England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

Turning the World Upside-Down (#ulink_8584dbe2-c8f2-574d-852a-9408068cd3cd)

These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also …

Acts of the Apostles, 17:6

Each day in London, I walk over a path of broken gravestones, slippery with moss and imprinted with the sooty shadows of long-decayed leaves. Most of the inscriptions have been eroded over the years, but one word remains –

Memory

– and every time I walk over it, the letters are slowly reduced by an infinite degree.

Bunhill Fields is a residual city square of lawn and plane trees, enclosed by tall buildings, as though part of the forest had been left behind as a museum of extinct specimens. But the reason for the survival of this ancient site is evident from its original, uncorrupted name: Bone Hill. Since 1315, layer upon layer of London’s dead have been laid here, a compost of 123,000 bodies. During the pestilence of 1665, Bunhill was registered as a plague pit; instead it became a burial place for religious dissenters, who chose this unconsecrated ground beyond the city walls. Its tight-packed headstones, obelisks and urns mark the resting place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and Isaac Watts. William Blake is also interred here, although his bones do not lie under his memorial, but in an unmarked part of the cemetery nine feet down in a common grave, as if even now, the mystic who saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye and who lived in the poverty of Jesus remains as elusive as his visions.

This is a shadowy place, even at noon. Over one grave grows an oddly suburban privet hedge, trimmed in the shape of a table-top tomb; some stones assume the shape of coffins themselves, while others mimic Egyptian temples. They bear laconic elegies – Affection Weeps – Heaven Rejoices – or more morbid epitaphs:

the unfortunate Dame being a victim of dropsy. But perhaps the most famous presence here is buried on the other side of the City Road, where Wesley lies next to his house and chapel. From there pilgrim tourists spill out into the narrow alley that runs through Bunhill, mingling with the office workers taking a shortcut through the necropolis, all of them unaware that these fields once witnessed sensational events.

On 15 September 1784, the first hot-air balloon to ascend from English soil rose from the Artillery Ground abutting Bunhill Fields. It was piloted by Vincent Lunardi and watched by the Prince of Wales and 150,000 others. Monsieur Lunardi ate chicken and drank wine as he surveyed the scene from his gondola, the first to broach the space above London and look down on its warrens of streets and churches. It was an experience for which history had not prepared him, seeing a city

so reduced (#litres_trial_promo) on the great scale before me, that I can find no simile to convey an idea of it. I could distinguish Saint Paul’s and other churches, from the houses. I saw streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. It was an enormous bee-hive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself, and the transition from the suspicion, and perhaps contempt of the preceding hour, to the affectionate transport, admiration and glory of the present moment, was not without its effect on my mind.

Lunardi’s view was that of the eye of God; in his ascent, he seemed to have broken some natural law and assumed the divine, looking down on this vast still life, its numinosity directed by himself. This was eighteenth-century science fiction, a triumph of technology over nature; confirmation of an age in which Man took central stage and perhaps even superseded the Creator Himself. It was also a public spectacle: Lunardi’s vehicle was exhibited in the Pantheon, Oxford Street’s hall of brash attraction, and drew great crowds, some sporting the latest fashion in balloon hats; even Blake was inspired by Lunardi to write his verse ‘An Island in the Moon’. The new invention caught the imagination of the young Shelley, too, who saw it as a means of discovery, both physical and philosophical –

The balloon (#litres_trial_promo) has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable … Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa? – why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided silently over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery for ever.

– but his optimism was counterpointed by Horace Walpole, who hoped that

…these new mechanical meteors (#litres_trial_promo) will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.

Walpole’s vision presaged Zeppelin raids and firestorms; Shelley’s, a socialist utopia. Later, stranded in Devon yet keen to pursue his radical campaigns, the poet made miniature silk balloons and sent them over the moors laden with his Declaration of Rights, little airborne devices of sedition suspended by spirit flames, invested with their own subversive futurity, ‘Twinkling (#litres_trial_promo) amid the dark blue depths of Heaven’.

Two generations later, in 1850, the architect, artist and aerialist Philip Brannon displayed the remarkable properties of the hot-air balloon above Southampton. He produced an image of the town from ‘a framed point (#litres_trial_promo) about 400 feet above Hill Farm’, the same site from which my own flight would begin. Brannon’s painting, made from a photograph, was part chart, part panorama; in other images he would envisage a utopian Southampton laid out in imperial avenues, while his guide to the town described an urban Eden in which antediluvian monsters had become a kind of sideshow:

The Whale (#litres_trial_promo) and Grampus have been captured in Southampton Water, and on such rare occasions there have been of course the usual arrangements for sightseers. Small shoals of Porpoises often visit the estuary; and the visitor from inland counties may be pleasingly surprised, as he walks the Quays and Platform, to see at a short distance from the shore many of these singular fish rolling and springing on the surface of the water, then disappearing, and rising again at another point to renew their awkward gambols.

