial_promo)’ before falling ‘into an ecstacy, and God opened my mouth. For those three days and nights I was continually under the influence of the spirit, and neither ate, drank, nor slept’. Some claimed the ability to exorcise and heal, ‘passing unharmed through the fire, and practising clairvoyance’. At their secret rites, held at night to avoid detection, young recruits ‘learned to perform the strangest contortions, and generally wrought themselves in a sort of trance’. They were then breathed upon to receive four degrees of divine afflatus: L’Avertissement, Le Souffle, La proph?tie and Le dons, a refinement of the holy fire of Pentecost – although others ascribed these ecstatic states to the excessive fasting practised by the Camisards. In their battles they were led by a former shepherd, Jean Cavalier, guided by God and punished by the Beast. Apprehended Camisards were tortured by being broken on the wheel, their limbs smashed until they could be made to fit its circumference, just as the orthodox world demanded that they should conform their beliefs. Fleeing from persecution, some were exiled to New Orleans (where, in a later civil war, black troops would call themselves Camisards, as rebels within a rebellion), while in 1704 another group, led by Cavalier, escaped to London. They settled in Spitalfields where ‘they ranted profusely (#litres_trial_promo), and made converts of many English people, chiefly of the devouter sex … Miracles, too, were performed in abundance.’ Their ‘mystical phalanx (#litres_trial_promo)’ was promulgated in tracts such as An Account of a Dream at Harwich, In a Letter to a Member of Parliament about the Camisars, a portentfilled reverie to rival Revelations and haunted by two figures: a horseman in golden armour, and a monstrous female, ‘her Eyes glaring (#litres_trial_promo) like Lightning’: Out of her Nostrils came a sulphurous Smoke, and out of her Mouth Flames of Fire. Her Hair was frizled, and adorn’d with Spoils of ruin’d people; her Neck bare, with Chains about it of Dice, mix’d with Pieces of Gold; which rattling, made a horrid Noise, for her Motions were all fierce and violent, her garment was all stain’d with Tears and Blood: There hung about her several Pieces of Parchment, with Bits of Wax at the end, with Figures engraved on them. She cast her Eyes often with Rage and Fury at that bright appearance I have describ’d [the golden horseman] over whom having no force, she toss’d her Head with Disdain, and glared about on her Votarys, till we saw several possess with her … This nightmare, experienced on the Suffolk coast close to Mary Ann’s own birthplace, seemed to engulf all England; another pamphlet, Clavis Prophetica, feared that these French Prophets had imported anarchy, and would cover ‘the whole Face (#litres_trial_promo) of our Heaven with Darkness’. At Christmas 1707, an English Camisard convert, Dr Thomas Emes, died on the eve of the millennium he had predicted. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, but it was foretold that God ‘wou’d attest (#litres_trial_promo) this Publication of our Lord’s Approach as Bridegroom, and Return as a King, by raising Dr Emes from the Grave on the 25th of next Month, above 5 Months after his Interment …’ Accordingly, on 25 May 1708, a crowd estimated at between twenty and sixty thousand gathered in Bunhill Fields to await the doctor’s resurrection. Their disappointment was blamed on ‘the fact of some (#litres_trial_promo) unfaithful person looking on’; denied their miracle, the mob managed to do great damage both to Emes’s resting place and other graves as they rioted through the cemetery. Yet the French Prophets’ fire still burned fiercely: four hundred converts spread out through the country, bearing their pentecostal message like Shelley’s miniature balloons, and holding nocturnal meetings at which crowds gathered to see prophetesses sigh and quake. By the 1740s, their influence had reached the north of England, where it was claimed to have inspired James and Jane Wardley of Bolton-le-Moors, with that ‘further degree (#litres_trial_promo) of light and power’ which would define their own and yet stranger sect. They called themselves the United Society of Believers, to differentiate from the Quakers’ Society of Friends, founded by George Fox on his Mount of Vision, Pendle Hill. But just as the latter were so called because they quaked at the word of the Lord, so the Wardleys earned the nickname of Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, a term of abuse which they turned and took upon themselves. The same soubriquet had been given to the Ranters in 1648: it was as if Shakerism was a delayed reaction to those revolutionary sects – the Familists, the Grindletons, the Seekers, the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers – who were themselves influenced by foreign heresies. The early Quakers had interrupted church sermons to castigate the preachers, and had stripped naked as a protest. In the 1650s, John Gilpin wanted to cut a hole in his throat to let out the spirit’s tongue. Local lads were encouraged to throw stones at itinerant Quakers, and in their stronghold at Bristol, Wakefield’s James Nayler re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, with his long hair, riding on a donkey with women strewing palms before him – a blasphemy for which he had his tongue bored and his forehead branded. But with the Restoration, Quakerism lost its messianic fervour and settled into silent meditation. The Shakers, however, rejoiced in noise. It was as though they registered a seismic preecho of the impending industrial revolution. One Shaker described how ‘a strange power (#litres_trial_promo) begins to come on, and takes place in the body … which sets the person agaping and stretching; and soon sets him a twitching, as though his nerves were all in convulsion. I can compare it to nothing nearer in its feelings, than the operation of an electerising machine.’ These tremors were symptoms of a new revolution to which the operators of Manchester’s mechanised cotton looms would be shackled, in thrall to the processes of mass production while their children scurried perilously beneath eternally shuttling frames. Shakerism would offer an alternative to such slavery. ‘… Amend your lives (#litres_trial_promo),’ demanded Mother Jane Wardley. ‘Repent. For the kingdom of God is at hand. The new heaven and new earth prophesied of old is about to come …’ Her female ministry had its precedent in the French prophetesses, such as the fifteen-year-old Isabeau Vincent, who conducted services while sleeping and maintained, ‘It is not I that speak, but it is the spirit within me’; or the elderly Dorothy Harling, the ‘Permanent Spring (#litres_trial_promo)’ who whipped her followers and urinated on their limbs. Here in the northern forests of Pendle and Knaresborough a dangerous memory lingered; that of a holocaust in which as many as eleven million, mostly women, had died throughout Europe. The same suspicion would taint all female prophets, whose daughters would inherit what their mothers had endured. It was not until 1736 that the laws against witchcraft were repealed – the year in which Ann Lee was born in Manchester. Even her street had the name of a witch’s familiar: Toad Lane, an alley in a pre-industrial city still surrounded by wilderness, a devil darkness which Saddleworth Moor does little to dispel today. Like Mary Ann, Ann Lee was the daughter of a labourer – her father was a blacksmith – and she too was subject to divine inspiration, ‘especially concerning (#litres_trial_promo) the lusts of the flesh’. Ann would admonish her mother against sex and, as her father attempted to whip her, ‘threw herself into her mother’s arms, and clung around her to escape his strokes’, a scene in which we might detect the traces of other abuse. And like Mary Ann, we have little record of how Ann Lee looked, only a strange phrenological portrait, an imaginary impression. ANN LEE. After working at a cotton loom and as a velvet-cutter, Ann became a cook in the Manchester Infirmary, while her father joined the Wardleys’ congregation. In September 1758, aged twenty-two, she too became a Shaker and was soon disrupting services in Manchester’s cathedral, questioning the priest’s words. Four years later, she was persuaded to marry John Standerin, another blacksmith. The lateness of their union owed much to Ann’s mistrust of marriage – legacy of seventeenth-century radicalism which saw marital union as another form of slavery. For Ann it was a protest vindicated by a terrible sequence: the death of her four children in infancy. And as with Mary Ann, these losses became the catalyst for her own rebirth. After the painful and dangerous forceps delivery of her youngest daughter, Ann lay for hours in a kind of coma, as if by giving life her own had been suspended. When she recovered, her fear of her husband’s concupiscence had grown. At night she paced the floor in her stockinged feet so as not to awaken him, moving through a nightmare – one which seemed to evoke her own memory of abuse. ‘When I felt my eyes (#litres_trial_promo) closing with sleep, I used to pull them open with my fingers, and say within myself, I had better open my eyes here, than open them in hell.’ Where witches had been walked to make them summon their familiars, Ann forestalled her hellish visions by remaining conscious. She starved her body so that her soul ‘might hunger for nothing but God’; tears ‘cleaved off’ her cheeks, blood ‘gushed from under her nails’, and when she lay down at night, the bed shook so that her husband was glad to leave it. Denying herself every gratification, her ‘earthly tabernacle’ was so reduced that she had to rely on others to feed her. ‘My flesh consumed upon my bones, bloody sweat pressed through the pores of my skin, and I became as helpless as an infant.’ As she fasted, ‘a kind of down (#litres_trial_promo) came upon my skin’ – a symptom of malnutrition, elsewhere responsible for the animal appearance of feral children. In her personal wilderness, Ann ‘labored, in strong cries and groans to God, day and night, till my flesh (#litres_trial_promo) wasted away, and I became like a skeleton’. It seemed she was about to make of her marriage bed a sepulchre. Reduced to a living memento mori, Ann was now granted an ‘astonishing vision (#litres_trial_promo) of the Fall, in which Christ appeared to her in all his glory’. She was shown a ‘full and clear view of the mystery of iniquity … and of the very act of transgression committed by the first man and woman in the garden of Eden’. The impact of this sacred, sexual vision was to set Ann on a new and extraordinary course, one which would take her across the world. But others saw it differently, and in 1770 Ann was admitted to the asylum of the same hospital in which she worked. Thus confined, as if with child, Ann faced her final confrontation. There, in the Lunatick Ward of the Manchester Infirmary, God revealed that she was the woman whose appearance was foretold in Revelations, ‘clothed with the sun (#litres_trial_promo), and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’, crying out ‘in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery’. At this Ann ‘felt unspeakable joy (#litres_trial_promo) in God, and my flesh came upon me, like the flesh of an infant’. Released from the infirmary and out of madness, she was born again, just as two centuries later psychotics would be reborn through insulin coma or electrical therapies which themselves resembled the Shakers’ trembling rituals. In this rite of her own body, she had become a different being: the Bride of the Lamb, or simply Ann the Word; and as she emerged from her confinement, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, she asserted her power over her mentors, the Wardleys. It was a religious coup in which Ann installed her own followers, among them her brother William, a former cavalry officer, a tall, powerfully-built young man who would act as Ann’s protector and yet who would also acknowledge her as his mother. As the new figurehead of the Shakers, Ann pursued their principles, taken from the Pentecostal or Primitive church: communal property, celibacy, pacifism, self government and power over disease. As with her familial conflicts, these claims enraged the mob, threatened by the promise that they might be saved if they too rejected sex. One of Ann’s own brothers took a broomstick to his sister: ‘He then beat me (#litres_trial_promo) over my face and nose, with his staff, till one end of it was much splintered. But I sensibly felt and saw bright rays of the glory of God, pass between my face and his staff, which shielded off the blows, so that he had to stop and call for drink.’ Having refreshed himself, he resumed his assault, and yet a spiritual souffle infused Ann: ‘While he continued striking, I felt my breath, like healing balsam, streaming from my mouth and nose, which healed me, so that I felt no harm from his stroke, but he was out of breath, like one which had been running a race.’ His breath was merely human; Ann’s, divine. Like the Camisards, the Shakers moved by night to safe houses, chanting as they went, their leader miraculously preserved as though enveloped in some sacred bubble; when being stoned by the mob, Ann was ‘surrounded by (#litres_trial_promo) the presence of God to such an effect that she felt joy and comfort while her unprotected enemies were utterly confused and distressed’. On another occasion, after ‘wilfully and contemptuously (#litres_trial_promo)’ haranguing a Manchester congregation, Ann was interrogated by the church authorities who, she claimed, threatened to brand her cheeks and bore her blasphemous tongue with a hot iron – an attack which echoed the punishment meted out to James Nayler and portended Mary Ann’s paralysed lips, as if the word of God were as much an affliction as a blessing. And like Mary Ann, Ann Lee too had her would-be assassin: one Elizabeth Bishop, who declared she wished to shoot Ann with a silver bullet – only to fall under her influence and become a Shaker herself. It was as if Mary Ann’s trials had all been run before her, incarnate in Ann Lee. One Sunday morning the local constabulary broke in upon the Shakers’ worship and dragged Ann downstairs by her ankles, an act of humiliation in which her skirts rode up about her waist. In Manchester’s House of Correction, she was confined in a cell so small that she was unable to straighten herself. ‘She had nothing to eat (#litres_trial_promo) or drink, except some wine and milk mixed, put into the bowl of a tobacco-pipe, and conveyed to her by inserting the stem through the key-hole once every 24 hours. This was done by James Whittaker, when a boy, whom Mother Ann brought up.’ It was a modern version of the medieval torture of ‘little ease (#litres_trial_promo)’, in which, as Linder Sterling observes, the victim became an involuntary anchoress. Or perhaps this was a political imprisonment, an augury of hunger-striking suffragettes who used consumption and its denial as an offensive weapon, only to be punished by force-feeding with mechanical contraptions and rubber tubes. Freed once more, Ann declared, ‘It is not I (#litres_trial_promo) that speak, it is Christ who dwells in me. I converse with Christ.’ She was the Elder Sister to Jesus’s Elder Brother: mortal beings to be followed, not worshipped; yet in her ‘the Christ (#litres_trial_promo), NOT Jesus… should make a Second Appearance’. The Shakers would reject physical resurrection as ‘utterly repugnant (#litres_trial_promo) to both science, reason, and Scripture’. With their foundation, the Day of Judgement had occurred; they were now living ‘in the Resurrection Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’ – a communion in which they looked to the new world for salvation. Over the wild Atlantic, America seemed to reflect its absence of history in its very vastness, as if the unending forests, prairies and lakes were waiting for its story to be written by the clouds scudding across its gigantic skies. This terra nullis evoked Eden before the Fall; a place in which to be reborn, as the Puritans believed, out of a state of fallen grace and back into perfection. Unseen and sublime over the horizon, this brave new world was itself a religious experiment, implicit with redemption. Even the passage there was a test of faith, just as The Tempest was inspired by a shipload of Irish rebels, gypsies, dissenters and criminals who had set off for Virginia, ‘Earth (#litres_trial_promo)’s only Paradise’, only to founder on Bermuda, Prospero’s Island. Since their foundation by the Puritans, the colonies had been home to many such refugees. The Quaker William Penn had established Pennsylvania – a place of sylvan woods named after his father – with its biblical capital, Philadelphia. Mennonite and Amish communities would follow, as would a young Rosicrucian, Kelpius, who exchanged ‘millennial convictions’ with Mrs Leade in London, before taking his followers on a voyage during which the storm was calmed as Christ had done on Galilee. Led to their ‘new forest-homes (#litres_trial_promo) beyond the mighty sea’, they set up their wooden tabernacle near Germantown in Pennsylvania, there to await the Second Coming, living communally and identifying with the woman clothed with the sun from whom they took their name, Das Weib in der W?ste (The Woman in the Wilderness). For seven years they scanned the skies with telescopes for signs, but were rewarded only with ‘a white, obscure (#litres_trial_promo), moving body in the air … which, as it approached, assumed the form and mien of an angel’ before receding ‘into the shadows of the forest …’ Back in Manchester, the woods also beckoned to Ann Lee. One night the Shakers were resting at the roadside when James Whittaker saw ‘a large tree (#litres_trial_promo), and every leaf thereof shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch’. Like the burning bush from which Moses was commanded to lead his people out of slavery, this ‘Tree of Life’ was a sign of their new order; and so, in the words of their chroniclers, the Shakers ‘fled to the (#litres_trial_promo) wilderness of America, from the face of the “fiery flying serpent”’ – the church and state which they saw as the Image of the Beast. During their voyage – financed by a wealthy supporter, John Hocknell – the captain threatened to throw his human cargo overboard when they persisted in their strange rites, but a tempest blew up, and as waves sprang a plank in the hull, Ann saw two bright angels standing by the mast. At this another wave pounded the plank back into place. On their arrival in New York, the Shakers strode up Pearl Street and stopped outside the house of Mrs Cunningham, whose name Ann seemed to know. ‘I am commissioned (#litres_trial_promo) of the Almighty God to preach the everlasting Gospel to America, and an Angel commanded me to come to this house, and to make a home for me and my people,’ she declared, whereupon they were immediately taken inside. There they stayed until the spring of 1776 when they established a new Albion at Niskeyuna, on land bought by Hocknell in upstate New York, a place reached through ‘the immense pines (#litres_trial_promo) and hemlock trees’ of ‘that dreary forest, which blackens so large a portion of North America’. Around them raged the battle for the new nation, a revolution which, their visions had assured them, would ‘terminate successfully, and that a Civil Government would be founded, protecting all people in their liberty of conscience, person, and press’. Indeed, they had come to save Americans ‘all sunk (#litres_trial_promo) in their pollutions’. It was a mission rooted in the virgin forest. Ann Lee was the woman living unknown in the woods of the Apocalypse, asking the trees to pray for her followers, who ran wild, hooting like owls. Witnesses claimed to have seen them dancing naked, in the belief that ‘they were angels (#litres_trial_promo), and invisible, and could go out among men and not be seen’. There was a precedent for such behaviour: the Ranters had preached unclothed, and the Quakers went ‘naked for a sign (#litres_trial_promo)’. These were symbolic states, just as Blake and his wife would sit naked in their Lambeth garden, reciting from Paradise Lost and greeting a visitor, ‘Come in! it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’ The Blakes’ back garden represented the perfection of paradise, ‘to the scandal of wondering neighbours’. Neighbours of the Shakers’ Eden were also suspicious – not least of the sect’s claims to commune with the dead: ‘Sometimes while (#litres_trial_promo) eating at the table, they say their dead parents and brethren come on the table and set on a pyre and they see them.’ The Shakers had inherited the early Quakers’ belief in ‘a certain efflux (#litres_trial_promo) or effluvium of animal volatile spirits … that flow from their bodies by the command of their will into the bodies of … new proselytes’, while Ann saw God’s power ‘visible on the faces of the believers and even on their clothing … It looked perfectly white and run in veins’. At other times a ‘strange milky substance … seemed to run over the skin and clothes of converts’. Such phenomena recalled the breath that had protected Ann like balsalm and foreshadowed spiritualistic ectoplasm – the mysterious cloudy matter which possessed its own methods of bodily extrusion as it was brought forth from mediums’ mouths and even their vaginas. In fact, in the New World their rituals had become even more extreme. The Shakers struck grotesque shapes – ‘shaking their heads (#litres_trial_promo), in a violent manner, turning their heads half round, so that their face looks over each shoulder, their eyes being shut’ – as if God was fighting the Devil for control of their bodies. To some, such contortions were indistinguishable from the possessed victims of witchcraft. As the ritual rose to fever-pitch, worshippers would be ‘groaning most dismally; some trembling extremely; others acting as though all their nerves were convulsed; others swinging their arms, with all vigour, as though they were turning a wheel, etc. Then all break off, and have a spell of smoaking, and some times great fits of laughter … this they call the worship of God’. Sometimes the dancing grew so intense that the entire company would jump up and down, making the house tremble ‘as if there (#litres_trial_promo) were an earthquake’. Nor were these convulsions confined to indoors. They could happen while travelling by foot or horseback, digging in the fields, or cutting trees; their subjects would not interrupt their chores, but carried on working as their heads turned from left to right, ‘with eyes closed or raised towards the sky, with an expression which proclaims ecstasy, anguish, and pain’. Such scenes must have been truly disturbing for passersby, and perhaps even for the Shakers themselves. Yet they had been licensed to act in this way by the freedom of America, as though their removal to a new world had liberated them from England’s little ease and allowed their ranks to swell. The American colonies had already witnessed George Whitefield’s Great Awakening and the revival known as the New Light Stir. Now, with the Dark Day of 10 May 1780, when candles had to be lit at noon – in fact, the clouds were the carbonised remains of the forest itself, burnt in clearings and suspended in the air like great trails of incense – hundreds came over to Shakerism, drawn by this apocalyptic sign. It seemed the Shakers were summoning spirits, or were possessed by them, sometimes to be purged by Mother Ann. After all, was not Christ an exorcist? But in New England, these were dangerous ideas in the lee of Salem, the harbour town due east of Niskeyuna. Only eighty years previously, in 1692, several girls of the town had begun to display strange symptoms. ‘Their motions (#litres_trial_promo) in their fits are preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into,’ wrote Reverend Lawson, while Reverend Hale noted: ‘Their arms, necks, and backs were turned this way and that, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.’ Others spoke in voices which were not their own; some felt bitten or pinched, and even had actual marks on their skin. Later explanations for these phenomena would include multiple personality, an extreme form of ‘hysterical fugue’, or even ergotism, St Antony’s Fire, in which the victim contorts their body in pain, shaking and suffering delusions. But such pathology was not available to those who witnessed the Shakers’ strange convulsions; and as Matthew Hopkins’ campaign would haunt Mary Ann Girling, so Salem’s memory cast these forest rites as a kind of Goyaesque coven. For the Shakers, who saw time in heaven-directed dispensations which extended beyond human measure, it was the beginning of a new age. To seal the success of their ‘federated communal order (#litres_trial_promo)’, an echo of the new states of America, they set off to tour New England. Travelling by night, they sang to keep their spirits up in the pitch-black darkness of the forest, and carried their faith as far north as Maine and the plantation by Sabbathday Lake. Yet in these shadowy sorties they were accused of unAmerican activities, of harbouring weapons and ‘being unfriendly (#litres_trial_promo)to the patriotic cause, from the fact of their bearing a testimony against war in general’. Their pacifism was in itself an offence, and Mother Ann was abducted by vigilantes with blackened faces like the ‘Red Indian’ protesters of the Boston Tea Party, and her dress torn off to reveal ‘a British emissary (#litres_trial_promo) in a woman’s habit’, while her followers were accused of being Indian-lovers. And just as Salem’s witches were suspected of contracts with the devil – to ‘over Come (#litres_trial_promo) the Kingdome of Christ and set up [his own] Kingdome’ – so the Shakers seemed to pose a new threat to the virgin territory. They had become the enemy within. Enraged by their enacted, allegorical war between Michael and the dragon, colonists besieged the Shakers in their houses or route-marched them out of town. Still they bore their sufferings selflessly, like Christian and Faithful in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, jumping on each others’ backs to save one another from the whippings, and thanking God ‘that He had (#litres_trial_promo) found them worthy of persecution’. These years of opposition took their toll on Ann Lee, and on 8 September 1784 she succumbed to what may have been leukaemia, visible as bruise-like marks on her body: pathological stigmata. Ann had never believed in her own immortality, although her followers expected her ministry to last a thousand years. Under her appointed successor, her surrogate son James Whittaker, the sect financed the building of a ship, the Union, ‘to bear (#litres_trial_promo) the testimony to foreign lands’. With its Shaker crew and cargo of horses, flour and other supplies, this latter-day Mayflower must have made an extraordinary sight as it sailed out of Boston Harbour, bound for Haiti and Havanna. We know nothing of its journey, nor is there any record of Cubans converting to the cause, no secret Caribbean colony of Shakers conducting their rites in the tropical wilderness, observed only by parakeets and snakes. In the Old World, rationality had triumphed. England had rejected Ann Lee’s visions and sent her troublesome sectarians to one colony, just as it would transport its criminal outcasts to another. Faced with its own republicanism and radicalism, a new English revolution was averted by John Wesley and his peculiar people, who subsumed rebellion in religion and what Charles Kingsley called ‘the opium (#litres_trial_promo) of the masses’. Yet faith remained an outlet for lives in thrall to industrialism, and open-air Methodist gatherings were prey to ‘swooning, groaning, crying out, weeping and falling into paroxysms’. Although Wesley opposed such extreme reaction, it had grown rather than subsided among people alienated by enclosure and the age of the machine; and in an era paradoxically attuned to madness and hysteria by its own rational aspirations, metaphysical questions gathered currency as the century moved towards its end. Anton Mesmer, discoverer of animal magnetism, believed that the universe was filled with a mystical fluid which permeated everything and was the conduit of the influence of the stars – an alchemical connexion between the Shakers’ effluvium and the modern notion that our bodies are made of stardust. Like Isaac Newton searching for the Philosopher’s Stone even as he wrote his Principia, or the earlier scientist Sir Kenelm Digby, who had developed his curative ‘powder of sympathy’ and who joined others such as Francis Bacon in the belief in sympathetic magic – that bleeding could be stopped at a distance by applying a handkerchief soaked in the injured party’s blood to the weapon which had caused the wound – Mesmer moved between philosophy and the preternatural. Mozart was said to have written Cos? Fan Tutte under his influence, although in 1784 the French Academy decided that ‘imagination with magnetism (#litres_trial_promo) produces convulsions and that magnetism without imagination produces nothing’. Yet mesmerism, in its scientific reincarnation as hypnotism, would become a treatment for the neuroses which afflicted the industrial world and which filled its asylums with the mad. Was religious mania, then, a neurosis? The behaviour of Richard Brothers made a good case study. In March 1795, Richard Brothers was arrested on the orders of the Privy Council and confined to an asylum. His crime – his madness – was to have predicted that the Thames would run with human blood in advance of the Second Coming. As his popularity grew, Brothers issued prophetic tracts whose comprehensive titles – the Downfall of the Pope; a Revolution in Spain, Portugal, and Germany; the Death of Certain Great Personages in this and other Countries. Also a dreadful Famine, Pestilence and Earthquake – evoke the apocalyptic scenes painted by John Martin, with their angel hosts on one side, and on the other, hordes thrown into hell like those Shakers who felt themselves teetering on the precipice of the inferno. In Brothers’ imagined future, France would be infected with ‘contaminated blood’, Catholicism and Islam would be destroyed, and a universal brotherhood take their place. Such predictions were a heady narcotic for those excluded by the changing centre of economic gravity. But Brothers was arrested and confined to Bedlam, and only released in 1806, still insisting that he had seen the Devil ‘walk leisurely into London (#litres_trial_promo)’ – by which time he had been superseded by an even greater cult. The fin de si?cle had produced new prophetesses, women such as Elspeth Buchan, a contemporary of Ann Lee who claimed that God’s power ‘wrought such a wonderful change’ that she was able to live without food for many weeks. She too employed holy breath, decried marriage as ‘the bondage of the law (#litres_trial_promo)’, and bid her Buchanites sleep on heather bundles in a barn. She would stand in a circle of young men and touch each with her palm, at which they would swoon away and lie about her like some human crop circle, springing upright when touched again. She also set a date for the Second Coming in July 1786, when her followers, their heads shaved save for tufts by which angels could pluck them up, waited on a wooden platform built on a nearby hill – only instead of the Lord a wind arrived and sent them crashing to the ground. But none gathered greater crowds than Joanna Southcott. Born in Gittisham, Devon, in 1750, Southcott was a farmer’s daughter, and a zealous Methodist. At the age of forty, a change came over her: modern doctors might have discerned the menopause, but Joanna said she had been called by God and, like Elspeth Buchan, she assumed the starry mantle of the Woman Clothed with the Sun. By 1801, when she published her booklet, The Strange Effects of Faith, her Christian Israelites were particularly numerous in the North and South-West. From London, Joanna issued ominous warnings – ‘O England! (#litres_trial_promo) O England! England! the axe is laid to the tree, and it must and will be cut down; ye know not the days of your visitation’ – while in Hampshire, William Cobbett despaired, ‘It is in vain (#litres_trial_promo) that we boast of our enlightened state, while a sect like this is increasing daily.’ One day, sweeping out a house after a sale, Southcott ‘was permitted by the Lord (#litres_trial_promo) to find, as if by accident’, a commonplace seal. In her hands it became the English Seal of Revelation, and her SEALED PEOPLE rapidly approached the mystical number predicted in the book of the Apocalypse: ‘Then I heard (#litres_trial_promo) the count of those who were sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand of them’. This was followed by a yet more extraordinary announcement: that the sixty-three-year-old Southcott was pregnant with the messiah who would rule the nations with a rod of iron. This was not a new phenomenon – in the Interregnum, Ranter women had professed to be with Christ’s child – but now all England awaited Shiloh’s birth. Expectation grew, as did Joanna’s belly, but fatally she cast doubt on her state, and when no child appeared, she fell ill and died on 27 December 1814. Her followers waited three days for her resurrection, keeping her body warm with hot water bottles (and thus accelerating its putrefaction). On the fourth day they permitted a postmortem, which revealed that her phantom pregnancy (as if to bear the Holy Spirit) was due to dropsy, the same watery disease which had flooded the unfortunate corpus of Bunhill’s Mary Page. Southcott left (#litres_trial_promo) behind twenty-five boxes filled with her visions, one sealed and to be opened only in time of national crisis. Attempts were made to have it opened during the Crimean War and the First World War – the same points at which a ghostly hart appeared at the Rufus Stone. The Panacea Society – formed in Bedford by the suffragette Mary Bulthrop, who believed herself to be the reincarnation of Shiloh – campaigned for its opening, but when it was finally unlocked in 1927, the box was found to contain some insignificant papers and a lottery ticket. The Panaceans, however, contend that this was not the authentic box, and that even now, Joanna’s secrets lie in a rural repository awaiting ultimate revelation, while her followers prepare for Christ’s arrival at 18 Albany Street, Bedford, the original site, they claim, of the Garden of Eden. In New England, Shakerism had settled down to become an institution, with a written constitution and divided ‘orders (#litres_trial_promo)’ as if in mimesis of the new republic. The Shakers lived like monks and nuns, their daily routines of worship and work strictly regulated, even as to how they should eat: noiselessly and without conversation. The outside world was kept at bay: surgeons were summoned only in the case of broken bones or serious wounds; otherwise, trust was put in God’s healing. Industry became an expression of their faith; as Ann Lee had declared: ‘Put your hands (#litres_trial_promo) to work and give your hearts to God’. Their clothes were symbols of their unity and their otherness – and, perhaps, of suppressed individuality, a uniqueness in itself homogenous. With long gowns, aprons and caps for the women, and coats, capes, breeches and stocks for the men, they resembled a cross between Puritans and workers in a Lancashire factory. Such subfusc costumes reflected their connexion with nature, in felt and wool and linen and cotton, woven and dyed with the levelling unchemical colours of drab, nutgall, butternut or pursley blue to blend with the land – just as the paint used by the Sabbathday Lake family for their meeting house was composed of crushed blueberry skins, sage leaves, and indigo. The Shakers saw God in the natural kingdom, in the animals they kept, in the food they ate: many were vegetarians or even vegans. Their villages aspired to a similar purity. Built of plain white clapboard, they were unadorned places in which to live out lives of innocence. They now rehearsed their steps before dancing, and on Sundays, carriages would arrive at Sabbathday Lake from the spa hotels of Poland Springs, as though the Shakers were another attraction laid on for their amusement. In a complicated world, Shakerism presented an uncluttered appeal. Free from possessions and responsible to no government but God, they were ‘the children of one (#litres_trial_promo) family, enjoying equal rights and privileges in things spiritual and temporal, because … love is the only bond of their union’. Bonded by love: it was that simple. The Shakers seemed to reinvent the way the world could work, and they inspired the Welsh-born reformer Robert Owen in his plans for a new society, founded on a series of co-operatives – although Britain remained sceptical about his plans: ‘Can Mr Owen reverse (#litres_trial_promo) the decrees of Fate, and so regulate the accidents to which human beings are liable, as to remove from them all temptation to sin, and exempt them from all chance of mistery?’ Nonetheless, this wealthy visionary arrived in America in the wake of Ann Lee, with an equally presumptuous ambition. ‘I am come (#litres_trial_promo) to this country,’ he declared in 1825, ‘to introduce an entire new system of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system … and remove all causes for contest between individuals.’ And as he explained to President John Adams, who himself opposed slavery, he would achieve his aim by building utopia, for that was the only way Man might change, if his circumstances dignified his ambitions. Owen’s vision was a new Jerusalem, about to rise in the New World – in Indiana. He proposed a great hollow square, one thousand feet long, which would contain all his community needed: a school and a university, a library, chapel, ballrooms. Kitchens, dining rooms and laundries would occupy other blocks, while the upper storeys would house the inhabitants like some gigantic hotel. This ‘new empire (#litres_trial_promo) of peace and goodwill’ foresaw the city of the future; but just as that would for many become a dystopia, Owen and his architect, Stedman Whitwell, also had to accept a different reality. Having taken over a former Rappite community, hundreds flocked to Owen’s New Harmony, drawn by its utopian dream or its founder’s substantial fortune. But the colony did not live up to its name: it lacked the religious principles, the discipline and the cohesion of celibacy, as practised by the Shakers, and there were disputes over the system which should be adopted to run the place. Yet it sowed radical seeds, not least in the work carried on by Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, who would join Fanny Wright (one of the first to arrive at New Harmony and founder of Nashoba (#litres_trial_promo), a community to educate liberated slaves) in proposing free education and women’s rights, ideas which would influence the Democratic party, while among other Owenites championing these same radical ideas was an Englishman, Frederick Evans. In a reverse arc to Owen’s inspiration, Evans would convert to Shakerism in 1831 and become its most able proponent. He was also the man who would oversee their venture into another world. THE WILLING GIFT In 1837, Shakerism was suddenly disrupted by a violent eruption. That August at Niskeyuna, a class of adolescent girls ‘began to shake (#litres_trial_promo) and whirl’. In the summer evening, ‘the senses of three of the children appeared withdrawn from the scenes of time … They began to sing, talk about angels, and describe a journey they were making, under spiritual guidance, to heavenly places.’ It was the start of ‘Mother Ann’s Work’, a revival directed from beyond the grave by Ann Lee herself. The Shakers had ever believed that they were surrounded by the spirits of the dead. Mother Ann had written to one Shaker, ‘I see (#litres_trial_promo) the dead around you, whose visages are ghostly and very awful. Their faces almost touch thine. If you did but see what I see, you would be surprised …’ Now the sect had witnessed the birth of spiritualism, and it was a violent genesis. The music created by these human instruments was an eerie composition which superseded time and space, connecting all things in the Shakers’ eternal dance. It threw its subjects to the floor, ‘where they lay (#litres_trial_promo) as dead, or struggling in distress until someone near lifted them up, when they would begin to speak with great clearness and composure’, although the words came in ‘native speech’ or ‘mongrel English’. These events may have recalled those at Salem, but to some, the extremity of the reactions in these, adolescents was more clearly than ever an erotic sublimation. As the phenomenon spread, the instruments were possessed by figures from the past; by dead Shakers or a panoply of Sounding Angels, Angels of Love, of Consuming Fire, and the Holy Witnessing Angel of God bearing scrolls of ‘heavenly thoughts (#litres_trial_promo)’ from the Apostles and Old Testament prophets, from Alexander, Napoleon and George Washington, or from their ‘Heavenly Parents’, Jesus Christ and Ann Lee herself. ‘Mother Ann’s Work’ was breathtaking in the detail with which it imagined another plane. Where Enlightenment scholars had debated whether one would drink claret in heaven, Shaker feasts of invisible food were consumed and drinkers made giddy by invisible wine in what were in effect mass seances. There were extravagant manifests of fantastic objects echoing those of Revelations and the eschatological banquet of the Lamb, a festival to mark the final unfolding of time: ‘diamonds of charity (#litres_trial_promo)’, ‘chrysolites, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones; golden censors, bowls, and chains; gold boxes filled with various treasures; cakes of love and “sweet-scented manna on shining plates”… plates of wisdom, baskets of simplicity, balls of promise, belts of wisdom, bands of brightness and robes of meekness; heavenly doves; leaves from the tree of life …’ It was as if the after-life was providing the Shakers with the luxuries denied them on earth, all listed in dream-like, Byzantine indices worthy of Huysmans’ ? Rebours. Like later mediums, instruments employed Indian spirit guides, with brethren as braves and sisters as squaws, whooping and yelling in strange antics, ‘such as would (#litres_trial_promo) require a Dickens to describe’, while predictions of the invention of the telegraph and coming revolution in Europe seemed, like Mother Shipton, to map out the future, opening doors to the unknown. Although the Shakers were reluctant to make public the phenomena they were experiencing, the instruments announced that ‘similar manifestations (#litres_trial_promo) would soon break forth in the world’. Accordingly, in 1847 at Hydesville, a small town in New York State, two sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, aged twelve and ten, heard ‘a brisk tattoo (#litres_trial_promo)’ of raps on their bedroom wall and saw their furniture move of its own accord. As newspapers began to report these strange events, Mrs Fox sent the girls to their married sister, Leah, in Rochester, five miles away. But the phenomena followed them, delivering messages for which Leah charged visitors a dollar a head. The Rochester Rappings ushered in commercial spiritualism. Moving to New York, the Fox sisters set up operation in P. T. Barnum’s Hotel, where they were visited by Manhattan society and such figures as the singer Jenny Lind, so impressed that she left ‘with her eyes (#litres_trial_promo) full of tears’. Despite an investigation which concluded that the noises were made by snapping certain tendons, and Margaret Fox’s confession – subsequently retracted – that ‘the whole business is humbug from beginning to end’, an air of mystery lay over the affair. It was as if the sisters had fulfilled a need for belief in a rational age. Among those who paid their dollar admission were the members of a Shaker committee, who ‘at once recognised (#litres_trial_promo) the presence of the spirits, and believed it to be the prelude to extensive manifestations of different kinds’. However, as spiritualism began to grip the country, other Shakers professed to be uncertain about its manifestations, declaring that ‘this form of communion with the spirit world is not for Believers in our faith’. In those years America seemed open to a hundred Edens, from Thoreau’s Walden in Massachusetts to Keil’s Aurora in Oregon; from Josiah Warren’s Equity in Ohio to ?tienne Cabet’s Icaria in California. In 1840, Emerson told Thomas Carlyle: ‘We are all (#litres_trial_promo) a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket…’ However, Boston Transcendentalists distrusted spiritualism (a ‘Rat-revelation (#litres_trial_promo)’, said Emerson); and Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting the Shaker village of Hancock with his friend Herman Melville, then in the midst of writing Moby-Dick, professed to be disgusted by its ‘utter and systematic (#litres_trial_promo) lack of privacy’, the ‘miserable pretence of cleanliness and neatness’ and the fact that two men shared a narrow bed. Yet ten years before, Hawthorne had been a shareholder in Brook Farm’s brief commune of intellectuals on 160 acres of farmland, where he laboured all day in the fields – only to find himself too tired to write at night. Even shorter-lived was Fruitlands, a commune inspired by the Shakers and founded by Amos Bronson Alcott, the great Transcendentalist, after a visit (funded by Emerson) to the ‘Concordium (#litres_trial_promo)’, an English commune at Ham Common which was run by his friend, Charles Lane. Back in New England, Alcott and Lane, nine other adults, and the Alcotts’ four daughters – among them the ten-year-old Louisa May – set up camp on ninety acres in Harvard, where many adopted new identities for the venture. One man, Samuel Bower, declared that clothes stifled his spirit and became a nudist, while another lived only on apples. Apart from Mrs Alcott, there was only one other woman, Ann Page, although she was expelled for eating fish. The community was strictly vegan, taking nothing whatsover from animals – no dairy products, eggs, honey, wax, or wool. No manure was used to fertilise the land, nor animals to work it. There was no lamp oil, since it came from whales and so the commune was dark at night; cotton was forbidden as it was produced by slavery. Yet such admirable, contemporary-sounding sanctions caused problems – not least what their adherents could wear (for those unwilling to adopt Samuel Bower’s sky-clad solution) in an era before man-made fibres. ‘Since cotton, silk, and wool (#litres_trial_promo) were forbidden as the product of slave-labor, worm-slaughter, and sheep-robbery’, as Louisa May Alcott wrote in Transcendental Wild Oats, her fictional account of the commune, ‘a new dress was invented. Tunics and trousers of brown linen were the only wear … Some persecution lent a charm to the costume, and the long-haired, linen-clad reformers quite enjoyed the mild martyrdom they endured when they left home.’ Fruitlands was a utopian may-fly, lasting only one summer. Its failure lay in its membership of people already unable to cope with life, men such as Samuel Hecker, who ‘had nervous fits, heard imaginary voices, and suffered from an unidentified sexual disorder for which others advised marriage but which convinced him always to remain celibate’. Hecker tried to purify himself by eating only unleavened bread, fruit and water, and aspired to the ultimate diet of wanting ‘to do away (#litres_trial_promo) with the digestive system entirely’. He later became a Roman Catholic priest. By now Brook Farm and its tenants had fallen under a powerful new spell: that of Fran?ois Marie Charles Fourier, a man whose influence spread across the world, even though he had never left France between his birth in 1772 and his death, kneeling by his bedside in a lowly boarding house, in 1837. Yet Fourier devised a world of mutually interdependent communities built up through layer over layer of human endeavour, and inhabiting gigantic three-storey dwellings spread over three square miles. In order to succeed where Owen had failed, these colonies would contain a high proportion of farmers and mechanics to capitalists, artists and scientists; the least pleasant work would receive the highest pay, and leisure hours be devoted to the uplifting pursuit of pleasure. This hedonistic army paraded – in Fourier’s mind – in ascending phalanxes of one thousand six hundred and twenty individuals ready to take over the world when their number reached 2,985,984. By that time, Fourier predicted, the sea would have turned to lemonade, the stars and planets (‘sentient beings (#litres_trial_promo) like ourselves’) continued to reproduce, and men would have grown tails with eyes in them. The dangerous beasts of the wilderness would be replaced by ‘anti-lions’ and ‘anti-sharks’, and the Arctic would dispense perfumed dew. Not since Thomas More’s Island of Utopia had paradise been so specifically charted. And such were these promises, so precise and so wonderful, that in an industrial century longing for its own lost Eden, Fourierism was taken up with a wild popularity. Brook Farm (#litres_trial_promo) itself became a phalanx, but in the process lost its intellectual sheen: the transcendentalists stopped coming, and the farm burnt down. Meanwhile, part of New York State was declared a Burnt Over Region through which revivalism had raged, leaving behind the stubble of faith. From this eschatological geography – from the Great Awakening to the New Light Stir and now this incindered zone – a gothic New England was created, evoked in Hawthorne’s Shaker Bridal, The Blithedale Romance and The House of the Seven Gables. The latter was set in his hometown of Salem, with its ‘Daguerreotypist (#litres_trial_promo)’ as a latter-day witch, a photographer-radical suspected of practising animal magnetism and who had ‘the strangest companions imaginable; – men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments; –… who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other people’s cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare’; while in Moby-Dick, Melville depicted the young ‘archangel Gabriel (#litres_trial_promo)’ as a maniacal figure in a ‘cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge’ who was ‘nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyuna Shakers’, and who declared the White Whale itself to be ‘the Shaker God incarnate’. One New England sect truly prospered, however: John Humphrey Noyes’ Perfectionists or ‘Bible Communists (#litres_trial_promo)’. In 1834 Noyes had announced that Christ had absolved him of sin, and that the Second Coming had actually occurred thirty years after the Saviour’s crucifixion. The Perfectionists were now living in a state of regenerated innocence – ‘In a holy community (#litres_trial_promo), there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be’ – and where the Shakers sublimated desire in the dance, Noyes liberated women via coitus reservatus. He even envisaged a kind of early eugenicism by preaching against ‘random procreation (#litres_trial_promo)’. Members lived in a centrally-heated Mansion House at Oneida in New York State, with a visitor’s parlour and a library which contained the latest works by Huxley and Darwin. Next door there was a school, photographic and chemistry laboratories, and a printing press producing the weekly Circular, with mock ‘classifieds’ advertising ‘Shares of Second-Coming Stock (#litres_trial_promo)’. Entertainment was provided by an orchestra, with a stereopticon for the children. Inhabitants rose when they liked, their workload lightened by hired labour. From its graceful lawns, Oneida presented a civilised image, with men in suits and women in liberated short skirts and bloomers; only the notion of radical sexual practices lent an edge to such genteel scenes. THREE (#ulink_b4955129-e367-56a2-b440-2a498f373412) Human Nature (#ulink_b4955129-e367-56a2-b440-2a498f373412) … Considering the poverty of Pekin, the beggary in Constantinople, the infanticide in Paris, the political corruption in New York, and the fifty thousand thieves, one hundred thousand prostitutes, and one hundred and sixty-five thousand paupers of London, is it strange that noble souls in all lands yearn for social reconstruction? … Are not present political and social systems falling to pieces? What mean their panics, strikes, internationales, trades’ unions, and co-operative fraternities? Does not Whittier, writing of recurrent cycles, say ‘The new is old, the old is new?’ ‘J. M. Peebles on Robert Owen’, Human Nature, June 1874 At the end of the twentieth century, I visited a monastery on the Isle of Wight. Quarr Abbey, close to Victoria’s retreat at Osborne, was constructed in 1911 to a modern design by one of its own brothers, Dom Paul Bellot, employing Belgian bricks and three hundred builders. Reached by a tree-lined avenue and surrounded by walled orchards, it lies on the shores of an island remaindered in time; a perpetually sunlit place where at any moment I might see a 1960s car, laden with my own family, en route for our holiday in a converted railway carriage around which the bats flew at night while the incandescent, moth-wing gas mantles glowed inside. At Quarr, the monks rise in the dark to sing their divine office, and work until it is time to eat their high-ceilinged refectory at bare wooden tables, facing across a space from which the outside world is proscribed. As they serve themselves soup and pale cider from their orchards, an ancient silence seems to reside in the building itself. Their black habits seem to be from some remote past, too, but underneath they wear trainers on their feet. For our rational age, faith is problematic (#litres_trial_promo). We find fervour suspicious; but perhaps you need faith to see. From Plato’s Atlantis to Thomas More’s u-topos and Fourier’s phalanxes, Utopia was ever a human ideal: its hope is one of the appeals of religion, for that is where paradise lies. But paradises are lost, too, and by its very perfection, Utopia’s history is a virtual one, to be created out of a metaphorical wilderness. Crowded nineteenth-century England, its primal forests felled long ago, was constricted and controlled; conversely, the vast reaches of America allowed for adventure. But it too was being privatised and industrialised, and the attraction of such sects began to pall in inverse proportion to the inexorable pull of capital. The new republic’s economic expansion reined in its religious experiments by the simple expedient of the equally expanding price of land. Utopia was priced out (#litres_trial_promo) of the market, and among those to suffer in the exchange were the Shakers, their decline an ironic result of the progress which they had embraced as inventors of (#litres_trial_promo) the washing machine and the clothes pin. At their peak in 1840 there were six thousand Shakers in America; by the end of the century that number would be reduced to just one thousand. The United Society of Believers had been superseded by the United States of America, and as the secular replaced the sacred, a new revival was required: one which would withstand the test of an industrial age, yet which could draw on the passion of Mother Ann’s Work. And if anyone could save Shakerism from decay, it was Frederick Evans. Born in Worcester, England, in 1810, Evans, the former Owenite, would become the intellectual face of Shakerism, drawing radical strength from the virtues of his plain-clad sisters and brothers: ‘To the mind (#litres_trial_promo) of the simple, unsophisticated Shaker, it seems marvellously inconsistent … that more than one half the citizens should be disfranchised because they happen to be females … while still millions of other fellow-citizens are treated as property, because they chance to possess a darker-coloured skin than their cruel brethren.’ That these objections remain is a testament to the Shakers’ moral code. From their village of Mount Lebanon, Evans would correspond with Tolstoy on the subject of non-resistance, while his other protests have the ring of modernity, as the elder spoke out against animal cruelty, class education and religious persecution. He also sought to apply Shaker principles to the government itself, suggesting that leadership be confined to ‘intellectual celibates (#litres_trial_promo)’, male or female, ‘who would be married only to the state’. In search of new recruits, Evans planned to reimport these ideas to the mother country. England had been alerted to Shakerism by such writers and reformers as Robert Owen, Charles Lane and Harriet Martineau, but it was the new power of spiritualism that truly prepared the way for Evans’ mission. Writing to Owen in 1856, Evans reminded his mentor that ‘Spiritualism originated (#litres_trial_promo) among the Shakers of America … In truth, all the members, in a greater or less degree, were mediums’, for whom ‘physical manifestations, visions, revelations, prophecies and gifts of various kinds … were as common as is gold in California’. Indeed, Evans had discovered his own mediumship at the height of Mother Ann’s Work, and would invite the medium William Eddy to Mount Lebanon to conduct seances using special cabinets built by the Shakers, in which Eddy was locked while thirty-one spirits manifested themselves in ‘ancient costume (#litres_trial_promo)’. But among those ancestral voices, one would become all-important: ‘That noble (#litres_trial_promo), wonderful man Thomas Paine laid the foundations of the New Earth, as Ann Lee laid the foundations of the New Heavens.’ Thomas Paine, an ex-corset maker from Norfolk, had come to America in the same year as Ann Lee. As the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, he had inspired revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. He died in a back room in Greenwich Village, New York in 1809, and ten years later, William Cobbett, exiled from his farm in Botley near Southampton to Long Island, would bring Paine’s remains back to Britain as a symbolic act. But now Paine’s spirit was claimed for a new revolution. In 1850, three years after its infamous Rappings, Rochester’s Reverend Charles Hammond, who styled himself as a medium, claimed to have received an account of Paine’s posthumous conversion from sceptic to believer. Three years later, David Richmond, a Shaker convert, member of the Concordium, and witness to the Rappings, came home to Yorkshire, ostensibly as a missionary for the Shakers; but also as a proponent of spiritualism. He established a spiritualist sect in Keighley over which Paine’s spirit presided; the advance guard of a movement in which both Robert Owen and Fredrick Evans would claim Paine as a kind of patron saint. Such esoteric faith was a response to uncertain times. Since 1848, European revolution and the publication of the Communist Manifesto had served to destabilise old regimes while offering hope to the oppressed. The British Empire was threatened by mutinies in India and Africa and, later, a possible French invasion, in response to which the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, ordered a series of fortresses to be built on the south coast and even on the sea bed of the Solent. Island Britain felt embattled, and new prophets rose to pronounce on this troubled age. In 1857, John Brown (#litres_trial_promo), a soldier-turned-visionary preaching in Nottingham, presaged an apocalyptic conflict in which the Russians would invade Europe, leaving only Britain and America to hold out on the battlefields of Armageddon. He proposed a spiritual defence – among the locations in which his Community of the Great Organisation took root was the Isle of Wight – while he divided the map of England with compasses, each circled area to be entrusted to one of his twelve pseudo-apostles in a campaign directed by the Angel Gabriel through Brown’s crystal ball. At the same time, Owen’s own predictions were becoming increasingly bizarre: at his last Birthday Congress, held in May 1857, he foretold that by the end of the century, ‘the English and Irish channels [would] be crossed on dry land, the seas and oceans … navigated on islands instead of ships’. He had already proposed that Jesus Christ was ‘an inspired medium from his birth’, and that famous figures such as Shelley and Jefferson, whom he had known in life, came back in spirit form to guide him. Now Owen declared that spiritualism was either ‘one of the greatest (#litres_trial_promo) deceptions ever practised on human credulity’, or ‘the most important event that [had] yet occurred in the history of the human race’. Fourteen years later, as Evans prepared his own mission, utopia remained a topic of the day. In 1871 no fewer than three English texts proposed visions of utopia or apocalypse, from the social Darwinian science fiction of Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race, to George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, a John Brown vision of a war to end all wars; and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a Swiftian satire on the impossibility of utopia, the ‘nowhere’ of the book’s anagrammatic title. It was as if that summer had been ordained as a new season of utopian intent. Evans’ transatlantic adventure was a mirror image of Ann Lee’s American venture a century before: he intended to exorcise the old country of its ‘spirits of devils (#litres_trial_promo)’, and as spiritualism had been exported from America, so he was determined that Shakerism should follow in its wake. Indeed, his campaign was made possible by two highly influential spiritualists. Reverend James Martin Peebles was a professor at the Eclectic Medical College, Cincinnati; an anti-vaccinationist and honourary Shaker, were it not for Peebles, Evans ‘would have (#litres_trial_promo) come to an unploughed field unfit to receive the seed’. His other sponsor was one of the most important British practitioners. James Burns had come south from Scotland to work as a gardener, but was inspired by American tracts to found his Progressive Library and Spiritual Institution in Holborn. A longtime vegetarian and teetotaller, he also began spiritualist Sunday schools to which believers could send their children for corrective education, and in 1865 proposed a People’s University at which would be taught ‘Cosmology (#litres_trial_promo), Spiritualism, Immortality etc.’ – a notion which had its echo a century later in the Anti-University of London, founded in Hoxton in 1969 with a syllabus featuring R. D. Laing on anti-psychiatry, Yoko Ono on ‘The Connexion (#litres_trial_promo)’, and Francis Huxley on dragons. James Burns Burns was satirised in a contemporary novel, Maud Blount, Medium, as Mr Blathersby of the Spiritual Lyceum, ‘a kind of Universal Provider (#litres_trial_promo) for Spiritualists from the cradle to the grave, catching them at the former extremity of life in the hope of making Infant Phenomenons of them, and retaining their hold upon them until the last, on the chance of converting them into Rapping Spirits when in articulo mortis. It was a kind of school, clubhouse, and chapel rolled into one, and all comprised in the not very spacious accommodation of a first-floor over a barber’s shop, in a back street of the W. C. district.’ Here, ‘where the spiritualistic force of the metropolis was concentrated’, Burns edited Human Nature, a veritable compendium of new beliefs, as its first edition announced on 1 April 1867: HUMAN NATURE A Monthly Record of Zoistic Science and Intelligence, embodying PHYSIOLOGY, PHRENOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, SPIRITUALISM, PHILOSOPHY, THE LAWS OF HEALTH, AND SOCIOLOGY An Educational and Family Magazine Human Nature – which took its cue from the New Age journal published by the Ham Common Concordium – was a kind of esoteric ? la carte from which readers could pick and choose. The ‘Psychological Department (#litres_trial_promo)’ had features on ‘What is Mesmerism’, while the ‘Physiology and Hygiene’ section included a pertinent essay calling for ‘REFORM IN WOMEN’S DRESS’, noting that at a recent inquest, ‘Dr Lankester remarked that there were 300 women burnt to death annually in England and Wales … this being the case, it might well be said that there was room for a reform in women’s dress, not only in the mode, but in the material’. Victorian crinolines were indeed a fatal fashion: in January 1875 there were two such immolations in Southampton alone: Elizabeth Cleall, seventy-eight, was discovered ‘with the upper portion (#litres_trial_promo) of her body enveloped in flames … dreadfully burnt about the arms and head’, telling witnesses ‘to take the lamp out of her hand’, while Harriet Mills, a fifteen-year-old servant, was found in the wash-house, ‘exclaiming repeatedly (#litres_trial_promo), “Oh! Oh!”… her clothes being all in flames. She was told to lie down so that a rug could be put over her, but was too frightened to do as she was instructed …’ Other victims of this incendiary epidemic included Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters, who perished in 1871 when one’s dress caught fire and the other attempted to put out the flames. A sense of social justice underpinned Human Nature. One article on ‘Life in the Factories (#litres_trial_promo)’ attacked Victorian philanthropy; noting that a Bradford factory had recently given a ‘substantial knife and fork tea’ for their workers, its author complained that ‘No slave is so helpless as the factory operative. He is doomed to privations, of which the savage negro cannot complain, viz., want of fresh air and sunshine. Till the radical defects of this iniquitous system are altered, we feel that gluttonous suppers and “mutual admiration meetings” are only opiates to induce the victims to submit to further injury, and thus postpone the day of readministration and retribution.’ It was no coincidence that Bradford was a stronghold of spiritualism, or that in 1851 the philanthropic Titus Salt was moved to build his industrial utopia, Saltaire, on the outskirts of the town, where my own father was born in 1915. In publishing such critiques, Burns allied spiritualism to a radical agenda, and addressed other means of social control. In ‘The Vaccination Humbug (#litres_trial_promo)’, he examined the harmful effects of compulsory immunisation – medicine as violation – and quoted Richard Gibbs of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League: ‘I believe we have hundreds of cases here, from being poisoned with vaccination, I deem incurable … We strongly advise parents to go to prison, rather than submit to have their helpless offspring inoculated with scrofula, syphilis, and mania …’ Diet was another issue, and although Human Nature did not go as far as Fruitlands, it exhorted the readers to abandon ‘alcoholic liquors (#litres_trial_promo) and hot stimulants, such as tea, coffee &c … and substitute the juicy fruits which will at once remove a heavy tax from the pocket of the individual, and promote health, happiness, and long-life’. In this era of mass production, questions of consumption and abstinence defined the new age. Burns published a report on The Cases of the Welsh Fasting Girl & Her Father. On the Possibility of LONG CONTINUED ABSTINENCE FROM FOOD, a bizarre account of Sarah Jacobs, the daughter of a Carmarthenshire farmer, who had gone without food for two years. Burns had visited the girl at her parents’ farm, where he found her lying in a bed covered with books and pamphlets. ‘In length she measures about 4 feet 8 inches. She has not the power of moving her body [and] has fits several times a day,’ he noted. In 1869 the case was investigated by a committee which appointed four nurses from Guy’s Hospital, under whose scrutiny the girl died. ‘Her death was a triumph for science, which took no account of the influence of these four death-watchers upon a frail hysterical girl living on the very precipes of this life, whom a puff of air or of feeling threw into convulsions.’ Her parents were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; the judge decided that their daughter must have been fed in the previous two years, ‘and that when she was watched she of course died’. It seemed a drastic manner in which to prove the fact. Citing instances of living toads found in rocks, Burns proposed a number of reasons as to how Sarah had been able to survive, including the possibility of absorbing nutrition through the skin and from organic particles (#litres_trial_promo) in the air. Human Nature’s -isms would not be out of place in a modern Sunday supplement. Subscribers could turn to fiction by Eliza W. Farnham (The Ideal Attained), pick up hints on the conservation of fuel, and read essays on ‘Walt Whitman (#litres_trial_promo); or, the Religion of Art’ and extracts from Thomas Lake Harris’s poetry, ‘Music from the (#litres_trial_promo) Spirit Shore’. They might wonder WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE POISONED BECAUSE WE ARE SICK, and under the heading PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA, discover titbits on ‘Mysterious Photographs on Window Panes’ in Milan, Ohio, or an account of a nine-year-old negro girl from Kentucky able to memorise entire pages from books. But Human Nature’s most important function was to assemble news of spiritualist progress in places as far apart as Liverpool, Paris and America, from where J. H. Powell reported on Vineland, a ‘modern miracle of some 10,000 human beings, who are solving the question of colonisation with spirit. Six years ago, it was a houseless tract of 50 square miles, mostly covered with timber; now, a considerable part of it is a blooming township. Here are congregated men and women of intellect’, among them Robert Dale Owen, himself a committed spiritualist. Meanwhile, the English medium J. J. Morse attended a psychic festival of 15,000 spiritualists at Lake Pleasant, complete with displays of animals, ‘alive and stuffed (#litres_trial_promo)’, and a tent for ‘mesmeric entertainments’. But if there was a particular ‘science’ to which Human Nature was drawn, it was spirit photography. The capture of psychic manifestations in photographic emulsion was an exciting development; and in the excitement, it seems, rational observers suspended their critical faculties. Human Nature incorporated actual examples – all the more unreal for being stuck onto stiff, pale cream pages and outlined in thin red frames like photographs in a Victorian album. Yet their glossy physical presence still speaks of implicit faith: someone fixed them there; someone believed in them. Particularly favoured was the work of Mr Hudson, of 2 Kensington Park Road, London, the first of the English spirit photographers. One of a pair of his pictures in the September 1874 edition displayed ‘the baby sister (#litres_trial_promo) of Dr Speer … and the shadowy form in the right front is the mother of the infant …’ The author of the accompanying article, ‘MA (Oxon)’, was William Stainton Moses, an Oxford graduate, Anglican minister and himself an accomplished medium. ‘I have written before how this child-spirit has persistently manifested at our circle almost from its formation … She passed from this sphere of life more than fifty years ago at Tours, being then only seven months old. Her joyous little message, “Je suis heureuse, tr?s heureuse”, was the first indication we had of her presence …’ Yet to our eyes this cloth-swaddled figure is quite obviously a china doll and looks more like baby Jesus in a school Nativity than the shade of a dead infant. Photography was still a young and plastic art, and to those untutored in its sly deceptions, the camera could not lie. Spirit photographs seemed to demonstrate the survival of the soul, and a happy survival at that. It was as if the camera were able to peer into another dimension. The immortalising power of photography had been taken one step further, and in such pictures, Human Nature revealed the extent of the desire to believe, a thirst for hard proof satisfied by cotton-wool fantasies. Encoded with an occult unconsciousness, these images prefigured the surrealist constructions of the next century, the uncanny imagined in silver nitrate. Yet their moral instability – their essential untruthfulness – turns such putative glimpses of eternity into mere psychic pornography; glossy, titillating images carefully concealed within the pages of the periodical. One print by W. H. Mumler of Boston, a jewellery engraver and pioneer of American spirit photography, shows Mrs Abraham Lincoln (whose husband was a believer, as was Wild Bill Hickok) with the assassinated president looking over her: ‘… The evidence for (#litres_trial_promo) the genuineness of Mr Mumler’s photographs, and for the integrity of Mr Mumler himself, is as strong as can well be conceived.’ But in 1871 Mrs Lincoln was declared insane and Mr Mumler was later prosecuted for witchcraft in New York. In its acceptance of such pictures, Human Nature was betrayed by its own innocence. Opening the pages of the journal now, I look at these images with a childish sense of revelation and disappointment: in an ironic reversal of their intended function, they resonate with charlatanism and fakery, undermining my own will to believe, as much as if I had been shown videotape of Christ’s crucifixion and seen Kensington gore rather than blood oozing from His wounds. This was faith as theatre, ‘by way of (#litres_trial_promo) a singular intermediary … by way of Death’, a sensational sequence of manipulated images: from nineteenth-century tableaux vivants to Eadweard Muybridge’s calibrated human graphs and Julia Margaret Cameron’s angelic children, bedecked with wings and suspended in amniotic fluid, innocent emblems of infant mortality at the beginning of life. With the aid of muslin, montage and double exposure, the spirit photographers created equally convincing, equally fantastical visions of life after death. The final irony is that spiritualism invested its faith in such evidence, for the passing of time would ensure that these images undermined the movement more comprehensively than any amount of improbable table-tapping or levitating chairs. The powerfully eclectic editorial stance of Human Nature was to provide a natural platform, and excellent publicity, for Frederick Evans, while James Burns was keen to promote Shakerism for his own ends. This earthly alliance suited their spiritual ambitions – a vivid example of the cross-pollination of utopian belief between England and America. Evans and Burns were as much prophets of their age as their more colourful antecedents – and they had the added benefit of new media. Cheap publishing, burgeoning literacy and photographic reproduction allowed spiritualism to be widely disseminated via the self-promoting identities of its practitioners, feeding on a trend which was even more evident: the American genius for self-invention, and an attendant sense of glamour. Thus the meeting of Evans – the intellectual embodiment of American Shakerism – and Burns – the motivating force of British Spiritualism – was an enormously potent encounter. Yet behind these men lay two female spirits; and just as the progenitor of their meeting was Ann Lee, so Mary Ann Girling would be its progeny. That summer of 1871, as Mary Ann was making preparations for her mission to London, Evans and Peebles left New York on the new White Star liner, S.S. Atlantic. ‘The whole ship (#litres_trial_promo) is under the influence of Shakerism to some extent,’ Evans told his fellow elders. Turning the voyage into an extension of his mission, he used an onboard accident – when a cannon exploded during the Independence Day celebrations and blew off a seaman’s arms – as an endorsement of Shaker pacifism, and persuaded the captain to have the fireworks thrown overboard: ‘Thus we preached non-resistance and non-powder-explosions, at the same time, on the 4th of July.’ A week later, Evans arrived in London and set up his office at the Progressive Library and Spiritual Institution at 15 Southampton Row. In the ‘dark little shop (#litres_trial_promo)’, Evans was ‘crowded with (#litres_trial_promo) letters, papers, books, visitors, inquiries, and deputations of various kinds’, while Burns took the opportunity to make a phrenological examination of his guest, as ‘we have seen (#litres_trial_promo) only one Shaker’. It was as if the sect were an exotic tribe from some remote corner of the Empire: Burns advertised copies of Evans’ photograph and ‘stereoscopic views of groups of Shakers and their houses and gardens, all of which afford valuable data to the student of human nature’. Elder Frederick Evans Evans’ arrival also stirred up considerable interest among men such as the Honourable Auberon Herbert, Liberal Member of Parliament for Nottingham, with whom Evans and Peebles breakfasted at 11 o’clock (an hour which shocked Evans, who broke his fast around dawn). Their interview was ‘most interesting and profitable (#litres_trial_promo)’, wrote Peebles. ‘Elder Frederick expounded to him the principles of Shakerism. He was deeply interested – pricked in the heart; and, upon some points at least, convicted.’ That afternoon, Herbert took both men into the House of Commons, where Evans ‘preached the Gospel of Progress and Reform’. ‘Many in this English speaking nation are almost ready for the harvest,’ declared Peebles. ‘They feel that something must be done … many are inquiring the way to Zion, and asking, What shall I do to be saved … England is ripening up rapidly for the forming of Shaker Societies.’ And Evans was determined to reap the benefit. Invited by Herbert to ‘splendid rooms (#litres_trial_promo)’ to address a ‘fashionable gathering’ (‘some of the women not dressed as they ought to be, for modest women’), he was subjected to cross examination by lawyers, doctors and secretaries for nearly three hours. But this mission was not to be limited to the professional classes. Evans’ lectures at Cleveland Hall proved so popular that they soon required a larger venue, as The Times announced on 3 August: An Opportunity (#litres_trial_promo) Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon, State of New York, USA, will discourse on the principles of his order next Sunday, at the St George’s Hall, Langham Place, Regent St. Mr Hepworth Dixon, author of New America, will take the chair, supported by Mr Auberon Herbert, MP, and other Members of Parliament. William Hepworth Dixon had recently published his first-hand account of American sects; as a guest of Evans and Eldress Antoinette Dolittle at Mount Lebanon, he had been struck by the ‘singular beauty (#litres_trial_promo) and perfect success’ of the Shaker way of life, and his book was evidently The Times’ source of information. ‘The order of Shakers (#litres_trial_promo) has been in existence for nearly 100 years … They are celibates, hold property in common like Primitive Christians, are free-thinking Spiritualists, and firm believers in present Divine inspiration. They neither manufacture nor use intoxicating drink, and they entertain peace principles. They have solved those vexed problems, war, intemperance, poverty, the social evil [prostitution], and crime, with all its concommittants of police-courts, gaols, and such like.’ The paper also reported positively on Evans’ lecture itself: SHANKAR LADY. The proceedings were commenced with a hymn, ‘The Day is Breaking’, and a short prayer, after which Mr Hepworth Dixon introduced ‘Elder Frederick’ to the meeting with a few words expressive of the pleasure which he had felt some years ago in visiting Mount Ephraim [sic], and seeing with his own eyes the well-ordered community of the Shakers, and the peace, contentment, plenty, and morality which reigned among them, where they had ‘made the desert smile’. Such a life must have seemed attractive to many readers caught up in their quotidian duties. Cheered regularly throughout his speech, Evans warned ‘that both England (#litres_trial_promo) as a country and London as a great city had need to reform their social code and habits of life’, and ‘that other empires and cities as large and as powerful … had perished by the sword …’ Privately, he discerned a ‘desperate, drugged (#litres_trial_promo) determination … to do or die’ in that ‘great Babel (#litres_trial_promo) of a city of 3? millions of human bodies, supposed to have souls in them’, and where he felt like a ‘pilgrim and a stranger’. ‘The poor breed like rabbits; and, when the boys are old enough, the Government takes them as soldiers. But labor is so cheap, they are (#litres_trial_promo) willing to be shot at, if they can get food to eat … This city, and all great cities, rest upon volcanoes liable to eruption at [a] time when least to be looked for or expected.’ Such observations were redolent of the Communist Manifesto. ‘This Government is wise, with all its wickedness. It watches sharply the signs of popular uprising, and yields to the demands of the great middle class, so as to propitiate them …’ While he noted that five thousand a day were dying in the siege of Paris, Evans claimed that ‘Communism is the greatest good that thousands can see in the future; and the fact that the Shakers make it a practical thing, a success, is a constant source of congratulation, and of hope … I am quite (#litres_trial_promo) sure that our Gospel will be preached and received in England before long.’ He even envisioned his own North Family at Mount Lebanon coming to London to save its citizens, ‘I am quite sure souls would gather to them as fast as they could be taken care of.’ Shakerism had caught a public imagination already alert to utopian notions. Human Nature reported that ‘from one end (#litres_trial_promo) of the country to the other the principles of Shakerism were being eagerly discussed’. Evans addressed four thousand at two open-air meetings in Bradford, ‘convened by the Spiritualists (#litres_trial_promo) and largely attended by them’; other meetings followed in Bishop Auckland, Birmingham, and Manchester, the birthplace of Ann Lee, erstwhile home to Friedrich Engels, and host to such events as a ‘Spiritualists’ Vegetarian Banquet’. Yet Evans was warned by a friend that ‘I should do better (#litres_trial_promo) not to be identified with Spiritualists too much … the Shakers are in good order and famous with the public; while the Spiritualists are in unease [sic] condition than ever before’. ‘They are holding dark circles,’ Evans noted. ‘Peebles was at a house this afternoon and the spirits threw things about, and did damage – He took no part. We ignore them.’ Evans worried that spiritualists such as Emma Hardinge – one of the most famous American mediums working in England, herself sponsored by Burns, and who had sent Evans tickets for her appearance at the Albert Hall – were doing ‘harm rather than good’. And yet the link was undeniable. ‘What have Spiritualists (#litres_trial_promo) to do with Shakerism?’ Burns asked the readers of Human Nature, and answered his own question, declaring that the Shakers were ‘an illustration of the ultimate influence of Spiritualism in its highest form upon the mind of man …’ The Shaker and Shakeress – edited by Evans – also acknowledged these claims. With reports on ‘women’s rights (#litres_trial_promo) (including the right to live a virgin life)’; sleeping on the right side (so that the stomach was in the correct position for digestion); and a debate on the notion, ‘Will Shakerism (#litres_trial_promo) depopulate the world?’ the periodical bore comparison with Human Nature. It also featured miscellanea from other newspapers, such as one article on Mother Shipton, who ‘would have taken (#litres_trial_promo) high rank as a medium in our day’ and whose last couplet was especially ominous: ‘The world to an end shall come/In eighteen hundred and eighty-one’. But The Shaker too was concerned with spiritualism as an instrument of its aim ‘to inaugurate (#litres_trial_promo) Shaker Communism on British soil …’ Recruiting advertisements appeared in Shaker tracts published by Burns: ‘Single persons (#litres_trial_promo), who are free, may come at their own option, bearing in mind the important fact that SHAKERISM is “RELIGIOUS COMMUNISM”.’ Yet for all Evans’ sterling efforts and Burns’ positive public relations, few answered the call. When he sailed home from Liverpool on 24 August, the elder took with him just four recruits – and of that ‘party of proselytes (#litres_trial_promo)’, two would return to England to join the Girlingites. It was ironic that, while the Shakers had tried to stir up their land of origin through the ministry of an intellectual, adoptive American, it was an uneducated English woman who would capitalise on the new public awareness of Shakerism. For Evans, the summer of 1871 had proved an anti-climax; for Mary Ann, it marked the beginning of her most successful phase. From the start, the rather disparate party which accompanied Evans home across the Atlantic were not entirely convinced of what they were doing. James Haase was a twenty-six-year-old businessman whose wife Martha had died earlier that year at the age of thirty-one – perhaps a factor in his willingness to leave England. In his diary, Evans noted Haase’s address – 12 Cross Street, Islington – and that he was ‘a young man (#litres_trial_promo) who is the first that I have opened the testimony unto … James has just lost his wife’. It is possible that the grieving Haase was a visitor to Burns’ shop and a subscriber to spiritualism; certainly the bachelor Evans found him an attractive young man: ‘it is as easy to talk with him, as to breathe the air; I have hope that he will “be obedient to the Heavenly Mission”.’ Evans told Eldress Antoinette that ‘if things suit (#litres_trial_promo) him’ at Mount Lebanon, Haase would return to England to settle up his business: ‘His report … will be looked for with an amount of interest you can hardly realise.’ Evans had hoped for good, solid, practical recruits, with their own financial backing. ‘There is a family by the name of Stephens who are going to send a boy, sixteen, and a girl, 11. They are real business people, and engaged in co-operation. That is all I know of, except a young man about 17, who wants to come, but has not the means.’ Robert Stephens, father of eleven-year-old Annie Stephens and her sixteen-year-old stepbrother Edwin Clarke, was a socialist weaver from Manchester who had run a co-operative store in London ‘for political reasons (#litres_trial_promo)’; while their parents sorted out the sale of their business, it was agreed that Annie and Edwin would go on ahead. Reverend Alsop and his two daughters, ten and fourteen, said they would come too, and Evans also worked on a Mr Atkins, ‘a great scientific (#litres_trial_promo) man’; although a ‘bore’, Evans thought he might ‘get something useful out of him’. Another application – ‘if I wd pay (#litres_trial_promo) their passage’ – came from a family in Edinburgh. But in the event, the party was complemented by its oldest, wealthiest and most eccentric member. Fifty-three-year-old Julia Wood, born at Codsall, Staffordshire, was the third of eight children whose father had made his money from distilleries – a somewhat uneasy source which, given the temperance of the new age, may have made for family disagreements. As a young girl, Julia had exhibited a fervent spirituality, to the extent that her own family had had her confined to the Staffordshire Asylum on grounds of religious mania. Like Haase, she lived in Islington – in one of the grander Georgian terraces of Duncan Street – but was a less certain recruit: next to her address, Evans noted merely ‘thinks of going (#litres_trial_promo)’. Thus this ill-matched group of would-be Shakers arrived at Mount Lebanon, where they were greeted warmly as the vanguard of a new contingent: there was even a hymn written for them, ‘A Welcome (#litres_trial_promo) For the Company from England’. One hundred and fifty miles up the Hudson River from New York and just across the state border from Massachusetts, Mount Lebanon’s setting seemed paradisiacal. ‘Hills, mountains (#litres_trial_promo), and valleys, trees, gardens, farmhouses and farms spread around and above you in ever-varying beauty,’ wrote Henry Vincent, another Englishman who accepted an invitation from Evans, and who declared, ‘The dream of Utopia (#litres_trial_promo) is here realized … they work hard; they enjoy the fruits of their industry; they live simply and frugally. For ten years they have ceased to eat swine, or drink alcoholic drinks … Within the past forty years, the Owenite experiments in England and America have failed; but Shakerism is a living and triumphant fact.’ Such transcendentalism eluded David Brown, another young man drawn to America by Evans’ mission. A northerner of communist inclinations, Brown had heard the elder lecture at the Temperance Hall in Manchester. He listened patiently, but thought Evans took liberties with the facts: ‘He stated (#litres_trial_promo) that while every other community in America had been a failure, the Shakers alone had been a success. But this was a wrong statement. There are the German Rappites in Pennsylvania who have acquired immense wealth. There are also the Free Lovers at Oneida Creek, and others who have been very prosperous, and are established on a better basis in many respects than the Shakers. If Elder F. W. Evans had stated that there had been a falling off among the Shakers, and that he had come over to England to replenish their number, he would have come nearer the truth, but he knew better than that.’ At Mount Lebanon, Brown found his hopes fractured by reality, just as later visitors to communist states would be disabused of their utopian expectations. Brown thought the sect overdisciplined and its religious principles claustrophobic; he was also suspicious of Evans’ eagerness for publicity. ‘Whenever any person visits Mount Lebanon who is of high standing in literature, the elders are most anxious for such to write on Shakerism (#litres_trial_promo) … Elder F. W. Evans wanted me to write to Mr Burns, editor of the Medium and Daybreak, England, but I refused, saying that I wished to give it a fair trial, and then I would write.’ Brown’s account, published in Human Nature in 1876, voiced the opinion that the Shakers must wholeheartedly embrace spiritualism or perish, and was hardly likely to gather converts with its statement, ‘Shakerism is most unquestionably slavery modified’. It was a conclusion with which Burns would come to agree. David Brown’s unhappy experience may have reflected that of Julia Wood and James Haase. Of the four English visitors to Mount Lebanon, only one – Annie Stephens – found Shakerism compelling enough to become a permanent member. The others all returned to England – James Haase and Julia Wood as soon as 23 September, barely a month later. Still considering his position, Haase wrote to Evans from Islington on 8 November, complaining that his ‘trials have been (#litres_trial_promo) very severe and persecutions great from family relations. But I feel the more opposition I meet with, the firmer and more steadfast I become …’ James was evidently a passionate young man: ‘Life to me is earnest, life to me is real. I know that I am going to live for ever and am conscious that every thought and every action is moulding my character for eternity … I will follow the truth – at any cost.’ That pursuit for immortality would lead him to Mary Ann. Haase told Evans that ‘the interest manifested by the English Spiritualists to know what my experiences have been has been very interesting. The brief account I gave to the Medium brought forth many enquiries from several parts of the Country which I responded to. A brother from Manchester intends visiting me at Christmas and intends returning with me in the Spring.’ But Haase also noted that his neighbour, Miss Wood, ‘has called upon me once or twice since her return and I have visited her as often. She has grown very dissatisfied having been told by the “spirits” that she is not to go. She considers herself a lady and much more advanced than her Shaker Sisters – more refined – which I very much doubt. I felt inclined to say to her on one or two occasions whilst making frivolous objections “get thee behind me Satan’. She dwells considerably on her fortune, giving up her fortune and being placed at the wash tub.’ Evans had good reason to doubt Julia’s seriousness, but as she paid her own fare to America (the others had been subsidised by the Shakers), he had not dissuaded her, perhaps seeing in her a potential source of funds for future missions. Indeed, Evans would return to England twelve years later, but by that time the country had heard of a new and different kind of Shaker altogether. PART TWO (#ulink_1bc7de83-b14e-5020-9647-c5d3208c8ebc) O Clouds Unfold! (#ulink_1bc7de83-b14e-5020-9647-c5d3208c8ebc) The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending FOUR (#ulink_6e438a45-e986-52e6-b904-b3d04d2220cb) The Walworth Jumpers (#ulink_6e438a45-e986-52e6-b904-b3d04d2220cb) Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you. Matthew 4:11 The train from Ipswich, a steam-spewing monster, slouched into the maw of Liverpool Street where the brick arches of the terminus, newly-built over the site of the original Bethlehem Hospital, seemed to suck the visitor into the nerve-jangling immensity of the city, exciting the spirit as much as the third-class carriages had shaken the flesh. Detraining into the hot, fetid hubbub of the subterranean concourse, Mary Ann dusted down the smuts from her gown and prepared to resume her mission, not in the heart of some dark continent, but in the backstreets of London, where factory chimneys rivalled church spires for the skyline above and the fate of the souls in the lowly terraces below. The world had changed dramatically since the decade of Mary Ann’s birth, not least in the way one could move around it. It was one of the ironies of the modern world that many of those responsible for building the new railways were themselves Quakers; forbidden from swearing oaths which would admit them to professional positions, they excelled at other trades (#litres_trial_promo). It was a Quaker, George Bradshaw, who published his Railway Time Table in 1839, not for profit, but to assist his fellow man. The expanding network had standardised time itself, unifying the country and metering modern history, yet Bradshaw’s publication still bore Quaker designations – ‘First Month (#litres_trial_promo)’ instead of January, and so on – while one visitor to the Friends’ meeting house at King’s Cross found their tracts shelved on the walls like ‘the time tables (#litres_trial_promo) … in the stations of the Metropolitan Railway’. So too would Mary Ann’s mission be conducted by railway – under the tracks themselves. The myth of Mary Ann’s arrival in London, like the other stories that surround her, remains almost wilfully obscure. The Bible Christians said to have invited her were originally Primitive Methodists from East Cornwall, and therefore rural imports like the Girlingites. They too had female ministers, such as Mary Toms, a faith-healer who left Tintagel for the Isle of Wight in the 1820s and was seen ‘standing on (#litres_trial_promo) a borrowed chair one Sunday morning at East Cowes, lashed by the wind and rain’. She also claimed to have been followed down a dark lane by a ‘dimly visible (#litres_trial_promo) creature … thought by some to have been a heavenly visitant sent to protect her, but by herself to have been a diabolical creature sent to scare her’. But ‘Bible Christian’ was a term applied to a number of sects (not least the Girlingites themselves), and on closer inspection it seems more likely that Mary Ann’s invitation came from the Peculiar People, a sect founded by a fellow Suffolk preacher and erstwhile Wesleyan, William Bridges. Born in Woodbridge in 1802, Bridges had left Suffolk soon after his marriage in 1824, but his family still lived there and had probably come into contact with Girlingism, which seemed to share common ground with the Peculiar People. The ‘Plumstead Peculiars’, as they were later known, took their name from God’s commandment to Moses to lead His ‘peculiar people’. They believed in faith-healing, the anointing of oil and the power of prayer, and they opposed vaccination; in 1872 George Harry of Plumstead would be sent to Newgate Prison ‘for refusing (#litres_trial_promo) to provide medical assistance or remedies of any kind’ for his daughter Cecilia who was dying of smallpox, while his wife was summonsed by a coroner’s court for the manslaughter of their second child who had also died. In the 1830s, Bridges had set up a chapel in Gravel Lane, Kennington, but one of his followers, a cobbler named John Sirgood, extended the Peculiar Gospel to rural Sussex, assembling a congregation of two hundred in the village of Loxwood – only to attract the same antipathy which the Girlingites had suffered in Suffolk. Sirgood complained that his faithful were ‘derided, reproached, insulted (#litres_trial_promo) … thrown down into the mud … and women and children filled with terror’. One particularly terrifying night, assailants armed with bludgeons, their faces painted and ‘disguised in the most grotesque manner … beat about the house to the breaking up of the windows and the crockery, threatening the life of the Preacher’. And just as Mary Ann had left Suffolk, so by 1860, Sirgood had returned to south London. Despite their obscure history, it is clear that these part rural, part city evangelists paved the way for Mary Ann. Through their south London mission she would gain access to a new following, and in the process she would divide Bridges’ Southwark citadel. At first the Peculiar People allowed Mary Ann to preach in their chapel on Sunday evenings, where she maintained she was only the ‘Messenger’ of the Second Coming. But when she began to claim her own divinity, it proved too much for the Peculiars. Like the Methodists, they asked Mary Ann to ‘withdraw from (#litres_trial_promo) their communion’, which she did, taking many of their followers with her. As in Suffolk, she began preaching in private houses, where ‘spiritual manifestations’ took place. Emboldened by their move to the imperial capital as the Shakers had been by their American migration, the Girlingites’ fainting fits were now fully-fledged ecstasies; quivering, quaking rites. And like the Camisards before them, news of these strange phenomena attracted crowds wanting to see this woman from Suffolk, who was publicly declaring that she would not die. It was an exhortative season for the esoteric gospel. That summer, as Elder Evans hired ever larger halls to enable his words to be heard, Mary Ann acquired a new place of worship – an altogether more unconventional venue for one of the most extraordinary eruptions of religious zeal London had ever seen. In the sinful city which Cobbett had called the Great Wen, she would meet with opposition all the more violent for its metropolitan cynicism. Yet hadn’t Christ instructed his apostles to leave their fishing nets and families and follow in His footsteps? Her rural sectaries shamed the city-dwellers with their faith. Entire clans had given up their worldly goods and birthrights to be born again; and while their peers made similar migrations in pursuit of employment and wages, the Girlingites rejected work for anyone but God, and saw money as personally