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

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      When James J. Morse attended his first spiritualist meeting in Whitechapel in 1868, he found himself ‘endowed with another personality … I shouted, rolled around the room, I swore, and … the more I tried not to do these things, the more perfectly were they accomplished!’ After three-quarters of an hour the fit subsided, and he ‘sank exhausted upon a settee’. As a connoisseur of such events, Davies equated the altered states of mesmerism and spiritualism with the Jumpers’ ecstasy (in its original meaning, exstasis, to stand outside oneself), although when he interviewed Mary Ann, she was eager to disown such comparisons. Nevertheless, Davies was convinced that ‘whatever be the origin of the so-called mesmeric condition, the same is the cause of “jumping”. The magnetic “sleep-walking” may be produced without contact or passes … and religious excitement is certainly an adequate cause to produce such an effect.’

      The vexed question of whether Mary Ann hypnotised her followers would haunt her mission – and produce new accusations of witchcraft. That night in the railway arch, one woman who had been ‘grimacing and gesticulating in a slightly idiotic manner, jumped up and joined the dance. Her demeanour, however, was anything but happy; she prayed as in an unknown tongue, and called out “The devil! the devil!”’ Davies was told by his confidante, ‘Yes, there is something wrong. You see when they are in that state they have the gift of prophecy and clear vision. She can see the state of those around.’ Perhaps, like the Shakers, the Girlingites could see the dead walking – although Davies offered the explanation that, like the onlookers who had spoiled Dr Emes’s resurrection from Bunhill Fields, the New Cut swells had ‘“disturbed the conditions”… as the spiritists would say … When deprecating to me any use of mesmerism or chloroform, the minister said, “I wish I had been able to use the one or the other once or twice tonight”.’

      The reference to anaesthesia was apposite. Hypnotism and chloroform were seen to induce bodily abandonment beyond the control of consciousness; both evoked notions of surrender and perhaps violation (in 1865, Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, had been accused of ‘chloroforming’ a young patient before seducing her), and spiritualists and mesmerists were accused of taking sexual advantage of their entranced subjects. Similarly, Mary Ann would stand accused of moral transgression when her followers danced themselves into unconsciousness and ‘death’, as if experiencing the petite mort of sexual ecstasy. For a world which would be shocked by the waltz, it was little wonder that such rites were regarded with suspicion and fascination. This peasant woman had imported pagan ways into the city and had thrown the formalised choreography of polite society into uninhibited abandon; these diseased fits presaged the St Vitus-like jerks of jazz dancers yet to come: one newspaper compared the Jumpers’ rituals to ‘a performance between a nigger break-down and the jig of the wandering Savoyards that we see in our streets’. Or perhaps their terpsichorean excesses were fuelled by narcotics imported from the Orient to the nearby docklands of the East End, where the exports were said to include the drugged and abducted young women of the white slave trade.

      In Davies’ conspiratorial narrative, cloaked in mystery like a clerical detective novel, anything might be possible, and the plot deepened with an invitation to a private meeting at an address given to him in confidence by his Girlingite friend. Here, he was promised, ‘deaths’ were more frequent – perhaps because they were conducted out of range of the swells’ ridicule, and more lethal antipathies: ‘Some of the men wait for our brothers and almost kill them’, Davies was told. South London was a wild place, as the clergyman found for himself on leaving the rented railway arch. ‘It took two policemen to get us quietly out … lest some honest Walworthian should mistake me for a “brother”.’ With that somewhat edgy exit, the reverend concluded his account, for the time being.

      London was undergoing a transformation. Vast new buildings were rising at its centre like new geological formations, from the gothic cliffs of Kensington’s Natural History Museum – built by the Quaker, Alfred Waterhouse – to Charles Barry’s Italianate canyons of Portland stone along Whitehall, and the jagged stalagmites of Westminster. It was a city skyline newly framed by medieval crenellations; Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras, seen romantically against a fiery sunset like some gigantic monastery out of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, was in fact a modern hotel undercoursed by grinding locomotives and commuters hurrying through its tiled caverns. The entire metropolis was in a state of reinvention; one giant construction site for secular cathedrals dedicated to the imperial saints of science, technology, governance and capital. So too Mary Ann’s arrival had seen an extension in her mission, as if London’s burgeoning architecture encouraged her to produce yet more extraordinary effects. But hers was a spiritual phalanx populated by her Children of God, and unlike the leviathan monuments which her fellow Victorians were erecting, it did not need a grand temple to state its certainties. The Girlingites’ rites were conducted underneath those constructions, in the dead space which progress had left behind – a vacuum filled by their immortal faith.

      Mary Ann lodged with a family in Chelsea (possibly apostates of the Peculiar People), whose twenty-four-year-old daughter Violet was chosen, like Eliza Folkard, to receive the ‘gift of the Spirit’. Having accompanied her parents to Walworth to hear Mary Ann speak, Violet fell unconscious to the floor where she remained for two hours, then suddenly she began to speak under inspiration, prophesying ‘great and terrible judgements from God’ on anyone who refused to accept Mrs Girling’s message. Violet declared that she too would leave her family and follow Mary Ann wherever she went. Her conversion – which went one step further than the Peculiar People’s gospel of salvation, and resembled the trance-like fervour of the young Shakeress instruments – was a cornerstone in the Girlingites’ mission. It became a talisman for Mary Ann’s followers, raising their sense of identity and encouraging new converts.

      That winter at Walworth, Violet’s visions had a galvanising effect. Many exhibited similar manifestations in the services, which attracted up to three hundred people – as well as the attention of the press. Crowds milling around the arch had swollen tenfold to two or three thousand, and the South London Press in particular followed the ‘extraordinary proceedings … among the “Shakers” at Walworth’ – reports all the more notable for their comparison of the Girlingites with the American sect. Next to an article on ‘Mr Spurgeon’s Return to South London’ (from Rome, where ‘the Papal system [was] as full of idolatry as ever Hindooism was’), the journalist ‘C.E.P.’ posed the question, ‘What is a Shaker?’ It was one which would ‘naturally be asked by those who have not read Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America”’ – or perhaps by those who had attended one of Frederick Evans’ lectures that summer – and it might be difficult to answer ‘were it not for the fact that in South London, scarcely a hundred yards from the Walworth-road station, is the meeting-house of a Shaker community, where the inquirer may see with his own eyes …’

      Arriving at Sutherland Street for a Sunday morning service, C.E.P. found Mary Ann seated behind her green baize table, a cup of tea at her side ‘with which she occasionally refreshed herself’. The atmosphere was electric. Despite the winter weather it was hot and stuffy inside, and the correspondent watched as a group bent over a heavy-looking youth who lay in his companion’s arms. Two young women had their arms around the boy’s neck and were mumbling in excited, incoherent tongues. They then jumped up to dance, twirling and twisting ‘as if they were bitten by the tarantula’ (it was no coincidence that the poisonous spider also lent its name to a leaping mania and a feverish Italian dance). All the while another young man with slicked-back hair and a sickly smile dabbed at their faces with a handkerchief, helping an ‘unhealthy-looking girl’ out of her jacket when she grew too hot.

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