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

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      Mr Chance: Do you live with her?

      Witness: I live in the same house.

      Now came Mary Ann’s court debut. ‘… Gurling [sic]… said her husband allowed her to travel about, which she had done for six years. She now travelled with the witness Osborn [sic] and a young girl from the country, who were helpers in the work.’

      Edward Ball was allowed to cross-examine his accuser:

      Defendant: Are you not called the ‘Shakers’?

      Witness (sternly): Some may call us so.

      Asked to explain their manifestations, Mary Ann said, ‘When they take place I have no power. It is when they feel the word of God, and when it falls on them they remain in an unconscious state for a time, followed by a quickening effect which turns to a dance.’ Fired by the laughter which greeted this statement, she confronted the mockers with their own mortality: ‘All who dance have passed from death to life, and if you read the Bible you will understand it to be so.’ This was met with a sharp intake of breath.

      ‘Well, I am at present in the depths of darkness concerning it,’ said Mr Chance. ‘When are the dancers supposed to die?’

      ‘They do not dance for dancing sake,’ said Mary Ann, ‘but it is the spirit of God moved them. I can tell when they pass from death to life by the symptoms. There is always some indication, such as their not being able to move. I have known some upwards of seven hours passing from the old state of Adam to the new.’

      Inspector Fife of P Division told the magistrate that he had seen a crowd of some five hundred trying to gain entry to the arch. Despite the ‘sad delusion’ of its inhabitants, it was registered as a place of worship and had the right to be protected as such, Mr Chance conceded; but he also advised ‘sensible people’ to keep away from the place. As they left the court late that night, the Girlingites ‘were scrutinized in a most unenviable manner’.

      With Mary Ann’s court appearance came the first reports of her millenarian message to the metropolis, ‘to the effect that the end of all things was at hand and that she was to gather together the “hundred and forty and four thousand” who are to meet the Lord at His second coming …’ It was a reiteration of Southcott’s call to the ‘sealed’ of the Apocalypse. Meanwhile the South London Press reported on another local inhabitant with an interest in eschatology: ‘Why Mr Ruskin leaves Denmark Hill: Frankenstein flying from monsters of his own creation is the character Mr John Ruskin declares he now personates.’ Twenty years previously the author of The Stones of Venice had helped revive gothic architecture; now he protested, ‘I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between here and Bromley, and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin-and-bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals …’ As an habitué of Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and the Camden Chapel on Walworth Road, Ruskin must have known of the Girlingites; although with their enemies outnumbering friends in the area, they too were on the move. The residents of Sutherland Square complained that the streets were ‘infested, from 6 o’clock until after 9, by a swarm of overgrown boys … hooting and shouting every time a member of the sect passed in or out’, and by April Mary Ann had switched her operation to Salisbury Row, Lock’s Fields, near the Old Kent Road, where she took a room in a private house. Her landlord soon regretted the lease. On Tuesday nights, when the sect assembled, the house was besieged by ‘a crowd of women fearful lest their husbands should be converted and become “dead” to them in the flesh’. These wives ‘smashed every pane of glass in the windows, tore up the palings round the house’, shouting ‘Down with the Shakers!’ and ‘No more dead-alive husbands!’ СКАЧАТЬ