England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

The hooligans then began pulling off his wallpaper, and declared that ‘they would be d—if they wouldn’t kiss Mrs Girling before they left’. Failing in this, they tried to kiss another member of the congregation, Robert Spall. ‘Not being able to do that, they said they would kiss Mrs Spall, but did not attempt to do it.’

That night the gang came back to finish what they’d started. ‘What a pity it is you young men come here and make a disturbance,’ Benham told them. ‘The law is very stringent about this, and you’ll hear something from me about it.’ But Nichols strode into the room and began shouting and stamping, while Goldsmith mockingly held up a stick to which he’d attached a red handkerchief, saying, ‘This is a flag of distress.’ He then began to declaim a text of his own, and sat down to light his pipe. Crane, also smoking, cried, ‘Pinpatches and sprats at three pence a quarter.’ The scene turned violent as the gang began to break up the furniture, with Barham sitting on the window-sill shouting, ‘My wife has run away with a man that has three children, and when she comes back I’ll be d—if I have her again.’

The mob had tailored their insults to the Girlingites, and their actions had the air of a concerted assault rather than the casual vandalism of bored young men with nothing better to do on a Sunday night in a small country village. The explanation became clear when Benham told the court that such meetings were held every three weeks at his house.

‘We have two or three places where we worship under the head of Mrs Girling. Singing hymns is part of the services, which were usually well attended. I have never seen anyone on the floor fainting. Mrs Girling has a husband and two children at Ipswich. The rooms will hold one hundred people.’

Mr Jewesson, acting for the defence, asked, ‘You’re one of the disciples, ain’t you?’, his biblical overtones somewhat undermined by his grammar.

‘Yes, and thank God for it,’ replied Benham, who proceeded to give intriguing details of the sect and the power of their leader. ‘There is silence generally when Mrs Girling reads the word of God … It is customary for any person to pray who likes. I never saw two or three praying at once – one stopped till another had finished. Mrs Girling was the only one that read and expounded.’ He admitted, modestly, ‘I am not sufficiently high to read and expound the Word of God; I wish I was.’

It wasn’t clear whether he was referring to his stature or his spiritual status. Mary Ann had first come to his house eighteen months ago – ‘Eliza Folkard sometimes expounded, but not publicly’ – and although he had never seen anyone faint at any of these services, ‘I have seen them fall under the power of God.’ As an elder of the Children of God, Benham sought to counter some of the more extraordinary rumours already gathering around them. He told the court that their services differed little from those of other dissenting chapels:

‘It is just the same with the exception that other people give out a text while Mrs Girling only expounds the word of God.’

Yet there was the sense of something other at work, not least in the shape of Mary Ann herself and the transcendence to which she aspired.

‘By our people I mean the people who follow Mrs Girling. We subscribe money amongst ourselves. We only provide Mrs Girling with clothes and boots. We pay nothing for the rooms; I give mine gratis.’

‘You speak of falling down,’ remarked Mr Corrance, ‘when does that occur?’

‘Very often, sir,’ replied Benham. ‘We see people fall down by the power of God.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Corrance.

‘They go into a trance, sir, and can see all things that are going on around them. We allow them to remain till they come to themselves.’ Benham insisted that they never disturbed anyone: ‘We have never recognised these roughs as part of our congregation … They are the Devil’s congregation, and ours are the children of God.’

This testimony was supported by key figures in the movement: Alfred Folkard, Eliza’s father; Cornelius Chase, a twenty-seven-year-old coachmaker, and Isaac Batho, postmaster and shoemaker, both of Benhall; and Sally Spall, wife of Robert, a machinist from Hascheston, with whom Mary Ann had been staying during her missionary work. Sally Spall bore witness to the ‘kiss of charity’ which had prompted the gang’s sarcastic amorousness.

‘It is usual to kiss each other indiscriminately?’ Mr Jewesson asked Mrs Spall.