But back in the London graveyard over which Lunardi had floated, events born of yet more fantastical dreams had taken place.

The dissenters buried in Bunhill Fields were heirs of the Interregnum, when it seemed ‘that the world might be (#litres_trial_promo)permanently turned upside down’. Among them was one Jane Leade, a widow and prophetess whose followers, the Philadelphians – named after the future city cited in Revelations – expected the millennium. In communion with the spirit world, Mrs Leade issued tracts such as The Sign of the Times, Forerunning the Kingdom of Christ and Evidencing what is to come, but she died, still waiting, in 1704, by which time new prophets had arrived in London with their own eschatological gospel. Just as Bunhill lived in the memory of the years of the Beast, of famine, plague and fire, so forty years later, the French Prophets seemed to augur a new apocalypse.

The Camisards (#litres_trial_promo) were Protestant insurgents from southern France who took their name from the black shirts they wore in their nocturnal raids. They were heirs of the Cathars and their Gnostic heresies – rejecting organised religion, seeing men and women as equal before God, believing in mystical knowledge attained through divine revelation – and since the 1680s they had conducted a guerilla war directed by visions. Attended by a strange ‘aerial psalmody (#litres_trial_promo)’ when hymns were heard in the heavens, ‘many fell down as if dead … affected with sobs, sighs, groans, and tears’. Eyewitnesses said that they looked like ‘persons moved by a power outside or above themselves’. To others they resembled victims of St Anthony’s Fire, a nervous disorder caused by ergot, a fungus on wheat, which in medieval times had its own relationship to the apocalyptic Dance of Death.

One Camisard experienced nine months of ‘sobs and mental agitation (#litres_trial_promo)’ before falling ‘into an ecstacy, and God opened my mouth. For those three days and nights I was continually under the influence of the spirit, and neither ate, drank, nor slept’. Some claimed the ability to exorcise and heal, ‘passing unharmed through the fire, and practising clairvoyance’. At their secret rites, held at night to avoid detection, young recruits ‘learned to perform the strangest contortions, and generally wrought themselves in a sort of trance’. They were then breathed upon to receive four degrees of divine afflatus: L’Avertissement, Le Souffle, La prophétie and Le dons, a refinement of the holy fire of Pentecost – although others ascribed these ecstatic states to the excessive fasting practised by the Camisards.

In their battles they were led by a former shepherd, Jean Cavalier, guided by God and punished by the Beast. Apprehended Camisards were tortured by being broken on the wheel, their limbs smashed until they could be made to fit its circumference, just as the orthodox world demanded that they should conform their beliefs. Fleeing from persecution, some were exiled to New Orleans (where, in a later civil war, black troops would call themselves Camisards, as rebels within a rebellion), while in 1704 another group, led by Cavalier, escaped to London. They settled in Spitalfields where ‘they ranted profusely (#litres_trial_promo), and made converts of many English people, chiefly of the devouter sex … Miracles, too, were performed in abundance.’ Their ‘mystical phalanx (#litres_trial_promo)’ was promulgated in tracts such as An Account of a Dream at Harwich, In a Letter to a Member of Parliament about the Camisars, a portentfilled reverie to rival Revelations and haunted by two figures: a horseman in golden armour, and a monstrous female, ‘her Eyes glaring (#litres_trial_promo) like Lightning’:

Out of her Nostrils came a sulphurous Smoke, and out of her Mouth Flames of Fire. Her Hair was frizled, and adorn’d with Spoils of ruin’d people; her Neck bare, with Chains about it of Dice, mix’d with Pieces of Gold; which rattling, made a horrid Noise, for her Motions were all fierce and violent, her garment was all stain’d with Tears and Blood: There hung about her several Pieces of Parchment, with Bits of Wax at the end, with Figures engraved on them. She cast her Eyes often with Rage and Fury at that bright appearance I have describ’d [the golden horseman] over whom having no force, she toss’d her Head with Disdain, and glared about on her Votarys, till we saw several possess with her …

This nightmare, experienced on the Suffolk coast close to Mary Ann’s own birthplace, seemed to engulf all England; another pamphlet, Clavis Prophetica, feared that these French Prophets had imported anarchy, and would cover ‘the whole Face (#litres_trial_promo) of our Heaven with Darkness’.

