England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

They may have been lowly, but the Cloutings could trace their Suffolk roots back to the age of Julian of Norwich, when Wilmo Clouting was born, in 1327. In the five hundred years since, the family had barely moved fifteen miles, from the villages of Laxfield, Stradbroke and Saxmundham, to Orford – where Mary Ann’s grandfather, William, was born in 1760 – then inland to Little Glemham, where her father, also named William, was born in 1804.

Born before Victoria ascended the throne, Mary Ann came into a very different world to the one she would leave six decades later. ‘It was only yesterday (#litres_trial_promo), but what a gulf between now and then’, wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in 1860, looking back on his childhood. ‘Then was the old world. Stage-coaches … highwaymen, Druids, Ancient Britons … all these belong to the old period … We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.’ This often flooded corner of England was a remote, self-sufficient community in which lives were lived within themselves, as the reiteration of Suffolk surnames entered in the census and carved on village tombstones – Benham and Folkard, Todd and Barham, Girling and Clouting – suggest.

The Cloutings’ was certainly a crowded household. The first modern census, taken in 1841 when Mary Ann was fourteen, records that her father, William, and mother Emma (née Gibbs, and born in nearby Benhall), were then both thirty-five. Mary Ann had five younger brothers: John, aged twelve, Robert, ten, William, eight, Henry, six, and Charles, one; her only sister, Emma, was four. Later two more girls, Jane and Susan, would be born, along with another boy, Mark. They lived in a village of some sixty houses with a population of about three hundred, most of whose men were farm labourers like William Clouting, or blacksmiths, coachmen or wheelwrights. Like many such settlements, it had grown up in a haphazard fashion along the road, and its life centred around the parish church and its vicar, John Crabbe, the Red Lion Inn and its patrons, and the Norths of Glemham Hall; a semi-feudal existence which depended on a good harvest and the ability to pay the rent.

Yet even this rural backwater was moving into the modern world. In the ‘Hungry Forties’ of bad harvests and poverty, the People’s Charter for universal sufferage became an emblem of the stirring power of the working class. In 1845 the Chartists’ champion, Feargus O’Connor, set up small-holdings in which Shelley’s ‘helots of luxury (#litres_trial_promo)’ could escape industrial tyranny and unemployment in a bid for self-sufficiency; at the same time, railways and new roads spread across the country and provided another network for social change. Meanwhile the Anglican church, despite a similar boom in construction, was threatened by an equivalent growth in nonconformism and a decline in belief. In March 1851, the first religious census held in Britain found that of a population of 17,927,609 (#litres_trial_promo), fewer than half, 7,261,032, attended at Divine Service in chapels and churches; it was estimated that 5,288,294 people who could have gone to worship did not. While evangelism had touched the entire country in the 1830s, science would weaken orthodox religion. ‘It is said (#litres_trial_promo) that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,’ wrote W. H. Mallock in 1877. ‘One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying’.

Suffolk’s own Woodbridge Reporter noted, on the occasion of the laying of a foundation stone for a new Wesleyan chapel, that the town hardly lacked the ‘means for spiritual (#litres_trial_promo) instruction. More than a century ago there dwelt in it Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and Sabbattarians, but whether these sects had any public accommodation for performing their religious duties … does not appear.’ Other eclectic beliefs had sprung up in East Anglia, such as the New Lights and the Old Lights, still there in the twentieth century, their black-bonneted adherents walking miles from outlying villages to spend the entire Sabbath day worshipping in their chapels. There were secular sects, too, such as the vegetarian colony which flourished in Stratford St Mary, near Ipswich, from 1848 to 1851, where cultivation of the land was combined with cultural pursuits and an interest in shorthand writing. But family memory indicates that the Cloutings were being drawn to Primitive Methodism, whose itinerant ministers were particularly active here; Mary Ann’s own (#litres_trial_promo) younger brother Mark, a wheelwright, would become a preacher.

His sister, however – now a striking young woman, ‘impetuous, strong-willing (#litres_trial_promo) and passionate, somewhat tall, and in figure well made’ – had had little education, and was said never to have read the Bible. She spent her early adolescence in domestic service to local families, and at a house on Woodbridge Road in Ipswich; later she learned the skills of a milliner and dressmaker, working for farmers’ wives and more well-to-do inhabitants of the district. Then, sometime in the 1850s, Mary Ann met – but apparently did not yet marry – George Stanton Girling.