‘Yes, sir,’ she replied.

‘Both males and females?’ inquired Mr Corrance.

‘Both, sir.’

‘Men, women and children, I suppose?’ prompted Jewesson.

‘Yes, sir.’

This sounded decidedly immoral, so Mr Hill stepped in, acting on behalf of the Girlingites: ‘I suppose it was only a brotherly and sisterly expression of affection?’

‘That’s all,’ said Mrs Spall.

‘You don’t rush into just anyone’s arms – it is only the members of the congregation?’

‘It’s a salutation, I suppose,’ remarked the Reverend Pooley.

‘Just so, sir,’ said Mr Hill.

Mary Ann was as much on trial here as any of her potential assailants. ‘The members of this sect were led by a woman,’ Jewesson was reported as saying, ‘of whom, without imputing anything wrong to her, he might say that it was to be regretted she should leave her husband and children, and put herself forward in the way she did, creating as she must necessarily do so, a disturbance wherever she went.’ Thus Mary Ann was portrayed as a troublemaker, a woman who, by her very sex, sought to disturb the status quo. Jewesson went on to claim that his clients had gone to the service as potential converts, ‘and the confusion which took place was not caused by them or anyone connected with them’. It was a lame excuse. Hill said his client was willing to drop the charges if his expenses – and the fine – were paid there and then; and in an extraordinary intervention which to some seemed to compromise the impartiality of the Bench, Mr Corrance himself advanced the required sum for the defendants.

A legal resolution had been reached, but the wider question of the Girlingites and their freedom to worship remained. The Woodbridge Reporter may have been a local paper, but it reported on national issues: ‘the Rights of Women (#litres_trial_promo)’; ‘Spirit Rapping Extraordinary in Woodbridge’ (which turned out to be a skit advertising alcohol); Primitive Methodism; the vaccination debate; and emigration, ‘a subject uppermost in men’s minds now’. Disturbing events across the Channel – the ‘Literary, Scientific, and Artistic (#litres_trial_promo) Communists’ in the Paris Commune – sat alongside reports of riots in Dublin and an apocalyptic editorial on cholera, ‘the most destructive of human diseases’, whose invasion no ‘“streak of silver sea”’ could prevent. Amid such signs and wonders – as if plague and famine might yet sweep the land, just as the sea could break its defences – the appearance of a local prophetess was of more than a little interest; especially when her crusade provoked a riot at the Mechanics’ Institute in Woodbridge.

Mechanics’ institutes were established in the 1820s as educational centres for artisans. Often used for lectures on sectarian beliefs and spiritualism, they provided the working man with ‘an opportunity (#litres_trial_promo) to ride the wave of the new pseudo-sciences’. On 2 May 1871, the Reporter noted that ‘some printed handbills (#litres_trial_promo) circulated in the town announced that Mrs Girling would preach the Gospel in the Lecture Hall, on Tuesday evening, at half-past seven’. Such advance publicity ensured that the hall was packed, with a crowd of one hundred clamouring for admission, and ‘a great number who went were not prompted with the desire of hearing the Gospel preached …’ Mr Joseph Cullingford attempted to address the crowd, ‘but was frequently interrupted. Mrs Girling stood on the centre of the platform, and by her side was … a Miss Folkard from Parham.’ While many were still trying to get in – some by forcing the door – others were trying to get out, overcome by the heat and noise inside. It was the first indication of a mass reaction to the Girlingite gospel: a frightening spectacle to some; to others, rather farcical. Mr Cullingford tried to leave the hall, but as he did so the door was suddenly locked, leaving his coat tails trapped and the unfortunate man ‘subject to the rude remarks of the roughs for some time’ while he banged on the door unheard, such was the furore within.

