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

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СКАЧАТЬ of contracts with the devil – to ‘over Come 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 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 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 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 Così Fan Tutte under his influence, although in 1784 the French Academy decided that ‘imagination with magnetism 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’ – by which time he had been superseded by an even greater cult.

      The fin de siècle 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’, 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! 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 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 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 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 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 СКАЧАТЬ