Three years older than Mary Ann, George Girling was born in nearby Theberton, another small village, closer to the coast at Dunwich. His parents were menial, but if a photograph of his own son is any indication, he was a handsome man, and like others in the district, probably a ‘half and halfer (#litres_trial_promo)’ – that is, he spent part of his time working on land, and part of it as a sailor. Perhaps that is one reason why they did not wed; or perhaps their union was recognised in some other, nonconformist fashion. While George was away at sea, Mary Ann continued to earn a living by dressmaking, but she seemed restless with her half-neglected married life, and ‘went forth (#litres_trial_promo) in search of fresh and more congenial scenes’. Some reports claim that she made a living selling brandy and other spirits, ‘which she conveyed about surreptitiously, and of which she disposed as opportunity favoured’. Perhaps because of such less reputable interludes, there are great gaps in Mary Ann’s story – not least as self-told, or relayed second- or third-hand. What happened to her in the years between her meeting George and the beginning of her mission? Did she go to sea with him – perhaps even visit America, as some have suggested? Whatever course her life took until then, it was soon to alter in the most dramatic manner possible.

By now George Girling had become a fitter in an iron foundry in Ipswich, where the family name was and is well known: a 1920s edition of the Michelin Guide to Great Britain recommends the services of Girling & Dolan’s garage, and notes that the town was renowned for its agricultural implements. The company which employed George made ploughs, while traces of local history reveal other Girlings with occupations as disparate as farm labourers, police detectives and mariners. George and Mary Ann lived close to the docks in a terraced house on Arthur Street, with other iron fitters and mariners as neighbours; their daughter Mary Jane was born there on 6 September 1853. Two years later, at nearby Fore Street – one of Ipswich’s oldest thoroughfares, still partly lined with Tudor houses and then home to dressmakers, carpenters, pawnbrokers and makers of straw bonnets – Mary Ann had a son, William, on 27 December 1855. It was only on 2 May 1863 that the couple would be married, according to the rites of the Church of England, in Lowestoft – significantly not in their home town.

But these bare facts hide another story. It was claimed that Mary Ann had lost or miscarried several other children – one account puts the figure at as many as eight. Even in an age of high infant mortality this was unusual; and for some reason Mary Ann felt she was to blame. The bitter toll of dead infants turned her against religion, and for years she avoided any place of worship as melancholy overcame her. Then one day she went to a church – evidence suggests the great docklands parish church of St Clement’s, which towered over Fore Street and the river Orwell – and there heard words which comforted her soul. Convinced that her violent temper had brought judgement upon her, she joined the congregation and became a ‘female missionary (#litres_trial_promo)’ – although she still yielded to her sin of rage. ‘It was after (#litres_trial_promo) one of these outbursts that the climax came.’ For Mary Ann the dressmaker, the real and the imagined were about to be sewn together in a fantastic way, and in the process her body itself would be changed.

Years later Mary Ann would describe the precise moment at which the vision came to her, at the age of thirty-two (although some accounts put her age at twenty-one, others at thirty-seven). That night she lay restless in bed – perhaps in guilt for her ‘unsubdued temper’ – and after hours of misery, rose feeling wretched and began to pray for delivery from her sin. Suddenly the room filled with ‘a flash of light (#litres_trial_promo), brighter than the sun’, and she heard a voice say, ‘Daughter! thy sins (#litres_trial_promo) are all forgiven thee’.

As she watched, Mary Ann saw its source coalesce before her: a luminous figure which she identified as her Saviour by the nail-marks in His hands and feet. As she came face to face with this shimmering apparition in her Ipswich bedroom, ‘his body became (#litres_trial_promo) more glorious and beautifully translucent, and he looked young and of a benign countenance’. Now he spoke: if she loved him, would she give up something for him?

‘What is it, Lord?’ she asked.

‘Leave the world’s ways, and give up earthly and all carnal usages, and live for me.’

‘I don’t know that I can,’ said Mary Ann.

‘Do you not love me?’ replied the Lord.

‘And as he spoke, the divine love in his countenance came from his face into her, and the rapid communication of his thoughts to her was such, that her will became his, and she said, “I will do anything for thee, my Lord.”’

And with that, the vision vanished.

Mary Ann had never felt such ecstasy before; it sent ‘a thrill throughout (#litres_trial_promo) her organism’, filling her with love for the whole human race. Yet she kept her vision to herself, as if there was something shameful about what she had experienced alone in her bedroom. The modern world might diagnose sleep paralysis, a vivid hallucinatory state with sexual overtones, said to account for dæmonic possession from the evil spirits of the Bible to Henry Fuseli’s eighteenth-century painting, The Nightmare, and contemporary claims of alien abduction. Or perhaps, like Fuseli’s friend William Blake, she was able to produce eidetic images of what has previously been seen – in some religious tract or biblical illustration, for example – and which she saw ‘in the literal sense (#litres_trial_promo) … not memories, or afterimages, or daydreams, but real sensory perceptions’. Or maybe hers was an epileptic fit, during which the sufferer may sense a presence in an otherwise empty room, and afterwards assert absolute moral certainty and religiosity, as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus has been explained. Was Mary Ann’s vision a short circuit in her brain, or was this itself a gift? Whatever the truth, for an uneducated woman of a pre-Freudian age there was only one explanation for what she saw, and what came after it.