Meanwhile, Mary Ann had begun to speak. She told the audience that she lived at 58 Victoria Street, London Road, Ipswich, at which point a voice piped up, ‘Where is your husband?’, to roars of laughter. Mary Ann replied that she had his permission to speak the Word of God. Indeed, on the night of that year’s census, Mrs Girling was not at home with her husband, her seventeen-year-old daughter Mary Jane, now a dressmaker, and her son William, just fifteen but, like his father, already employed in the iron works. Instead she was roaming Suffolk – not preaching, but practising, as she declared. She was about to read from the Book of Revelations when a loud noise was heard outside and the door burst open, releasing Mr Cullingford’s coat. ‘Outsiders rushed in, insiders rushed out, jostling with each other, and a little fresh air was obtained by this indecorous breach. With some difficulty the door was shut and locked, but the interruption continued.’ Mary Ann said she’d been in worse places in Ipswich, but had never experienced such a disturbance. This merely made matters worse.

‘Where’s Osborne?’ went up another shout.

‘Are you going to mesmerise us?’

‘Sit down!’

‘Go home!’

‘Look out, Osborne! no harm sleeping with a saint.’

The hall-keeper tried to eject some of the troublemakers, but his efforts only resulted in an increase in the riot, ‘and the noise and disturbance that ensued were indescribable. A stone was thrown through one of the back windows and nearly hit a person on the head.’

At this point it was decided that it would be better to call off the entire service. The gas was turned out, and in the darkness Mary Ann made her escape through a rear exit, running across the fields towards Bredfield. In the meantime the police finally arrived, in the shape of Superintendent Fitzgerald and three or four officers. They cleared out the remaining roughs, who then went to the nearby Sun Inn where they thought the Girlingites had sought refuge, and where they ‘saluted Mr Banyard with a handful of slush, which they threw into his face, and the doors were kept shut two hours’. Mr Phillips, the local magistrate, was sent for, and the Reporter concluded that ‘Such a disgraceful riot (#litres_trial_promo) has not occurred in Woodbridge for a very long time. We are informed that proceedings will be taken against some of the parties concerned in it.’

It seemed Suffolk had joined battle with Mary Ann’s blasphemy; but what appeared to be a popular uprising was more likely organised by disgruntled squires determined to rid the county of such unsettling influences. While Phillips blamed Mrs Girling for the uproar and called for police intervention, Superintendent Fitzgerald said that as he understood the meeting ‘was for religious controversy, he did not think he had any right to interfere nor to send any of his men so long as personal violence was not resorted to, nor any injury to property done’. Girlingism was to become the focus for contemporary concerns about religious freedom, pursued with a ferocity which was a legacy of the English Revolution. In the Reporter, ‘A Lover of Fair Play (#litres_trial_promo)’ bemoaned ‘a lot of blackguards being encouraged to injure our property and howl down free discussion’, and thought it ‘very unseemly, to say the least [that] a Magistrate could … advance the money to pay the fine of one of those worthies to prevent him from going to prison. I can only hope he is in the habit of showing the same sympathy when a poor wretch is about to be sent to gaol for killing a partridge or a hare … Mrs Girling and her friends will not be silenced by mud and riot and brawling’; rational debate was the only way to ‘expose her folly and delusions’. And while a ‘Lover of Civil and Religious Liberty’ asked, ‘Will you tell me which is the worst of the two – heathenism in Madagascar, or heathenism in (so-called) Christian England?’, another ‘Layman’ declared that Mary Ann had been ‘misrepresented and ought to be heard’.

As she was. On 1 June at Dallinghoo, Mary Ann preached at Mr Cooper’s cottage: the congregation numbered twenty, five of whom were police constables, and two females fainted during the service. Landowners complained that the police ‘would have been (#litres_trial_promo) better employed in their own parishes looking to the public-houses … rather than being in a labourer’s cottage with this fanatic, who, with her disciples, declares she can never die, and, therefore, requires not mortal protection’. The Reporter meanwhile ‘deplored that such opinions (#litres_trial_promo) as Mrs Girling enunciates should “delude” even a Suffolk labourer; but orthodoxy is not the test of citizenship, and her success in these parts shows that they must be included amongst the dark regions of the earth’. The imperial sway represented justice, whether in the remoteness of Madagascar, or in East Anglia.

