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

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СКАЧАТЬ a home with her, by choosing a new family. And in questioning the morality of marriage, she offered women the right to choose God over slavery; to be freed from the shackles of sexual demands and the dangerous burden of child-bearing. Mary Ann had issued a challenge to the nineteenth-century family, even as she sundered her own: it seemed she really was set to turn the world upside down.

      Girlingism, as it became known, embraced those over whom industrialisation had ridden rough-shod. It offered an alternative way of life almost revolutionary in its aims, although its communist ideas were rooted in Scripture. Consciously or not, Mary Ann appeared to be influenced by sects such as the Family of Love and the Diggers and the Ranters of the Interregnum who took the Acts of the Apostles – ‘And all who believe were together and had all things in common’ – as precedent for their communality. In 1649, the Diggers had staked out their allotments on St George’s Hill in Surrey, and although their attempt at Eden, seeing the Second Coming as an earthly return to paradise, lasted little more than a year, the visionary William Everard, whose followers spoke with angels, went on to found other rural Digger communes. These provided patterns for what Mary Ann would attempt. And while she would admit a spiritual kinship with the early Quakers – more extreme in their early expression than in their later quietude – there was another echo to be detected, in the newly emancipated Catholic Church. In 1858, as Christ appeared in Mary Ann’s Ipswich bedroom, another young peasant girl saw the Virgin Mary in a French cave, as if her solemn, beautiful statue had come to life, her robe as blue as the sky from which she had fallen in augury of her Son’s return. Bernadette knelt on the ground and seemed to eat the earth: to some, a symptom of psychological disturbance; to others, an indication of the passion of her visions. In an increasingly secular century, it was no coincidence that the visitations at Lourdes and the agitations of the Girlingites registered simultaneously on the spiritual scale.

      Back in Suffolk, Mary Ann’s mission had a direct and intensely personal effect on another young woman. Eliza Folkard, a carpenter’s daughter from Parham, sang in the Methodist choir, but one day she attended a Girlingite meeting and suddenly got up and began to dance. She then spoke for an hour, describing ‘how she had been convinced of sin at the age of 17, but did not give her heart to God until after a long illness’. In a further reflection of Mary Ann’s conversion, she declared that Mrs Girling was truly the herald of the Second Coming, and as she emerged from her trance she embraced her new mother. To others, however, Eliza’s closeness to Mary Ann would lead to the notion that she was in fact her daughter, and perhaps an indication of sin. And where Mary Ann was dark, Eliza had blonde hair, a race memory of Viking invaders: she would become the pulchritudinous face of Girlingism, the angelic obverse to Mary Ann’s darker power.

      Eliza’s conversion was followed by that of Henry, or Harry Osborne, described as a ‘rough, uncouth and illiterate farm-labourer, of pugilistic tendencies’ – a useful person when danger threatened. In fact, Harry was a thirty-one-year-old widower and shoemaker; but in this gallery of types, he became Mary Ann’s right-hand man, completing the trinity that she presented to the world – and introducing new rumours about their own relationship.

      Within eighteen months Girlingism had fifty adherents, for whom it was compulsory to receive ‘the Spirit, or the baptism of the New Life’ and to practise celibacy, without which they could not be accepted by the Saviour on His return, ‘which was expected to be sudden as the lightning’s flash’. Anyone joining the group had to give up all their worldly goods; from there on ‘the old ties of husband, wife and lover were to be lost in a fraternal bond’; they were now all brothers and sisters, living ‘a pure and holy life’. Mary Ann was known as Sister: her sororial title was levelling and egalitarian, but it also gave her a sense of pre-ordained mission. As a universal relative, she cast off her wedded status and assumed a new role, that of a secular nun or religious nurse.

      This was neither an unusual self-discovery, nor a disreputable one: the most famous sister of the age, the high-born Florence Nightingale, had recently entered imperial iconography as the Lady with the Lamp, inspired by her own three visions of Christ; while the empire itself was ruled over by a matriarch queen from her seaside home on the Isle of Wight. But it was also the coming era of the New Woman, and Mary Ann would be seen as part of these powerful moves towards a new female identity: ‘She stands forth, in this age of “woman’s mission”, fearlessly to lead and encourage a pure society based upon the inward law of her nature’, claimed one new age magazine; although a more hostile account saw her as ‘a curious growth of the “Women’s Right” genus, from a theological point of view; and when she stretches her bony arms, in all the warmth of native eloquence, she reminds one of a pious scarecrow tossed in the winds of fanaticism and superstition and set up as a terror to evil doers in the way of religious enthusiasm.’

      A woman’s power was still to be feared; and like those new women, this universal sister’s tenets, intended to create an alternative clan, were not entirely welcome as they sundered families and married couples and separated children from parents. When a later visitor asked Mary Ann, ‘Why not procreate?’, she replied that the earth was already too full. Such sentiments echoed those of Reverend Malthus, who believed mankind was doomed if it continued to reproduce without check. But they also threatened the defining unit of an age which relied on reproduction. The family yoked the workers of the industrial revolution to the demands of capitalism; Mary Ann directly opposed that economic adhesion. For such a person of such a background and of such a sex to set up such a challenge was unacceptable. Mrs Girling made a travesty of her married name, and in the process became an anti-woman.

      There were other reasons to fear Girlingism: it created tensions not just between families, but between communities. In an era of insecurity and high unemployment – exemplified by the agricultural strikes which hit East Suffolk in the early 1870s as the newly formed Agricultural Labourers’ Union clashed with the Farmers’ Association – men lost their jobs because of Mary Ann. In the market and barrack town of Woodbridge, her teachings began to concern clergy and upset landowners, anxious at her effect on their flocks and labour force: ‘Many of the males were discharged from their situations, and others suffered loss in a variety of ways’. To some it seemed they had lost their senses to religious mania, and were suitable subjects for the local lunatic asylum at Melton – an establishment of more than four hundred disturbed souls, their occupations, listed next to their initials in the 1871 census, representative of Mary Ann’s constituency: farm labourers and their wives; factory girls and seamen’s wives; soldiers and needlewomen; chimney sweeps and policemen’s wives; brush makers and lime burners; or simply, in the case of ‘V. F.’, a ‘loose character’.

      They were the psychiatric casualties of an industrial era, the kind of minds susceptible to a woman who might have found herself similarly incarcerated. Or perhaps Mary Ann evoked an older belief, when people had laid votive offerings in the lakes and rivers, reaching down to that elemental world beneath their feet. Whatever the source of her power, it seemed there was a primal force gathering around this prophetess, one which would invoke spirits and provoke opposition. One man bet his friends that he would shoot Mary Ann on a certain night – although in the event the would-be assassin himself converted and became a Girlingite, a miracle taken by her followers as proof that their leader was protected by God. That which did not kill her made Mary Ann stronger, and in this sensational narrative – something between penny dreadful and missionary tract – she had become a symbolic, almost revolutionary figure.

      A later image of Mary Ann depicts her as an androgynous angel from some Renaissance woodcut, wearing indeterminate, anachronistic dress, her head encircled by a band in simple recognition of her sacred mission. Her stare СКАЧАТЬ