Mary Ann returned to her duties, fired with an undeclared determination; her heart must have been bursting to speak of it, but she told her fellow chapel goers only that they must observe holy lives. Five hundred years previously, Julian of Norwich had written of her own revelation:

When I was 30 (#litres_trial_promo) years old and a half, God sent me a sickness, in which I lay three days and three nights … my sight began to fail, and it was all dark about me, save in the image of the Cross, whereupon I beheld a common light … Suddenly my pain was taken from me, and I was as whole as ever I was. Then came … to my mind that I should desire the second wound of our Lord’s gracious gift. In this moment I saw the red blood trickle down hot and freshly and right plenteous, as it were in the time of His Passion when the Garland of Thorns was pressed on His blessed head. And suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy.

Now Mary Ann received a second vision, although, just as the gospels diversify in their accounts, so her story relies on different writers and her own fluctuating pronouncements; and where one claims six years between her visions, another records just days before the Spirit appeared in the form of a fiery dove commanding her,

I have called thee to declare my immediate coming, and it is now the close of this dispensation; a new era is opening on the world, and thou art to be the Messenger.

From this point, it seemed, Mary Ann’s life was determined as parable, to be replayed in situations which would reflect biblical events. The heaven-borne message echoed John’s baptism of Christ, when ‘the Holy Spirit (#litres_trial_promo) descended upon him in bodily form, as a dove, and a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; with thee I am well pleased”’. Yet still she said nothing: Mary Ann lost herself in her work, afraid that a public declaration would subject her to ‘odium and opposition (#litres_trial_promo)’. But the visions continued, more potent than ever. She was taken ‘into a realm (#litres_trial_promo) far above the earth; and she ascended out of it, and beheld a vista of ages; and then she looked at Christ, whose glory illuminated her, and she discovered that she was in a glorified ethereal body’. In this astral experience, the Lord appeared ‘in the form of a man’. This was no dream: like Moses and Elijah appearing to Jesus, the vision was as real as she could say. Now the Bible was opened to her, and its written word revealed ‘all its truth concerning the life of the spirit within the tabernacle of the body’.

Mary Ann’s eyes had been opened, just as the scales had fallen from St Paul’s eyes. And as with millenarian prophets of the past, her discovery resulted in a literal interpretation (#litres_trial_promo) of St John’s Revelations and its apocalyptic predictions for the end of time. Her visions told her that the Second Coming would happen in her lifetime, and that she was its Messenger, ‘to declare an end (#litres_trial_promo) of sin, and a judgement; and, further, that if she yielded and obeyed, she should not see death … and that as a witness to her call and work, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost should be to those who believed; that they should speak with tongues, and do marvellous works; which would be the seal of her messengership’. It was a mirror of St Paul’s mission, and in order to fulfil her duty, she must leave her home and family ‘and go forth into the streets, declaring the message; and … all who believed must be prepared to do the same’.

The cumulative weight of these supernatural events proved too much for a woman’s body already weakened by miscarriage. For six weeks Mary Ann was stricken by a paralysis which twisted her mouth, as if in punishment for her ill-tempered tongue, a God-sent witch’s scold. This physical ultimatum, in her own account, also caused blindness in one eye and seized her body – perhaps the result of a minor stroke. She was faced with a choice: she could either disregard the visions and remain in this helpless state, or obey her holy orders. And so she told the Lord that He must do with her as He would. As a result of this epiphany – in its original meaning, the manifestation of a god – she immediately recovered. But later, Mary Ann would claim that the last of her visions left her with a yet more extraordinary legacy. At Christmas 1864 she received the sign for which Julian had prayed. The stigmata appeared on her hands, feet and side, erupting in imitation of Christ’s crucified body. Like some sacred statue brought to life, Mary Ann’s flesh itself bore testament to her Saviour’s sufferings. It was as if these wounds were symptoms of her death, as though she had died and been reborn without sin.