Just when the readers thought they’d heard the last of the Children of God, came the headline:

MRS. GIRLING AGAIN!

William Brooks, a labourer, and William Leggatt, a cobbler, both from Charsfield, were charged with having assaulted John Cooper of Dallinghoo, a gardener. Around 9.30 pm on a summer evening, in the meadow next to his cottage, Cooper confronted some men throwing stones and rotten eggs at his door, and then proceeded to throw them at him.

Leggatt, standing behind a tree, hit the gardener over the head with a stick, and when Cooper said, ‘I know who you are’, Brooks struck out with a bigger stick, shouting, ‘You old b—, I’ll split your head.’ ‘My head was tender several days from the blow,’ said Cooper. He said he couldn’t understand why the gang were there, but his testimony showed precisely the reason: Mary Ann had been conducting services at his cottage for the past two months.

His evidence was a further insight into the sect’s practices:

‘We only sing, pray, and read the Bible,’ Cooper told the court. ‘It lasts one and a half hours, we sometimes stay as late as eleven, we have been as late as three or four o’clock in the morning at other places. I call myself a child of God; I belong to Christ. Mrs Girling has no particular name for the sect. We greet each other with a kiss. Mrs Girling kisses them all; she did on that occasion. My wife was present; she was kissed. I kissed Mrs Girling, and the men as well; that is our general salutation – kissing each other.’

This was decidedly unEnglish behaviour – men kissing men and persons to whom they were unrelated. Cross-questioned, Cooper painted an even stranger picture.

‘We never had any seized with hysteria or fits, or carried out at mine. Some persons do see visions and are overcome by the Word of God, but that is not hysterics. I never saw any person in hysterics. When they are taken up we let them remain the Lord’s time; we set them up; we use no hartsthorn …; we give them no brandy and water; we never tried what effect a pail of cold water would have by throwing it on them.’

Hartsthorn was a solution of ammonia, used as smelling salts, and originally made from the shavings of antlers. Cooper’s description evoked pagan rites and folk magic, as well as scenes of possession unseen in Suffolk for two centuries, and the magistrates decided it was time to put a stop to this nonsense: ‘If these services were met with silent public contempt and disgust they would drop, but while they were opposed in the manner they have been, the leaders of them would endeavour to claim sympathy as being the subjects of religious persecution.’ Leggatt and Brooks were each fined 1s and 12s 8d costs.

But a curious sidelight is revealed by the census: Leggatt was the nineteen-year-old stepson of a David Spall. Not only was he related to the Spalls, who had converted to Girlingism, but in the same village, Charsfield, his forty-six-year-old uncle, also a shoemaker, was a minister at the Baptist chapel. Meanwhile, Henry Osborne would marry Eliza Barham, his second wife, whose kinsman had harried Leonard Benham. This was a close-knit, internecine society whose families had been divided by faith, and it is not hard to see, in this light, why the reaction was so extreme in rural Suffolk: Girlingism pitted brother against brother, sister against sister, and Mary Ann had exhausted the temper of the county. She would claim that a new vision prompted her departure, but the threat of violence was a forceful factor, while an invitation from an elder of the Bible Christians, who had asked her to preach in London, provided a good excuse (#litres_trial_promo) to leave. Or perhaps, as the sea ate away at the Suffolk coast, she too was in retreat from its depredations, seeking a new life and a new communion in the ever-growing metropolis. Whatever her reasons, that summer of 1871 – which would prove to be a heady season for Victorian utopians – Mary Ann, her flaxen-haired chorister Eliza and her pugilistic cobbler Harry, left Suffolk to take on the capital itself.

TWO (#ulink_8584dbe2-c8f2-574d-852a-9408068cd3cd)