worthless. They placed their faith in Mary Ann. And just as her predecessor Joanna Southcott had drawn supporters to her House of God in the Elephant and Castle, so Mary Ann’s mission would operate from a railway arch off the Walworth Road. The Southcottians had proved to be pervasive in south London, where their loud orisons still brought irate neighbours out into the street. Other preachers inspired the people of Southwark, too: the evangelist Charles Spurgeon drew thousands to his Metropolitan Tabernacle at the Elephant and Castle, a theatrical auditorium with a grandiose fa?ade of Corinthian pillars still visible from today’s pink-painted roundabout. With ‘triumphant (#litres_trial_promo)’ acoustics and curving stairs ending in a deep pool where believers were baptised, the chapel was host to visitors such as John Ruskin, a resident of nearby Denmark Hall who contributed ?100 to the Tabernacle fund, and whose taste for Spurgeon’s sermons would emerge in his own apocalyptic essays, Unto this Last. In fact, the entire city seemed sensitised to new beliefs. In the teeming streets of Southwark and Bermondsey, in meeting houses in King’s Cross, in Hoxton’s dark squares and along Belgravia’s rich terraces, all manner of practitioners gathered believers to their causes. The salons of the wealthy might host after-dinner entertainment by a mesmerist or medium, while hastily-built chapels or squatted semi-industrial spaces became cells for lower-class dissent. The sheer range of creeds available to mid-Victorian Londoners was a reflection of the extent of the imperial project; in a commodified world, the choice of faiths mirrored an age of mass production. From its centre to its suburbs, the world’s biggest city encompassed Peculiar People and phrenologists, Quakers and Swedenborgians, homeopaths and hypnotists. For this cosmopolitan parish, the catchment area was the Empire itself, an ever-shifting congregation swelled by the Thames’ wide reach and supplied by the speedy railway. Here a home could be found for any belief, no matter how odd. And here was a ready-made market for Mary Ann’s offer of immortality. In that summer of 1871, a third and equally eccentric figure embarked on his own metropolitan mission. The Reverend Charles Maurice Davies was compiling a series of reports for the Daily Telegraph – ‘strictly descriptive (#litres_trial_promo) … expressing no opinion pro or con’ – on the remarkable spectrum of alternative beliefs, later to be collected in a volume entitled Unorthodox London, Or, Phases of Religious Life in the Metropolis. As a Fellow of Durham University, this sinecured cleric struck an authorial stance between a sceptic relaying the latest craze for the amusement of his Telegraph readers, and an intellectual with an interest in the strange sects sprouting up almost weekly. Like one of M. R. James’s learned professors, Davies’ religious-academic background gave a sense of authority to his narrative as he explored the city’s penumbral streets, reporting from the shadows thrown by the imperial glare. His ‘unorthodox London’ was a spiritual precursor of the colourcoded chart to be created by the radical statistician Charles Booth (on which my own street in Hoxton is coloured black and described as ‘the leading criminal (#litres_trial_promo) quarter of London and indeed of all England’). As Booth presented his socio-economic topography of the city, so Davies surveyed its dark heart of faith: ‘On the plane (#litres_trial_promo) of working from the circumference to the centre, I set off on a recent Sunday morning, resolved to make my first study at the widest possible radius, the very Ultima Thule of religious London.’ Turning the pages of his book in the British Library, with their indented type punctuated by the odd squashed fly preserved as if in amber, the clergyman’s gothic peregrinations come to life. He travelled by the newly-installed Underground, tunnelling into esoteric arenas like some clerical mole: from the Theists of the South Place Chapel ‘close to the Moorgate Street (#litres_trial_promo) Station of the Metropolitan Railway’, to ‘Colonel Wentworth Higginson (#litres_trial_promo) on Buddha’ (author of Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson had commanded one of the Black Camisard regiments in the American Civil War), taking in the Tabernacle Ranters of Newington, with their ‘loud and long (#litres_trial_promo)-continued’ hallelujahs, along the way. It was as if these nodes of unconvention were intimately connected by rail – the neural network by which their dissension spread – and on these public transport expeditions into urban anthropology, Davies’ own character and opinion emerged slyly, as though in an aside to a passenger. Ordained in 1852, Davies had served the Church in Somerset and London, but had since concentrated on writing as a career, contributing to the Western Morning News and the National Press Agency, as well as producing religious novels such as Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love Story. His true interest lay in spiritualism, however, as his skittish Maud Blount, Medium. A Story of Modern Spiritualism indicates. The book follows the adventures of ‘a splendid specimen (#litres_trial_promo) of a spoiled child’ who, as ‘a splendid specimen of womanhood, too’, discovers her psychic talents. ‘The very latest (#litres_trial_promo) novelty had been Spiritualism … Young ladies called it “charmingly dreadful”. Scientific men scoffed at it, and clergymen said it was either conjuring or the devil’, although one character – the Reverend Ball – proposes ‘these modern miracles … to be evidential just as those we find in Scripture’. It was the same justification employed by Christian spiritualists, who equated the exorcism of demons with the work of the seance table. ‘Spiritualism is (#litres_trial_promo) emphatically a question of the hour, and has been fairly described by one of its adherents to be “either a gigantic delusion or the most important subject that can possibly be broached”,’ Davies declared. And like so many, he had a personal sense of its importance. In 1865 his young son died of scarlet fever, and Davies found that spiritualism gave ‘hope at a time (#litres_trial_promo) when we are mostly hopeless’. His wife developed a facility for automatic writing, receiving messages from the guardian spirit who now cared for their little boy. Davies would spend fifteen years seeking ‘to prove unbroken continuity between the life in this world and the life beyond’, a quest in which he was guided by influential spiritualists. Despite this hidden agenda, the clergyman’s commentary was often acidulous. He found the Irvingites of Bloomsbury singular for their spirit voices and three-hour rituals, for which they adopted every colour of robe – ‘black tippets (#litres_trial_promo) … puce tippets … short surplices … coloured stoles’, while in the Swedenborgians of King’s Cross he detected other traces of spiritualism. The eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had experienced ‘a sort of middle (#litres_trial_promo) state between sleeping and waking’; a kind of permanent Near Death Experience, not the stuff of dreams, but of a spiritual ‘future life (#litres_trial_promo)’. He believed that man and angel were consubstantial, and ‘decoded (#litres_trial_promo)’ Scripture in his book, The Apocalypse Explained. An influence on writers and artists from Blake to Browning and Emerson, his presence still lingers in the Swedenborg Society, its panelled rooms presided over by his marble bust – just a street away from the site of Burns’ institution, where Davies was drawn in search of yet stranger beliefs. Having discovered the availability of ‘shilling seances (#litres_trial_promo)’ at Burns’ premises, Davies decided to attend this psychic pot-luck, where the visitor could not summon spirits at will, but had to take them as they came. As a ‘slim, artistic-looking’ young man in his early twenties played the piano, the gas was turned down and the seance began. ‘Had I been (#litres_trial_promo) altogether unused to the manners and customs of trance mediums, I should have thought that the poor young man was taken suddenly ill, for he turned up his eyes and wriggled about in his chair … in the most alarming manner.’ One ‘simpering voice’ belonged to ‘Maria Crook, late of the Crown and Can, Clerkenwell, and now of Highgate Cemetery’; another to a navvy who had worked on the south London drains; and when a third declared, ‘I never break (#litres_trial_promo) my word, sir; Thomas Paine never did whilst on earth’, Davies deduced ‘that we had been listening to the voice of the author of the “Age of Reason,” redivivus’. ‘It does certainly (#litres_trial_promo) seem remarkable that such things should be going on amid the very roar of Holborn in this nineteenth century,’ Davies concluded; and in that pioneering vein, he set off on another foray, this time to Hackney to visit a medium who claimed to be able to produce ‘spirit-faces’: ‘a pretty, Jewish-like little girl’ of sixteen ‘managed’ by her father at their home in the eastern suburb. It was an authentically bizarre scene. ‘Little Miss Blank (#litres_trial_promo)’ sat inside a ‘sort of corner cupboard … like a pot of jam or a pound of candles’ with a rope on her lap, while the rest of the party sat round, ‘grown-up children waiting for the magic lantern’. As the gathering – which included the editor of a spiritualist journal, a country doctor and an elderly gentleman from Manchester – sang spiritualist hymns, the cupboard doors opened to reveal ‘pretty Miss Blank tied round the neck, arms, and legs to the chair, in a very uncomfortable and apparently secure manner’. The knots were sealed and the cupboard shut again, leaving an opening at the top, like that in a seaside Punch and Judy show. After some delay a face rose gently to the aperture rather far back, but presently came well to the front. It was slightly pale, and the head was swathed in white drapery. The eyes were fixed, and altogether it looked ghostly. It remained for some time, disappeared and re-appeared; and the lamp was turned full upon it, but the eyes never lost their fixed stare, and showed no symptom of winking. After several minutes it went altogether. The cupboard was then opened and its inmate revealed still tightly bound, the seals unbroken. The exhausted girl was taken into the garden for a walk to revive her, and repeated the process three times that evening, summoning a ‘Parsee doctor (#litres_trial_promo)’ with a turban and a ‘decidedly Eastern expression of countenance and dark complexion’, and another face, ‘still surmounted by white drapery, but a black band was over the forehead, like a nun’s hood. The teeth were projecting, and the expression of the face sad. They fancied it was a spirit that was pained at not being recognized.’ The spirit guide, Katie, invited Davies to touch her face and hand after asking him, ‘Do you squeeze?’ Assuring her he ‘did not do anything so improper’, Davies was permitted his ‘manipulations’. The image of this bound and closeted girl recalls Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Despair’, for which she shut her adoptive daughter Cyllene in a cupboard in order to reproduce an authentic expression of terror when she was let out. There was something unsettling about this passive girl and her audience of men: a scene of contained violence and sexuality, pitched somewhere between circus sideshow and a vision of the unknown. Davies, ‘sufficiently struck’ to attend another seance at that address, wondered whether he had really been ‘in direct contact with supernatural beings or simply taken in by one of the most satisfactory “physical mediums” it was ever my good fortune to meet’. His suspicions were well founded. The young girl was Florence Cook, whose spirit guide, Katie King, was said to be the daughter of the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan. Nine years later, in the rooms of the British National Association of Spiritualists, Sir George Sitwell, father of the famous literary trio, would squeeze Katie’s hand, and in the process prove that the ‘vivacious and apparently (#litres_trial_promo) youthful ghost’ was ‘a common cheat’. Even then, many refused to believe that Katie was composed of anything other than ectoplasm. Yet astounding as Florence Cook’s manifestations were, Davies’ annals of the Victorian uncanny were about to produce even more extraordinary scenes as he went south of the river and into another enclosed space. This time it was to the very belly of the city’s industrial catacombs, where the fraudulent met the faithful and where those who could not afford even ‘shilling seances’ might pursue the quest for life after death; a place where believers might yet be reborn, never to die again. ‘Sect-hunting (#litres_trial_promo), like misery, makes a man acquainted with strange companions, and familiarises him with strange experiences,’ wrote Davies, ‘but of all the religious phenomena with which I had yet been brought into contact, the latest and certainly the very strangest, have been those connected with the “Jumpers” at Walworth – the Bible Christians, or Children of God …’ Having been tipped off about these odd goings-on, Davies proceeded ‘to a certain railway arch in Sutherland Street, Walworth Road, beneath which … I had been given to understand that the Bible Christians gathered thrice a week to listen to the preaching of an inspired woman from Suffolk’. Walworth Road was then, as it is now, a bustling thoroughfare leading south from the Elephant and Castle and running parallel with the railway from Blackfriars. Leading off the broad strand of shops, businesses and trams were narrow residential streets clustered with terraces of newly-built villas. Those on Sutherland Street were tall, not without some pretensions, and led to the enclave of Sutherland Square, with its ornate railings and miniature oval park. Most residents would have worshipped at St Peter’s, whose domed tower, designed by Sir John Soane, cast its graceful shadow over the area; an orthodox venue compared to the sensational Spurgeon Tabernacle up the road. This was the inner city parish Mary Ann chose to colonise. Davies was told that the Girlingites had been in existence for seven years, and now numbered more than two hundred. Their place of worship was leased from the London Chatham & Dover Railway by Samuel Burrows, a Girlingite and kinsman of William Bridges. Burrows, who lived in Walworth, may have been responsible for inviting Mary Ann to London: he and unnamed ‘others (#litres_trial_promo)’ had registered the arch for ‘Divine service’. It may have been down a back street, but the arch was easy to find. By 6.30 pm a mob had already gathered round the roughtarred hoarding at the entrance, where a lone doorman was admitting the crowd one by one. ‘Young Walworth (#litres_trial_promo) in the shape of ragged shock-headed boys and draggle-tailed girls, was rigidly excluded’; the local dandy-ruffians known as the New Cut swells got in only by ‘considerable manoeuvring and no little physical persuasion’. Negotiating planks laid over mud, Davies entered the arch, which smelt of the stables next door and was boarded up with an assortment of window-sashes partly smashed by ‘the missiles of the Walworth Gentiles’. A few forms and planks faced a green baize table on which stood two cups and a collecting box; a sole gas pipe ran the length of the arch, ‘whence descended two burners that shed a dim if not exactly a religious light …’ It was a weird sight, this gloomy cavern, lit with flickering flames. A century later such arches would house car workshops or illicit nightclubs; now, this subterranean temple – a negative void in the no-man’s-land formed by the railway’s onward march – was charged with expectation. Part sacred space, part profane sanctuary beyond the jurisdiction of the common law, its barrel-vaults and restive audience echoed those of the music halls whose limelight illuminated other feats of Victorian entertainment. By now the arch was filled with ‘fustian-clad men, women in about the proportion of two to one man, and babies in more than adequate force’. The swells – who declined to remove their hats – sat at the back, talking loudly. The crowd craned their heads, waiting for the show to begin. There was a ripple of excitement as the ‘Jumpers’ made their entrance, greeting each other with the kiss of charity – ‘no half-and-half stage salute, but a good whacking kiss’ – to the amusement of the swells, who ‘proceeded at once to imitate the sound, and to remark audibly, “Ain’t it nice?”’. Then, as seven o’clock struck, Mary Ann entered, her appearance all the more remarkable within this wayside grotto. Taking the stage with the drama of an actress, she presented a potent combination for an age which demanded entertainment with its religion; the bizarre venue and its rag-tag congregation invested her with a sense of revelation. Here was a woman who claimed divine inspiration, an extraordinary assertion to make – yet more so in a railway arch in south London in 1871 – but Mary Ann drew on all the visionaries in whose footsteps she walked, a demotic parade of mystics and charlatans, believers and deceivers. She was a messiah for an industrial age, borne here to redeem the wicked city – even as the London to Dover train rattled overhead. She was not, however, quite what Reverend Davies had expected. The figure he saw resembled less a seeress than one of those suburban mediums in whose vaguely disreputable company he had dallied. Dressed in a red merino gown and a ‘somewhat jaunty black bonnet’, to Davies she appeared to be a ‘tall, thin, Suffolk peasant woman, of middle age, with high cheek-bones and piercing eyes’ (elsewhere ascribed with a ‘peculiar bright gleam (#litres_trial_promo)’ and an ‘almost unnatural lustre’ when excited). Davies’ pathological description seemed to have some pre-knowledge of Mary Ann’s past, as though her mission were written on her face. ‘She had a large (#litres_trial_promo) prominent mouth with projecting teeth, and the muscles around the jaw bore that peculiar appearance often observed in habitual speakers, being strongly developed, and giving a sort of animal appearance to the lower portion of the face’ (others saw her thin lips as ‘betokening (#litres_trial_promo) an energetic and excitable temperament’). Flanked by the loyal Eliza Folkard, ‘a young, good-looking girl of twenty’, and Harry Osborne, ‘an inane-visaged man in a broadcloth coat and corduroys’, Mary Ann asked – in a ‘somewhat affected tone’ – that anyone who could not stay until nine o’clock should leave at once, as the door would be closed and no exit allowed until then. This confinement was necessary ‘on account of the outsiders, whose noisy clamours for admittance combine with the frequent passage of trains to mar the tranquillity of the evening’. It was religious worship determined by railway timetable and human interruption, although in her airs and graces, Mary Ann was quite equal to the heckles of the New Cut swells: ‘I had heard … of the superior wisdom of the Londoners, but if this be London wisdom commend me to my Suffolk ignorance.’ As another observer noted drily, it was a voice ‘that could have (#litres_trial_promo) been well heard in a place much larger than a railway arch’. Apologising for the ‘ill-convenience (#litres_trial_promo)’ of the venue, Mary Ann called for a prayer from Eliza, ‘who lifted one hand and prayed with a fervour and a certain rough but gentle eloquence for ten minutes’; Davies was reminded of Dinah Morris, the Wesleyan preacher in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. He was less impressed by Osborne’s oration. Mary Ann herself ‘prayed volubly, and used her long arms freely in gesticulation’, which to Davies resembled mesmeric passes, ‘but in this I was probably mistaken’. The reverend summed up the sect’s tenets for the benefit of his Telegraph readers. ‘Now it must be premised that the distinguishing doctrine of these Children of God is the assurance that they will never die,’ he noted. ‘Belief not only does away with previous sin, but exempts them from bodily death. The Lord is to come speedily and gather them to Himself, without the previous process of dissolution. From the date of their conversion, in fact, they are immortal. They die at conversion, and die no more.’ Where the Quakers ‘were often (#litres_trial_promo) believed to have claimed to raise from the dead when they only meant that they had effected a conversion’, and where Swedenborg experienced a ‘future life’ between life and death, Mary Ann said that her followers had never ‘given the undertaker a job yet, and didn’t mean to’. ‘Why did Lazarus come back?’ she asked her congregation. ‘Because he had got a return ticket,’ someone shouted. Riding the laughter and the noise of the trains, Mary Ann answered, ‘No; he never was dead. He had died before …’ As she spoke, Davies noticed ‘more than one lady subside into an apparently comatose condition’ with ‘a peculiar twitching of the limbs, and an expression of face like that which I have observed on the features of the mesmerised … what mesmerisers call “the superior condition”’. The women woke up at the end of the sermon ‘as though nothing had happened’. It was time for a performance, and the Jumpers duly obliged. Two young girls got up and began to dance, ‘much in the same way as they might do if a grinding-organ had struck up an appropriate air’. These infant phenomena were then joined by a young man aged about eighteen: it seemed to Davies that their strangely vacant expressions were ‘suggestive of animal magnetism’, and he could only conclude there was more than mere abandon in their antics. It was as though they drew on some primal energy within the modern city, whose darker alleys could still encompass such mysteries as Spring-heeled Jack, a caped ghoul breathing fire in its own devilish leaping; or later, Jack the Ripper, an apocalyptic, sacrificial reaper stalking the harlot-strewn streets. In such places residual belief sought shamans to counter evil times, and Mary Ann offered an alternative to the shackles of working-class life. On engaging a ‘respectable woman’ in conversation, Davies was told, ‘Every member of this sect, upon conversion, undergoes death – an actual process analogous to physical death, and exactly corresponding with it in external signs, only that it is not permanent.’ Even for a man accustomed to mediums summoning the dead, this was a remarkable development. ‘Some die very hard, in great agony,’ said the woman, ‘others quite peacefully. Only then would they ‘jump’; and like the Shakers, ‘once under the influence, it may recur at any moment’. In order to obtain the complete gift, ‘probationary believers (#litres_trial_promo)’ had to embrace celibacy; this would ensure their immortality. This was no allegorical state, no erudite metaphor teased out from biblical texts by a learned parson; it was the literal truth: ‘Once dead (#litres_trial_promo), not only will they die no more, but they suffer no pain, they feel no sorrow.’ The Children of God believed they had discovered the secret of eternal life, and in a world in which death was a daily fact, this promise was beyond prize and almost beyond imagination. Suspended in their state of grace, they awaited the millennium. Where Ann Lee had lain for hours ‘with but little (#litres_trial_promo) appearance of life’ before her own rebirth, Mary Ann’s Children emerged from their comas into the bright light of an assured place in heaven. Like Ann Lee, Mary Ann was living out a biblical narrative of her own. Why should she not be a prophet of modern times? After all, if Scripture was a battleground over which faiths had fought for centuries, then her exegesis looked back to the original, Primitive Church. It was as if she had only just discovered the Word of God (as indeed she had), and was now a missionary in her own country. And where the Shakers had believed they were living ‘in the Resurrection (#litres_trial_promo) Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’, here in Walworth Christ’s coming was divined daily, to a timetable set by Mrs Girling, as though that railway arch were a portal through which some spiritual steam engine might take them all into another world. When James J. Morse attended his first spiritualist meeting in Whitechapel in 1868, he found himself ‘endowed with (#litres_trial_promo) another personality … I shouted, rolled around the room, I swore, and … the more I tried not to do these things, the more perfectly were they accomplished!’ After three-quarters of an hour the fit subsided, and he ‘sank exhausted upon a settee’. As a connoisseur of such events, Davies equated the altered states of mesmerism and spiritualism with the Jumpers’ ecstasy (in its original meaning, exstasis, to stand outside oneself), although when he interviewed Mary Ann, she was eager to disown such comparisons. Nevertheless, Davies was convinced that ‘whatever be (#litres_trial_promo) the origin of the so-called mesmeric condition, the same is the cause of “jumping”. The magnetic “sleep-walking” may be produced without contact or passes … and religious excitement is certainly an adequate cause to produce such an effect.’ The vexed question of whether Mary Ann hypnotised her followers would haunt her mission – and produce new accusations of witchcraft. That night in the railway arch, one woman who had been ‘grimacing and gesticulating in a slightly idiotic manner, jumped up and joined the dance. Her demeanour, however, was anything but happy; she prayed as in an unknown tongue, and called out “The devil! the devil!”’ Davies was told by his confidante, ‘Yes, there is something wrong. You see when they are in that state they have the gift of prophecy and clear vision. She can see the state of those around.’ Perhaps, like the Shakers, the Girlingites could see the dead walking – although Davies offered the explanation that, like the onlookers who had spoiled Dr Emes’s resurrection from Bunhill Fields, the New Cut swells had ‘“disturbed the conditions”… as the spiritists would say … When deprecating to me any use of mesmerism or chloroform, the minister said, “I wish I had been able to use the one or the other once or twice tonight”.’ The reference to anaesthesia was apposite. Hypnotism and chloroform were seen to induce bodily abandonment beyond the control of consciousness; both evoked notions of surrender and perhaps violation (in 1865, Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, had been accused of ‘chloroforming’ a young patient before seducing her), and spiritualists and mesmerists were accused of taking sexual advantage of their entranced subjects. Similarly, Mary Ann would stand accused of moral transgression when her followers danced themselves into unconsciousness and ‘death’, as if experiencing the petite mort of sexual ecstasy. For a world which would be shocked by the waltz, it was little wonder that such rites were regarded with suspicion and fascination. This peasant woman had imported pagan ways into the city and had thrown the formalised choreography of polite society into uninhibited abandon; these diseased fits presaged the St Vitus-like jerks of jazz dancers yet to come: one newspaper compared the Jumpers’ rituals to ‘a performance between (#litres_trial_promo) a nigger break-down and the jig of the wandering Savoyards that we see in our streets’. Or perhaps their terpsichorean excesses were fuelled by narcotics imported from the Orient to the nearby docklands of the East End, where the exports were said to include the drugged and abducted young women of the white slave trade. In Davies’ conspiratorial narrative, cloaked in mystery like a clerical detective novel, anything might be possible, and the plot deepened with an invitation to a private meeting at an address given to him in confidence by his Girlingite friend. Here, he was promised, ‘deaths’ were more frequent – perhaps because they were conducted out of range of the swells’ ridicule, and more lethal antipathies: ‘Some of the men (#litres_trial_promo) wait for our brothers and almost kill them’, Davies was told. South London was a wild place, as the clergyman found for himself on leaving the rented railway arch. ‘It took two policemen to get us quietly out … lest some honest Walworthian should mistake me for a “brother”.’ With that somewhat edgy exit, the reverend concluded his account, for the time being. London was undergoing a transformation. Vast new buildings were rising at its centre like new geological formations, from the gothic cliffs of Kensington’s Natural History Museum – built by the Quaker, Alfred Waterhouse – to Charles Barry’s Italianate canyons of Portland stone along Whitehall, and the jagged stalagmites of Westminster. It was a city skyline newly framed by medieval crenellations; Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras, seen romantically against a fiery sunset like some gigantic monastery out of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, was in fact a modern hotel undercoursed by grinding locomotives and commuters hurrying through its tiled caverns. The entire metropolis was in a state of reinvention; one giant construction site for secular cathedrals dedicated to the imperial saints of science, technology, governance and capital. So too Mary Ann’s arrival had seen an extension in her mission, as if London’s burgeoning architecture encouraged her to produce yet more extraordinary effects. But hers was a spiritual phalanx populated by her Children of God, and unlike the leviathan monuments which her fellow Victorians were erecting, it did not need a grand temple to state its certainties. The Girlingites’ rites were conducted underneath those constructions, in the dead space which progress had left behind – a vacuum filled by their immortal faith. Mary Ann lodged with a family in Chelsea (possibly apostates of the Peculiar People), whose twenty-four-year-old daughter Violet was chosen, like Eliza Folkard, to receive the ‘gift of the Spirit (#litres_trial_promo)’. Having accompanied her parents to Walworth to hear Mary Ann speak, Violet fell unconscious to the floor where she remained for two hours, then suddenly she began to speak under inspiration, prophesying ‘great and terrible judgements from God’ on anyone who refused to accept Mrs Girling’s message. Violet declared that she too would leave her family and follow Mary Ann wherever she went. Her conversion – which went one step further than the Peculiar People’s gospel of salvation, and resembled the trance-like fervour of the young Shakeress instruments – was a cornerstone in the Girlingites’ mission. It became a talisman for Mary Ann’s followers, raising their sense of identity and encouraging new converts. That winter at Walworth, Violet’s visions had a galvanising effect. Many exhibited similar manifestations in the services, which attracted up to three hundred people – as well as the attention of the press. Crowds milling around the arch had swollen tenfold to two or three thousand, and the South London Press in particular followed the ‘extraordinary proceedings … among the “Shakers” at Walworth’ – reports all the more notable for their comparison of the Girlingites with the American sect. Next to an article on ‘Mr Spurgeon’s Return (#litres_trial_promo) to South London’ (from Rome, where ‘the Papal system [was] as full of idolatry as ever Hindooism was’), the journalist ‘C.E.P.’ posed the question, ‘What is a Shaker?’ It was one which would ‘naturally be asked by those who have not read Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America”’ – or perhaps by those who had attended one of Frederick Evans’ lectures that summer – and it might be difficult to answer ‘were it not for the fact that in South London, scarcely a hundred yards from the Walworth-road station, is the meeting-house of a Shaker community, where the inquirer may see with his own eyes …’ Arriving at Sutherland Street for a Sunday morning service, C.E.P. found Mary Ann seated behind her green baize table, a cup of tea at her side ‘with which she occasionally refreshed herself’. The atmosphere was electric. Despite the winter weather it was hot and stuffy inside, and the correspondent watched as a group bent over a heavy-looking youth who lay in his companion’s arms. Two young women had their arms around the boy’s neck and were mumbling in excited, incoherent tongues. They then jumped up to dance, twirling and twisting ‘as if they were bitten by the tarantula’ (it was no coincidence that the poisonous spider also lent its name to a leaping mania and a feverish Italian dance). All the while another young man with slicked-back hair and a sickly smile dabbed at their faces with a handkerchief, helping an ‘unhealthy-looking girl’ out of her jacket when she grew too hot. C.E.P. was particularly disgusted by ‘a pale child of stunted growth’ and the way she threw her head back over her shoulder ‘and cast her eyes upwards, until almost nothing but the whites were visible … one almost felt tempted to jump up and rescue the silly fools …’ But the dance went on. One girl began to stagger with her eyes closed and ‘a wild unmeaning smile on her features’, her cheeks ‘streaked with white and red patches’; another respectably-dressed man in his fifties danced on one leg. The two young women had grabbed hold of the recumbent youth’s head and were pulling his face towards them, kissing him violently as he submitted in a placid, cow-like manner’. The Brueghel-like scene was completed by a dark, swarthy man who performed like a dancing bear, his appearance ‘as if … mesmerized’ and his face ‘more like that of a corpse’. Evidently Mary Ann felt some explanation was necessary for this bizarre circus. She told the audience that the spirit of the Lord had a quickening effect. ‘Ah’, she said, ‘if you could get people to do this, you might shut up all your dancing places.’ Then she declared that ‘Parents have (#litres_trial_promo) a difficulty to get their children to places of worship; we have nothing of that kind; so far from it, we can’t keep our children away. They like dancing, and cry to come.’ To others, however, the presence of children in these rites – like that of adolescent mediums – was worrying, and would lead to questions about the Girlingites’ treatment of their youngest and most vulnerable members. One ‘matron of some (#litres_trial_promo) 35 years’ attested that ‘having once died the relation of a husband and wife ceases: A wife is ever after a housekeeper – nothing more’; while the preacher that night – probably Harry Osborne – declared, ‘My sisters, if your desire be to your husbands, I pray you let it be so no more; for every child born is the offspring of lust!’ The sect had inverted the relationship between adult and child; by surrendering to Mary Ann’s control, they gave up responsibility for their own lives and became Children of God, leaving their offspring to be moulded in the Girlingite faith. Later, it seems, they would adopt orphans, as well as caring for children whose parents had joined but then left the sect; these young members would ensure a new generation for the celibate Family. Their role in such wild scenes was discomforting – especially when they made the front page of the Illustrated Police News (a consequence of the fact that the local police station stood directly behind Sutherland Street). The front page of the issue for January 1872 was a Grand Guignol display of a man eaten by rats, a lion tamer killed by his charges, and a violent poaching ‘affray’. Set below these exhibits in a graphic predella, as though caught in a photographer’s stark magnesium flash, were thrilling glimpses of the arch, with the figure of Mary Ann presiding over two dancers almost levitating in their ecstasy. Such voyeuristic images made the Jumpers’ chapel look more like Bedlam; and although the sect may have regarded their place of worship as an asylum in the other sense of the word, their disruptive presence was not beyond the law – whether used for or against them. In a rerun of their Suffolk trials, the Girlingites now appeared in London’s courts, and at Lambeth on 8 February 1872, an Edward Ball was charged with ‘indecent behaviour (#litres_trial_promo) in a certain chapel of the religious denomination called Bible Christians’. The magistrate, Mr Chance, heard how the ‘excitement and turmoil’ at the arch necessitated a constant police presence from the nearby station to maintain order. The sect had decided to prosecute Ball, having been ‘so much annoyed by parties interfering with them for some time’. Samuel Burrows maintained theirs were ‘manifestations’, not dances, and an integral part of their worship. Then Harry Osborne testified that he travelled with ‘the female speaker’. This did not sound entirely respectable. Mr Chance: What do you mean by travelling with her? Witness: We go about reading the word of God. Mr Chance: Do you live with her? Witness: I live in the same house. Now came Mary Ann’s court debut. ‘… Gurling [sic]… said her husband allowed her to travel about, which she had done for six years. She now travelled with the witness Osborn [sic] and a young girl from the country, who were helpers in the work.’ Edward Ball was allowed to cross-examine his accuser: Defendant: Are you not called the ‘Shakers’? Witness (sternly): Some may call us so. Asked to explain their manifestations, Mary Ann said, ‘When they take place I have no power. It is when they feel the word of God, and when it falls on them they remain in an unconscious state for a time, followed by a quickening effect which turns to a dance.’ Fired by the laughter which greeted this statement, she confronted the mockers with their own mortality: ‘All who dance have passed from death to life, and if you read the Bible you will understand it to be so.’ This was met with a sharp intake of breath. ‘Well, I am at present in the depths of darkness concerning it,’ said Mr Chance. ‘When are the dancers supposed to die?’ ‘They do not dance for dancing sake,’ said Mary Ann, ‘but it is the spirit of God moved them. I can tell when they pass from death to life by the symptoms. There is always some indication, such as their not being able to move. I have known some upwards of seven hours passing from the old state of Adam to the new.’ Inspector Fife of P Division told the magistrate that he had seen a crowd of some five hundred trying to gain entry to the arch. Despite the ‘sad delusion’ of its inhabitants, it was registered as a place of worship and had the right to be protected as such, Mr Chance conceded; but he also advised ‘sensible people’ to keep away from the place. As they left the court late that night, the Girlingites ‘were scrutinized in a most unenviable manner’. With Mary Ann’s court appearance came the first reports of her millenarian message to the metropolis, ‘to the effect that the end of all things was at hand and that she was to gather together the “hundred and forty and four thousand” who are to meet the Lord at His second coming …’ It was a reiteration of Southcott’s call to the ‘sealed’ of the Apocalypse. Meanwhile the South London Press reported on another local inhabitant with an interest in eschatology: ‘Why Mr Ruskin (#litres_trial_promo) leaves Denmark Hill: Frankenstein flying from monsters of his own creation is the character Mr John Ruskin declares he now personates.’ Twenty years previously the author of The Stones of Venice had helped revive gothic architecture; now he protested, ‘I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between here and Bromley, and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin-and-bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals …’ As an habitu? of Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and the Camden Chapel on Walworth Road, Ruskin must have known of the Girlingites; although with their enemies outnumbering friends in the area, they too were on the move. The residents of Sutherland Square complained that the streets were ‘infested, from (#litres_trial_promo) 6 o’clock until after 9, by a swarm of overgrown boys … hooting and shouting every time a member of the sect passed in or out’, and by April Mary Ann had switched her operation to Salisbury Row, Lock’s Fields, near the Old Kent Road, where she took a room in a private house. Her landlord soon regretted the lease. On Tuesday nights, when the sect assembled, the house was besieged by ‘a crowd of women (#litres_trial_promo) fearful lest their husbands should be converted and become “dead” to them in the flesh’. These wives ‘smashed every pane of glass in the windows, tore up the palings round the house’, shouting ‘Down with the Shakers!’ and ‘No more dead-alive husbands!’ It was, in its way, an augury of the prostitutes who would demonstrate outside the Old Bailey during Oscar Wilde’s trial. Mary Ann now assumed the title of Mother, as had Ann Lee, an action which symbolically coincided with the conversion of her own son, William Walter, now seventeen, to the cause. The comparison with the Shakers was also underlined by two more new recruits: James Haase and Julia Wood, newly returned from Mount Lebanon. They were important additions. Haase brought (#litres_trial_promo) his business sense to this English eruption of religious communism – perhaps with the prospect of gathering the Children of God for Elder Evans – while Miss Wood’s money would finance their establishment as a community. When told of the poverty of the followers back in Suffolk – where Mary Ann’s mission had continued in her absence, a kind of holding bay of the faithful as converts awaited her confirmation – Wood acquired a home for the Girlingites at 107 Battersea Bridge Road. Here, by the banks of the river Thames, was a London Mount Lebanon, founded by ‘the first twelve’, the dozen Suffolk elders who sought to follow the lives of the apostles. For their neighbours, however – who included the congregation of a Wesleyan chapel and William D. Sumner, a professor of music – the arrival of this commune, preceded by reports of riots and court cases, was probably as welcome as that of a bail hostel in a modern suburb. In April 1872, Mrs Dawe, the wife of a mechanic living at 4 Agate Street, Walworth, told Lambeth court that her husband ‘had for some (#litres_trial_promo) weeks belonged to the “Shakers”. He had not entirely left her, but had ceased cohabitation, and she believed he would shortly proceed with the party to America.’ The case was heard by Mr Chance, who was becoming all too familiar with south London’s sects (two months later he would direct one of the Peculiar People ‘to have his (#litres_trial_promo) son vaccinated on pain of a fine of 2/6’). The magistrate told Mrs Dawe that he could hardly interfere between man and wife, despite her protests: ‘What she had (#litres_trial_promo) witnessed on Sunday week, when she went with her husband, was quite shocking, and enough to outrage any decent woman. She saw men and women embracing one another for a quarter of an hour at a time …’ When her husband came home, he ‘looked vacant, and seemed lost, and took no notice of anything. He had what the “Shakers” called “died”, and had passed from death to “newness of life”,’ and she feared he was about to leave for America. The recruitment of Evans’ erstwhile acolytes seemed to encourage such ideas: the lure of the New World as a religious refuge held as good in the 1870s as it had in the 1770s, and perhaps – with Julia Wood’s patronage – Mary Ann even considered a Girlingite exodus across the Atlantic, just as John Hocknell had financed the Shakers’ move. In the event, however, theirs was only a trek up the Old Kent Road. The equally familiar figure of Inspector Fife told the court that the sect had ‘received notice to leave Sunderland Street, and on Thursday would open Milton Hall, near a railway station’. Although he would remain with Mary Ann for the next ten years at least, James Haase was ambivalent about Girlingism, as if he could not quite bring himself to embrace its more extreme tenets. That May, a labourer named John Tyseen was charged with using abusive language to Haase. In court Haase claimed that he was not a member of the group, and ‘did not altogether (#litres_trial_promo) agree with the worship of dancing’. It was a disclaimer which, with its overtones of Peter’s denial of Christ, seemed to echo Mary Ann’s generally equivocal relationship to the Shakers. What did she know of the American sect with which she was associated? Did she draw on their beliefs in the same way as she had parasitised the Peculiar People? Her new recruits must have discussed their experiences at Mount Lebanon with Mary Ann; it is even possible that she had attended one of Evans’ lectures, although there is no trace of any encounter. The connexion, as indisputable as it is in one respect, is at the same time comprehensively denied. It is one reason why Mary Ann remains such an elusive figure. Even now, the influence of the Shakers on Girlingism is impossible to pin down. The English sect left almost no records of its own, and those accounts which survive in the press are often wanton in their reporting, compounding the errors of others. In the search for sensation, the complicated lines of millenarian genealogy were obscured, not least through Mary Ann’s own publicity-worthy assertions. For editors, it was easy to associate the two sects, especially as Mary Ann’s arrival in London had coincided with the advent of Elder Evans; just as Girlingism was associated with spiritualism, for the same reasons. In the wake of Hepworth Dixon’s New America and the comic sketches of Artemus Ward – a popular cartoonist who had also visited the Shakers – it was assumed Mary Ann was a Shaker and perhaps even American herself. The confusion was encouraged by the way in which the Girlingites were seen through the filter of popular culture, and remarks about Mary Ann’s apparently American accent and dress and the transatlantic mannerisms of her followers were rooted in this media confusion. Even to informed observers, it seemed plain that Girlingism drew on the same kind of itinerant preachers and radical sectaries who had sought refuge in the New World. Ann Lee’s struggle had been one of Manichean polarities, a narrative of pioneering faith. Mary Ann’s fate, as related in the press, would follow a similar trajectory. But hers was a distorted drama enacted, not in a colonial wilderness, but under the sophisticated surveillance of the imperial metropolis. Her mission was compromised by the burgeoning press and accelerating means of communication, as if the century itself sped her story to its inevitable d?nouement. Back at Shaker headquarters, word of Mary Ann’s ambitions had reached the Society, which moved swiftly to deny the impostors, as The Times announced: ‘We have received from Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon … a communication disclaiming on the part of his community all connexion with a sect known as “the Walworth Shakers”, but whose proper cognomen, according to Elder Evans, “would appear to be Jumpers or Bible Christians”.’ Evans may have been concerned at the effect on his own recruitment drive, but his protest underlined other paradoxes. Where the Americans had become regularised in their rituals, the Girlingites were wilder, more passionate, like the early Shakers, or the Quakers. It was as if they were re-enacting Mother Ann’s Work – and gaining the kind of support which Evans had hoped for. Indeed, had Girlingism been a little more practical, its satellite communities, which would spring up in the Isle of Wight and Bristol, might have seen a national network to rival the Shaker families of America. ‘Had she been (#litres_trial_promo) supported by men of similar calibre to those who followed Ann Lee, and Joanna Southcott, there can be no doubt but that her work would have continued like the Shakers, and the Christian Israelites,’ observed one contemporary. But the times were already moving too fast. From the outset there was a sense of a lost cause to Mary Ann’s mission, undermined, ironically, by her distinct lack of insight and administrative ability: ‘she … would not permit any interference with her absolute rule of affairs, or allow any practical person to organise the Family on sound economic principles’. The chaos in the Walworth arch had been emblematic of the essential anarchy of the Children of God. They looked forward to the millennium, but not to the immediate future. Instead, Mary Ann insisted on her immortality – an ultimately fatal mechanism – and at the same time rejected identification with the Shakers: to do otherwise would be to acknowledge another messiah. It was a crucial component in the creation of Mary Ann’s myth: she sought to obscure parallels and influences in order to make her own appearance that much more remarkable (while on a personal level, she may have been envious of Evans and antipathetic towards his masculine erudition). Although Mary Ann seemed at times to be a reincarnation of Ann Lee – and all the other prophetesses before her – for her onceorphaned, now reborn Children, there was only one Mother. And so it would remain, until they were made orphans once more. It was left to Julia Wood, who had first-hand knowledge of both creeds, to make the distinctions. ‘The American Shakers (#litres_trial_promo) believe in Christ only as a prophet and a great man,’ she told The Times, ‘the followers of Girling believe in Him as God-man.’ ‘On the other hand,’ observed the newspaper, ‘dancing, celibacy, and community of goods are common to both sects’, and, indulging in its own little pun, it predicted that it would not be easy ‘to shake off the name’. Mary Ann’s comments were rather more disingenuous: ‘She believed (#litres_trial_promo) there was a sect of the name in America, but she had never been there and she knew nothing about them … She and her friends were more like the Quakers, but they preferred to be called the children of God …’ Nonetheless, the Girlingites and the Shakers continued to be connected, often in a manner which reflected well on neither. One commentator on the Walworth Jumpers quoted from Charles Dickens’ 1842 visit to Mount Lebanon which, like Brown and Hawthorne’s accounts, contradicted the rosy pastoral portraits of that New England paradise. The novelist particularly disliked Shaker chairs, which ‘partook so strongly (#litres_trial_promo) of the general grimness, that one would have much rather sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to them’. His greater complaint was philosophic, however. Like Hawthorne, Dickens saw Shakerism as forever living in the shadow of an apocalyptic future rather than rejoicing in the pragmatic present; and where Evans’ Autobiography of a Shaker, and Revelation of The Apocalypse (with an Appendix) had the epigram, ‘The spirit searcheth (#litres_trial_promo) all things, yea, the deep things of God’, Dickens declared, ‘I so abhor (#litres_trial_promo), and from my soul detest that bad spirit … which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave …’ That struggle for spiritual integrity had its casualties back in Walworth, where the Girling whirlwind had left the Peculiar People and John Sirgood in disarray. Sirgood had initially been won over by Mary Ann, and that August had written, ‘I do not think (#litres_trial_promo) any of them knows what the power in the soul is but the woman that is their chief …’ Like some vampire, Mary Ann fed on the Peculiar People, seducing them with her promise of immortality; the glamour of Girlingism put Bridges’ beliefs in the shade, and ‘those who believed the new docrine are of course getting the joy’, observed Harriet Sirgood. She attended a meeting ‘under the Arch’, where Mary Ann pressed the urgency of gathering the 144,000: ‘You better make haste, don’t wait for others or the number will be made and the Saviour come.’ Harriet watched as one member ‘died’ at the meeting and was still unconscious at ten o’clock. Her husband now felt that he had been ‘led astray’ by Mary Ann, and saw her as an equivalent of the vision of Satan as an angel of light which had once appeared to him. It was as if he feared for his own attraction to Mary Ann: ‘the more I gave place to her the less I felt towards others, which caused me to see that it was a deception of the devil come closer to me than ever before’. William Bridges went so far as to claim: ‘They had even (#litres_trial_promo) brought the tar to tar the woman over; to set fire to her but was prevented.’ It was a potent vision of violence: Mary Ann in flames, a tarred but not feathered witch, a blackened angel, her gown afire, too late for any Human Nature campaign to save this Joan of Arc of the Walworth Road. After three weeks at Milton Hall – which appears to have been a generic name for a railway arch, this time a dark and damp void close to Waterloo station – the Girlingites were driven out by ‘a volley of stones (#litres_trial_promo), a general melee, and a grand “skedaddle” of the saints’. After a brief stay in Finsbury, by June they were in West London where, under the management of James Haase and financed by Julia Wood, they rented Victoria Hall, in Little College Place, ‘a back slum in Chelsea (#litres_trial_promo) … situated about midway between the South Kensington and Sloane Square Stations on the Metropolitan District Railway’, as Maurice Davies reported. Davies duly arrived by tube to find the sect newly installed in a whitewashed and well-lit chapel, a contrast to their chimney-sweep neighbour. It seemed that in their move to Chelsea, the Girlingites were ‘gravitating towards (#litres_trial_promo) common sense’: the meeting was conducted ‘in a more decorous fashion’, with a ‘most excellent choir’. But this raised a new problem: with sensation came income, especially in a city with so many rival sideshows, and as the meeting ended without any manifestations, some of the congregation demanded their money back. Having stayed behind to engage Mary Ann in conversation – she was perfectly amenable to questions on Scriptural theory, but her answers were less satisfactory – Davies left (#litres_trial_promo) thinking he had heard the last of the Jumpers. He could not know that of all the sects he had visited on his capitalwide trawl of the eerie, the faithful and the fraudulent, the Children of God would soon return to the pages of the newspapers, and in a manner more sensational than anyone could have predicted. Their services may have calmed down in Chelsea, but the Girlingites still found themselves assailed by the mobs they thought they had left behind in Walworth. Paying threepence to view their antics, sightseers came expecting marvels or freaks, just as visitors to the East End’s Commercial Road would gawp at John Merrick, the Elephant Man. Some were disappointed with what they found; others took exception to the ‘Shaker (#litres_trial_promo)s’ Tea Meeting’ and its orgiastic scenes: ‘The men kissed each other, the women kissed each other, then the men ran about kissing the women, and the girls then ran and kissed the men. Their kisses were not single kisses or mere salutes of love and peace: they were regular running fires of kisses and love chirps, which lasted for several minutes. Their arms were first round each other’s waists, then round each other’s necks: then they were looking into each other’s eyes, then laying their heads on one another’s shoulders, and then kissing again, as though entirely lost to all around in feelings of the most exquisite ecstasy.’ O CLOUDS UNFOLD! Audiences stood on their benches to get a better look: ‘Oh crikey, look here at that girl: ain’t her having it nice: I should like to be kissing her’, while an offended observer said, ‘You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you ought: it’s disgraceful.’ Then, as Eliza – assumed to be Mary Ann’s daughter – sang a hymn, the crowd struck up a rival tune, sung to the air of ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’ – There lives an ancient party At the end of Ipswich town, Who keeps a little preaching shop In Chelsea college town. She has only got one daughter, Such a party I never saw; By jingo I would like to be That woman’s son-in-law – with the ironic refrain, ‘Mother Girling’s daughter is a proper sort of girl’. The parody was itself an indication of Mary Ann’s celebrity, as was a satirical A Shaker’s ‘Service’ pamphlet, cashing in on the sensational Girlingites. Accordingly, the crowd at Chelsea were rewarded with yet more extraordinary manifestations, as if in reaction to that fame. ‘Numbers of people were thrown into trances, from which they were not aroused, and apparently could not be aroused, at the time of leaving. In their apparently mesmeric state they related visions and prophesied most startling events. While in their unconscious state they danced and violently jumped to a height of several feet. They also spoke and sang in unknown tongues. There were several professed spiritualists present …’ Littered with comatose bodies and supercharged with emotion, it is little wonder that the chapel attracted spiritualists, for its jabbering tongues and ecstatic rites rivalled mediumistic trances for sensation, and seemed to tap into the same strange energies. Another newspaper witnessed an uproarious atmosphere akin to ‘the gallery (#litres_trial_promo) of the “Vic” on Boxing Night’. The noise was ‘absolutely deafening; cat-calls, whistling cries for “the old woman … to come on”, groans and shouts of mocking laughter … No one took the trouble to take off his hat, and stale cutties and penny smokes filled the place with sickening odours’. Mary Ann finally descended from the loft, dressed ‘in the orthodox black silk dress, whose glories had long since departed, leaving a rusty brown predominant in its shades’ – as if London’s acid pollution had begun to eat away at the prophetess. ‘A tight-fitting jacket of the same material, and a black and white bonnet of puritanical simplicity completed her attire … Ascending the platform she surveyed her audience for a few seconds in silence, then in accents which almost set one’s teeth on edge, shouted, “Get hoff them seats, or I’ll close the meeting. If you are gentlemen show yourselves sich”.’ As the hubbub rose, Mary Ann folded her arms like a long-suffering school mistress and stared at the rafters until the noise subsided. Some took this to mean that she had ‘seen something’ (‘“Cobwebs”, suggested a shock-headed youth’), while a greenogrocer offered, ‘’Ave a drop of short, missus.’ ‘Turning sharp round, the goddess thundered forth, “You are a disgrace to the name of Englishmen; if you were in the lowest place of worship in the land you would not behave so”.’ After the dancing, during which Eliza’s flaxen hair flew ‘as wildly as the snakes that … supply the Furies with chignons’, Mary Ann declared, ‘I’m not afraid of death’, to an ‘Oh, Oh’ from the audience. ‘You are, but I am not,’ she replied. ‘I shall never die. I was dead once’ – at which a voice interrupted, ‘What a shake you must have given to have got out of yer coffin’ – ‘but I have been born again.’ As the meeting disintegrated, Mary Ann ‘abused the press’ and ‘maintained that she and her followers were not such fools as they looked. She repudiated the assertion that their religion was an American importation, but gave no explanation of its origin.’ The session ended with the police clearing the room. Afterwards, the reporter spoke to one of the elders: ‘“Is your religion an American invention?” we inquired. “Certainly not.” “Let us look at your hymn-book.” The saint looked confused, but seeing we would take no refusal, he let us open it. It was headed “The American Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/philip-hoare/england-s-lost-eden-adventures-in-a-victorian-utopia/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.