At Christmas 1707, an English Camisard convert, Dr Thomas Emes, died on the eve of the millennium he had predicted. He was buried in Bunhill Fields, but it was foretold that God ‘wou’d attest (#litres_trial_promo) this Publication of our Lord’s Approach as Bridegroom, and Return as a King, by raising Dr Emes from the Grave on the 25th of next Month, above 5 Months after his Interment …’ Accordingly, on 25 May 1708, a crowd estimated at between twenty and sixty thousand gathered in Bunhill Fields to await the doctor’s resurrection. Their disappointment was blamed on ‘the fact of some (#litres_trial_promo) unfaithful person looking on’; denied their miracle, the mob managed to do great damage both to Emes’s resting place and other graves as they rioted through the cemetery. Yet the French Prophets’ fire still burned fiercely: four hundred converts spread out through the country, bearing their pentecostal message like Shelley’s miniature balloons, and holding nocturnal meetings at which crowds gathered to see prophetesses sigh and quake. By the 1740s, their influence had reached the north of England, where it was claimed to have inspired James and Jane Wardley of Bolton-le-Moors, with that ‘further degree (#litres_trial_promo) of light and power’ which would define their own and yet stranger sect.

They called themselves the United Society of Believers, to differentiate from the Quakers’ Society of Friends, founded by George Fox on his Mount of Vision, Pendle Hill. But just as the latter were so called because they quaked at the word of the Lord, so the Wardleys earned the nickname of Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, a term of abuse which they turned and took upon themselves. The same soubriquet had been given to the Ranters in 1648: it was as if Shakerism was a delayed reaction to those revolutionary sects – the Familists, the Grindletons, the Seekers, the Diggers, the Ranters and the Levellers – who were themselves influenced by foreign heresies.

The early Quakers had interrupted church sermons to castigate the preachers, and had stripped naked as a protest. In the 1650s, John Gilpin wanted to cut a hole in his throat to let out the spirit’s tongue. Local lads were encouraged to throw stones at itinerant Quakers, and in their stronghold at Bristol, Wakefield’s James Nayler re-enacted Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, with his long hair, riding on a donkey with women strewing palms before him – a blasphemy for which he had his tongue bored and his forehead branded. But with the Restoration, Quakerism lost its messianic fervour and settled into silent meditation. The Shakers, however, rejoiced in noise. It was as though they registered a seismic preecho of the impending industrial revolution. One Shaker described how ‘a strange power (#litres_trial_promo) begins to come on, and takes place in the body … which sets the person agaping and stretching; and soon sets him a twitching, as though his nerves were all in convulsion. I can compare it to nothing nearer in its feelings, than the operation of an electerising machine.’ These tremors were symptoms of a new revolution to which the operators of Manchester’s mechanised cotton looms would be shackled, in thrall to the processes of mass production while their children scurried perilously beneath eternally shuttling frames. Shakerism would offer an alternative to such slavery.

‘… Amend your lives (#litres_trial_promo),’ demanded Mother Jane Wardley. ‘Repent. For the kingdom of God is at hand. The new heaven and new earth prophesied of old is about to come …’ Her female ministry had its precedent in the French prophetesses, such as the fifteen-year-old Isabeau Vincent, who conducted services while sleeping and maintained, ‘It is not I that speak, but it is the spirit within me’; or the elderly Dorothy Harling, the ‘Permanent Spring (#litres_trial_promo)’ who whipped her followers and urinated on their limbs. Here in the northern forests of Pendle and Knaresborough a dangerous memory lingered; that of a holocaust in which as many as eleven million, mostly women, had died throughout Europe. The same suspicion would taint all female prophets, whose daughters would inherit what their mothers had endured. It was not until 1736 that the laws against witchcraft were repealed – the year in which Ann Lee was born in Manchester.

Even her street had the name of a witch’s familiar: Toad Lane, an alley in a pre-industrial city still surrounded by wilderness, a devil darkness which Saddleworth Moor does little to dispel today. Like Mary Ann, Ann Lee was the daughter of a labourer – her father was a blacksmith – and she too was subject to divine inspiration, ‘especially concerning (#litres_trial_promo) the lusts of the flesh’. Ann would admonish her mother against sex and, as her father attempted to whip her, ‘threw herself into her mother’s arms, and clung around her to escape his strokes’, a scene in which we might detect the traces of other abuse. And like Mary Ann, we have little record of how Ann Lee looked, only a strange phrenological portrait, an imaginary impression.

ANN LEE.

