England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
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Название: England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia
Автор: Philip Hoare
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Историческая литература
isbn: 9780007391523
isbn:
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, 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 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’, 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 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, 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’, 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 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 à la carte from which readers could pick and choose. The ‘Psychological Department’ 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 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, “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’ 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’, 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 СКАЧАТЬ