Was she a sinful woman, this sometime purveyor of illicit liquor, as yet unmarried in the eyes of the Church, now an evangelist? Records do not tell us, although the guilt Mary Ann may have felt for her children – born dead and out of wedlock – may indicate something for which she needed to atone: a recovered memory, perhaps of abuse within the crowded childhood home. Nor was she beautiful; her face was no lure to lust, and what was interbred emerged in sharp features set awry by harsh experience. Yet she was tall and imposing, with a magnetic stare; as if, in compensation for her lack of beauty, she relied on other means to command attention. There was a sensuality in the way her hair curled in dark locks over her shoulders, although her physical stance spoke against desire and her wide, thin lips bore the memory of paralysis. Her gaunt frame rejected consumption and sexuality in favour of asceticism and spirituality; a visionary aspiration in retreat from the world and its demands. In retrospect, it seems Mary Ann may have suffered some kind of dietary disorder; certainly her body was unnaturally slender. ‘The only emaciated (#litres_trial_promo) being we saw was the prophetess herself’, one witness would note, ‘and her desperate enthusiasm would burn the flesh from any flame.’

Perhaps her passion fed on her body, exchanging the one for the other. In the process, her resolve was stiffened, as if that heaven-sent rictus were a physical reaction to or a prevention of sin, tensing her body against evil. And if she had been a sinful woman, then her sins were forgiven. Her manner, once inflexible and intolerant, was now gentle and generous. Seeing this, her newly married husband gave up his initial opposition – an acquiescence he would maintain throughout all that was to come. Mary Ann explained that having experienced the ‘perfect presence of Jesus’, it was impossible to remain with him, ‘for her spirit being once set free to enter the paradisiacal state, it was not lawful to enter the state of matrimony again’. Instead she became a bride of Christ, and returned to her chapel – only to find that the congregation refused to listen.

It is easy to imagine their reaction, faced with this woman whose duty lay at home with her children, yet who chose to lecture them on their sins. Mary Ann burned to communicate the wonder of what she had seen, and rejection merely made the fire glow brighter. Shortly after, she saw a crowd listening to a male preacher on a street corner. Someone asked her to speak, and soon, like Wesley, she had her own audience in the open air. But for Mary Ann there was something more to her commission than human history, and she was reminded of it every day by her hidden, holy scars, as if God’s words were written on her skin.

We all reinvent ourselves. We conflate memory and fact, and reinterpret the pleasure and pain of the past to suit the present and form our future. Mary Ann too was convinced of her story, and felt the need to share it – a desire only heightened by the obstacles placed in its way, not least that of her sex. Yet being born a woman was not necessarily a bar to her calling: not only were there precedents for female preachers among the Methodists and the Quakers, but her experience – the loss of her children, her lowly origins – made her message more immediate. It was said that her ‘thrilling, and often (#litres_trial_promo) overpowering speeches had a vivid effect on sympathetic lady hearers, for she observed proprieties of behaviour, and there was nothing coarse or vulgar about her’. And like other female mystics, from Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, to Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Avila and Joan of Arc, she cited higher authority; like the Maid of Orleans’ armour, her visions were a defence against male prejudice. Who could doubt the Word of God, even if it came from a farm labourer’s daughter?

The world had always been reluctant to give women a voice; yet more so when their prophecies crossed the barrier between Christian and pagan, between witch and saint. In Yorkshire, Mother Shipton had seen the future from her Knaresborough cave and its dripping well, where I was taken as a boy to see strange objects dangling from a rock ledge, the pale brown mineral-rich water turning soft toys into modern fossils. Around the same time as Shipton made her predictions of telegrams and aeroplanes, the Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Burton, was hanged for prophesying Henry VIII’s death. In Mary Ann’s native East Anglia, the power of magic lingered long after it had faded elsewhere. The eastern counties became home to the Family of Love, a heretical cult imported across the sea from the mirror-lowlands of Holland, which preached that heaven and hell were to be found on earth and that it was possible to recreate Eden through communal living; Ely was declared an ‘island of errors (#litres_trial_promo) and sectaries’, and parts of this countryside were said to be heathen until the draining of the fens in the 1630s – as if the act of reclamation deprived the land of its ancient aquatic spirits.

Perhaps devils took hold instead. In 1645, Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General, instituted his campaign in Suffolk, when neighbour denounced neighbour and women were walked to keep them awake until their demonic familiars came to betray them. Those who miscarried or whose children were stillborn were accused of sacrificing their offspring. At Aldeburgh, seven women were hanged as witches, and the Borough paid Hopkins £2 for his work. Had she been born two centuries earlier, Mary Ann too might have been stripped and searched for the devil’s marks – although her searchers would have found Christ’s.

