England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare

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      The balloon 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 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 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 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 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 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 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’ 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’ 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 prophétie СКАЧАТЬ