England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

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

A kaleidoscopic story of myth, Spiritualism, and the Victorian search for Utopia from one of the brightest and most original non-fiction writers at work today.In 1872 there was a bizarre eruption of religious mania in Hampshire’s New Forest. Its leader was Mary Ann Girling, a Suffolk farmer's daughter who claimed to be the female Christ and whose sect, the Children of God, lived in imminent anticipation of the millennium. It was rumoured that Mrs Girling mesmerised her supporters, literally hypnotising them to keep them in her power. Other reports claimed that the sect murdered their illegitimate offspring in their Utopian home at 'New Forest Lodge'.Through Mary Ann's story and the spiritual vortex around her, Philip Hoare takes us deeper into the pagan heart of the New Forest. In the neighbouring village of Sway, an eccentric barrister, Andrew Peterson, conducted séances in which the spirit of Christopher Wren instructed Peterson to build a 300-foot concrete tower to alleviate local unemployment. Wren, although dead for two centuries, even issued Peterson with the exact plans for the foundations and the formula for the concrete. It rose like some spiritualist lighthouse towering over the trees, and looming over the Shaker encampment and Mrs Girling's Children of God.At the same time, on the other side of the forest, in the grand country house of the Cowper-Temples, further experiments into the realms of the Victorian uncanny were under way. William Cowper-Temple, a supporter of Mary Ann Girling, vegetarian, anti-blood sport activist and member of Parliament, had joined his wife Georgiana in her Spiritualist quest. A third pair of hands came to the table, those of John Ruskin – the great Victorian artist, scientist, poet and philosopher – who sought the dead spirit of his beloved Rose La Touche. His explorations into the afterlife would eventually send him insane.Through this unique biography of the New Forest Philip Hoare paints a strange, and little known, portrait of Victorian England – a fascinating story of disorder in an avowed age of reason.

ENGLAND’S LOST EDEN

Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

PHILIP HOARE

DEDICATION (#ulink_caeb48dd-7f13-5951-bb23-646c03d0d4b0)

For Mark

CONTENTS

Cover (#u5074f192-7a2e-5a9b-bfeb-b024e02d1224)

Title Page (#ud3f57c7e-98eb-5dfa-90c5-ac7d1a7c26e0)

Dedication (#u4b534b9c-4eac-5311-864f-a6f0ff9027f8)

Map (#u51b02893-f48a-52a8-98d7-45e9f84f6c6a)

Prologue: A place of royal death (#u05e77e6e-205e-57ae-aa7f-a3410cd77b25)

PART I: Green and Pleasant Land (#u2169e23c-3364-5c5d-bef8-dc7e573ed14d)

1 A Voice in the Wilderness (#ucbf78f42-0f6a-5bee-a9d9-5c00cb794411)

Into the forest; Mary Ann’s life & visions in Suffolk; the Girlingites’ debut

2 Turning the World Upside-Down (#u5f5390c6-ea59-5fd2-9f5e-c9b09f39f25e)

Bunhill Fields & the Camisards; Ann Lee & the Shakers; American utopias

3 Human Nature (#ufc4be0e2-354e-5560-8a38-7487e89209cf)

Elder Evans & James Burns; Human Nature & spirit photography; the mission to Mount Lebanon

PART II O Clouds Unfold! (#uc418da38-0119-5bd0-8a51-21cd1391794f)

4 The Walworth Jumpers (#u5832e89d-eba5-5687-8373-6f0b721aaa66)

Sects, spiritualism, & Swedenborg; Mary Ann at the Elephant & Castle

5 The New Forest Shakers (#litres_trial_promo)

Hordle, the Girlingites’ heyday; Peterson & his mesmeric experiments

6 The Dark and Trying Hour (#litres_trial_promo)

Eviction & despair; Mary Ann examined on the condition of her mind

PART III Arrows of Desire (#litres_trial_promo)

7 The Sphere of Love (#litres_trial_promo)

Broadlands & the Cowpers; Rossetti & Beata Beatrix; Myers & Gurney; the Broadlands Conferences

8 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (#litres_trial_promo)

Ruskin & the Spiritualists, the Guild of St George & Fors Clavigera; Brantwood

9 The Names of Butterflies (#litres_trial_promo)

Rose La Touche, Broadlands & the spirits

PART IV The Countenance Divine (#litres_trial_promo)

10 This Muddy Eden (#litres_trial_promo)

Isaac Batho’s mission; Auberon Herbert & naked dancing; Julia Wood interned; Girlingites on tour

11 Mr Peterson’s Tower (#litres_trial_promo)

A.T.T.P. & Wm Lawrence, pet medium; the tower rises

12 The Close of the Dispensation (#litres_trial_promo)

The Census; the rival ‘Mother’; Mary Ann’s stigmata

PART V A New Jerusalem (#litres_trial_promo)

13 In Borderland (#litres_trial_promo)

Laurence Housman & ‘Jump-to-Glory Jane’; Herbert & Theosophy; Ruskin’s last days; Georgiana & the Wildes; The Sheepfold

14 Resurgam (#litres_trial_promo)

The quest for Mary Ann & her followers; Peterson’s transition

Epilogue: The forest once more (#litres_trial_promo)

Source and Bibliographical Notes (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)