Two hundred years after Matthew Hopkins’ reign of terror, Mary Ann left Ipswich to travel the villages around Woodbridge and Saxmundham, the land she knew so well from her childhood and where she thought her words would be heard. As she preached in the open air at Little Glemham, it must have been odd for her young children to witness the change in their mother, leaving the family home for the fields of rural Suffolk. Mary Jane, then in her teens, would assist at the services by teaching and playing the piano, although she was soon to marry; William, however, just six years old when Mary Ann’s mission began, would find himself caught up in her cause.

The Primitive Methodists were well represented in these places, and Mary Ann was invited to preach at their chapel at Stratford St Andrew’s. But her unorthodox ideas offended them, and many of those who had listened now refused to hear her increasingly radical ideas. So Mary Ann sermonised in market squares, a soapbox orator in shirtwaist and curls. Unconfined by marriage or maternal duties, she took her message to the disenfranchised and the dispossessed – just as the first British Christians had been lowly peasants who found a new sense of community in their faith, and just as the same common people had been identified as God’s chosen ones during the religious revolutions of the seventeenth century, with its own dreams of ‘utopia (#litres_trial_promo) and infinite liberty’ and a theocracy led by another East Anglian prophet, Oliver Cromwell. In her version of Christ’s elegantly paradoxical beatitudes, which called for the poor to be rich and the downtrodden to be free, Mary Ann promised social justice and heaven on earth. Those who had failed to find a place in the world could find 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo), 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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? (#litres_trial_promo)’, 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 (#litres_trial_promo) 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 (#litres_trial_promo)’.

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 challenges the viewer and imbues the portrait with the air of an icon. This idealised Mary Ann is far from what we know of her true features; more Joan of Arc as seen in a Victorian picturebook than the face of a farm labourer’s daughter. But equally, it could be an advertisement for the latest nostrum, lacking only the caption, Mother Girling Saves.

Girlingite meetings took a set form. Bible verses were read and debated, followed by prayer. But then came the strange dancing and trance-like speaking in tongues which Eliza Folkard had exhibited, and which were already attracting crowds. These shaking fits earned the sect the nickname Convulsionists, although they preferred to call themselves Children of God, from St John’s gospel, ‘… to all those (#litres_trial_promo) who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God; who were born, not of blood nor of the will of flesh nor of the will of man, but of God’. Like the Corinthians in the wake of St Paul’s mission, they would ‘jabber and quake’ when in the spirit, led by Mary Ann herself, leaping from foot to foot while waving her arms as if beckoning while she exhorted the Lord’s name. To some these antics resembled the dance of a savage; others watching the ‘springy, elastic movements and considerable waving of her arms … could hardly resist the comic aspect of the scene’.

Soon enough these rites attracted the attention of the press, and on 20 April 1871 a headline appeared in the Woodbridge Reporter & Aldeburgh Times:

MOBBING A FEMALE PREACHER.

The accompanying story may have been the first occasion on which Mary Ann’s name appeared in print; it was certainly not the last.

Reporting on a case heard at the Framlingham Petty Sessions by F. S. Corrance, the local Member of Parliament, and two clergymen – the Reverends G. F. Pooley and G. H. Porter – the newspaper gave details of five young men, William Goldsmith, James George, Samuel Crane, James Nichols and John Barham, who were charged by a farmer with ‘riotous behaviour in his dwelling, which is registered as a place for religious worship’.

At first it seemed a matter of mere youthful high spirits. The farmer, forty-eight-year-old Leonard Benham of Stratford St Andrew, worked 138 acres – belonging to the Earl of Guildford – where he employed three men and a boy, as well as two household servants (one of them being twenty-year-old William Folkard, a kinsman of Eliza’s). But Benham was also a member of the Children of God, and had resolved to support Mary Ann ‘at any cost’. He would pledge his entire family – his wife Martha, forty; his daughters Ellen, twenty, Emma, thirteen, and Mary Ann, then four years old; together with his sons Arthur, then aged sixteen, William, fifteen, and George, just five – to the cause.

That Sunday afternoon, a meeting had been held in Benham’s house which was attended by the five defendants – not by invitation. As the Girlingites prayed, one of the young men, John Barham, began to talk and laugh. When asked to be quiet, he replied by singing and hallooing, with his friends joining in.

‘I went to the door and stood near them,’ Leonard Benham told the court. ‘They said, “Take your sins off your own back, we won’t believe you, you’re a liar.” I told them mine was a registered house. They told me not to daubt them up with untempered mortar’ – an obscure metaphor which would pursue the Girlingites, along with mobs hurling slack, or slaked lime.