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

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      SHANKAR LADY.

      The proceedings were commenced with a hymn, ‘The Day is Breaking’, and a short prayer, after which Mr Hepworth Dixon introduced ‘Elder Frederick’ to the meeting with a few words expressive of the pleasure which he had felt some years ago in visiting Mount Ephraim [sic], and seeing with his own eyes the well-ordered community of the Shakers, and the peace, contentment, plenty, and morality which reigned among them, where they had ‘made the desert smile’.

      Such a life must have seemed attractive to many readers caught up in their quotidian duties. Cheered regularly throughout his speech, Evans warned ‘that both England as a country and London as a great city had need to reform their social code and habits of life’, and ‘that other empires and cities as large and as powerful … had perished by the sword …’ Privately, he discerned a ‘desperate, drugged determination … to do or die’ in that ‘great Babel of a city of 3½ millions of human bodies, supposed to have souls in them’, and where he felt like a ‘pilgrim and a stranger’. ‘The poor breed like rabbits; and, when the boys are old enough, the Government takes them as soldiers. But labor is so cheap, they are willing to be shot at, if they can get food to eat … This city, and all great cities, rest upon volcanoes liable to eruption at [a] time when least to be looked for or expected.’ Such observations were redolent of the Communist Manifesto. ‘This Government is wise, with all its wickedness. It watches sharply the signs of popular uprising, and yields to the demands of the great middle class, so as to propitiate them …’ While he noted that five thousand a day were dying in the siege of Paris, Evans claimed that ‘Communism is the greatest good that thousands can see in the future; and the fact that the Shakers make it a practical thing, a success, is a constant source of congratulation, and of hope … I am quite sure that our Gospel will be preached and received in England before long.’ He even envisioned his own North Family at Mount Lebanon coming to London to save its citizens, ‘I am quite sure souls would gather to them as fast as they could be taken care of.’

      Shakerism had caught a public imagination already alert to utopian notions. Human Nature reported that ‘from one end of the country to the other the principles of Shakerism were being eagerly discussed’. Evans addressed four thousand at two open-air meetings in Bradford, ‘convened by the Spiritualists and largely attended by them’; other meetings followed in Bishop Auckland, Birmingham, and Manchester, the birthplace of Ann Lee, erstwhile home to Friedrich Engels, and host to such events as a ‘Spiritualists’ Vegetarian Banquet’. Yet Evans was warned by a friend that ‘I should do better not to be identified with Spiritualists too much … the Shakers are in good order and famous with the public; while the Spiritualists are in unease [sic] condition than ever before’. ‘They are holding dark circles,’ Evans noted. ‘Peebles was at a house this afternoon and the spirits threw things about, and did damage – He took no part. We ignore them.’ Evans worried that spiritualists such as Emma Hardinge – one of the most famous American mediums working in England, herself sponsored by Burns, and who had sent Evans tickets for her appearance at the Albert Hall – were doing ‘harm rather than good’. And yet the link was undeniable. ‘What have Spiritualists to do with Shakerism?’ Burns asked the readers of Human Nature, and answered his own question, declaring that the Shakers were СКАЧАТЬ