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

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       Human Nature

      … 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. 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 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 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 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’, 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 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’. But among those ancestral voices, one would become all-important: ‘That noble, 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; СКАЧАТЬ