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

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       The Walworth Jumpers

      Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.

      Matthew 4:11

      The train from Ipswich, a steam-spewing monster, slouched into the maw of Liverpool Street where the brick arches of the terminus, newly-built over the site of the original Bethlehem Hospital, seemed to suck the visitor into the nerve-jangling immensity of the city, exciting the spirit as much as the third-class carriages had shaken the flesh. Detraining into the hot, fetid hubbub of the subterranean concourse, Mary Ann dusted down the smuts from her gown and prepared to resume her mission, not in the heart of some dark continent, but in the backstreets of London, where factory chimneys rivalled church spires for the skyline above and the fate of the souls in the lowly terraces below.

      The world had changed dramatically since the decade of Mary Ann’s birth, not least in the way one could move around it. It was one of the ironies of the modern world that many of those responsible for building the new railways were themselves Quakers; forbidden from swearing oaths which would admit them to professional positions, they excelled at other trades. It was a Quaker, George Bradshaw, who published his Railway Time Table in 1839, not for profit, but to assist his fellow man. The expanding network had standardised time itself, unifying the country and metering modern history, yet Bradshaw’s publication still bore Quaker designations – ‘First Month’ instead of January, and so on – while one visitor to the Friends’ meeting house at King’s Cross found their tracts shelved on the walls like ‘the time tables … in the stations of the Metropolitan Railway’. So too would Mary Ann’s mission be conducted by railway – under the tracks themselves.

      The myth of Mary Ann’s arrival in London, like the other stories that surround her, remains almost wilfully obscure. The Bible Christians said to have invited her were originally Primitive Methodists from East Cornwall, and therefore rural imports like the Girlingites. They too had female ministers, such as Mary Toms, a faith-healer who left Tintagel for the Isle of Wight in the 1820s and was seen ‘standing on a borrowed chair one Sunday morning at East Cowes, lashed by the wind and rain’. She also claimed to have been followed down a dark lane by a ‘dimly visible creature … thought by some to have been a heavenly visitant sent to protect her, but by herself to have been a diabolical creature sent to scare her’. But ‘Bible Christian’ was a term applied to a number of sects (not least the Girlingites themselves), and on closer inspection it seems more likely that Mary Ann’s invitation came from the Peculiar People, a sect founded by a fellow Suffolk preacher and erstwhile Wesleyan, William Bridges.

      Born in Woodbridge in 1802, Bridges had left Suffolk soon after his marriage in 1824, but his family still lived there and had probably come into contact with Girlingism, which seemed to share common ground with the Peculiar People. The ‘Plumstead Peculiars’, as they were later known, took their name from God’s commandment to Moses to lead His ‘peculiar people’. They believed in faith-healing, the anointing of oil and the power of prayer, and they opposed vaccination; in 1872 George Harry of Plumstead would be sent to Newgate Prison ‘for refusing to provide medical assistance or remedies of any kind’ for his daughter Cecilia who was dying of smallpox, while his wife was summonsed by a coroner’s court for the manslaughter of their second child who had also died. In the 1830s, Bridges had set up a chapel in Gravel Lane, Kennington, but one of his followers, a cobbler named John Sirgood, extended the Peculiar Gospel to rural Sussex, assembling a congregation of two hundred in the village of Loxwood – only to attract the same antipathy which the Girlingites had suffered in Suffolk. Sirgood complained that his faithful were ‘derided, reproached, insulted … thrown down into the mud … and women and children filled with terror’. One particularly terrifying night, assailants armed with bludgeons, their faces painted and ‘disguised in the most grotesque manner … beat about the house to the breaking up of the windows and the crockery, threatening the life of the Preacher’. And just as Mary Ann had left Suffolk, so by 1860, Sirgood had returned to south London.

      Despite their obscure history, it is clear that these part rural, part city evangelists paved the way for Mary Ann. Through their south London mission she would gain access to a new following, and in the process she would divide Bridges’ Southwark citadel. At first the Peculiar People allowed Mary Ann to preach in their chapel on Sunday evenings, where she maintained she was only the ‘Messenger’ of the Second Coming. But when she began to claim her own divinity, it proved too much for the Peculiars. Like the Methodists, they asked Mary Ann to ‘withdraw from their communion’, which she did, taking many of their followers with her. As in Suffolk, she began preaching in private houses, where ‘spiritual manifestations’ took place. Emboldened by their move to the imperial capital as the Shakers had been by СКАЧАТЬ