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

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СКАЧАТЬ href="#litres_trial_promo">such as would 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 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’ 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 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 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 Étienne Cabet’s Icaria in California. In 1840, Emerson told Thomas Carlyle: ‘We are all 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’, 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 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’, 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 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 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 François 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 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 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’ 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’ 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’. СКАЧАТЬ