After working at a cotton loom and as a velvet-cutter, Ann became a cook in the Manchester Infirmary, while her father joined the Wardleys’ congregation. In September 1758, aged twenty-two, she too became a Shaker and was soon disrupting services in Manchester’s cathedral, questioning the priest’s words. Four years later, she was persuaded to marry John Standerin, another blacksmith. The lateness of their union owed much to Ann’s mistrust of marriage – legacy of seventeenth-century radicalism which saw marital union as another form of slavery. For Ann it was a protest vindicated by a terrible sequence: the death of her four children in infancy. And as with Mary Ann, these losses became the catalyst for her own rebirth.

After the painful and dangerous forceps delivery of her youngest daughter, Ann lay for hours in a kind of coma, as if by giving life her own had been suspended. When she recovered, her fear of her husband’s concupiscence had grown. At night she paced the floor in her stockinged feet so as not to awaken him, moving through a nightmare – one which seemed to evoke her own memory of abuse. ‘When I felt my eyes (#litres_trial_promo) closing with sleep, I used to pull them open with my fingers, and say within myself, I had better open my eyes here, than open them in hell.’ Where witches had been walked to make them summon their familiars, Ann forestalled her hellish visions by remaining conscious. She starved her body so that her soul ‘might hunger for nothing but God’; tears ‘cleaved off’ her cheeks, blood ‘gushed from under her nails’, and when she lay down at night, the bed shook so that her husband was glad to leave it. Denying herself every gratification, her ‘earthly tabernacle’ was so reduced that she had to rely on others to feed her.

‘My flesh consumed upon my bones, bloody sweat pressed through the pores of my skin, and I became as helpless as an infant.’ As she fasted, ‘a kind of down (#litres_trial_promo) came upon my skin’ – a symptom of malnutrition, elsewhere responsible for the animal appearance of feral children. In her personal wilderness, Ann ‘labored, in strong cries and groans to God, day and night, till my flesh (#litres_trial_promo) wasted away, and I became like a skeleton’. It seemed she was about to make of her marriage bed a sepulchre. Reduced to a living memento mori, Ann was now granted an ‘astonishing vision (#litres_trial_promo) of the Fall, in which Christ appeared to her in all his glory’. She was shown a ‘full and clear view of the mystery of iniquity … and of the very act of transgression committed by the first man and woman in the garden of Eden’. The impact of this sacred, sexual vision was to set Ann on a new and extraordinary course, one which would take her across the world. But others saw it differently, and in 1770 Ann was admitted to the asylum of the same hospital in which she worked.

Thus confined, as if with child, Ann faced her final confrontation. There, in the Lunatick Ward of the Manchester Infirmary, God revealed that she was the woman whose appearance was foretold in Revelations, ‘clothed with the sun (#litres_trial_promo), and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’, crying out ‘in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery’. At this Ann ‘felt unspeakable joy (#litres_trial_promo) in God, and my flesh came upon me, like the flesh of an infant’. Released from the infirmary and out of madness, she was born again, just as two centuries later psychotics would be reborn through insulin coma or electrical therapies which themselves resembled the Shakers’ trembling rituals. In this rite of her own body, she had become a different being: the Bride of the Lamb, or simply Ann the Word; and as she emerged from her confinement, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, she asserted her power over her mentors, the Wardleys.

It was a religious coup in which Ann installed her own followers, among them her brother William, a former cavalry officer, a tall, powerfully-built young man who would act as Ann’s protector and yet who would also acknowledge her as his mother. As the new figurehead of the Shakers, Ann pursued their principles, taken from the Pentecostal or Primitive church: communal property, celibacy, pacifism, self government and power over disease. As with her familial conflicts, these claims enraged the mob, threatened by the promise that they might be saved if they too rejected sex. One of Ann’s own brothers took a broomstick to his sister: ‘He then beat me (#litres_trial_promo) over my face and nose, with his staff, till one end of it was much splintered. But I sensibly felt and saw bright rays of the glory of God, pass between my face and his staff, which shielded off the blows, so that he had to stop and call for drink.’ Having refreshed himself, he resumed his assault, and yet a spiritual souffle infused Ann: ‘While he continued striking, I felt my breath, like healing balsam, streaming from my mouth and nose, which healed me, so that I felt no harm from his stroke, but he was out of breath, like one which had been running a race.’ His breath was merely human; Ann’s, divine.

Like the Camisards, the Shakers moved by night to safe houses, chanting as they went, their leader miraculously preserved as though enveloped in some sacred bubble; when being stoned by the mob, Ann was ‘surrounded by (#litres_trial_promo) the presence of God to such an effect that she felt joy and comfort while her unprotected enemies were utterly confused and distressed’. On another occasion, after ‘wilfully and contemptuously (#litres_trial_promo)’ haranguing a Manchester congregation, Ann was interrogated by the church authorities who, she claimed, threatened to brand her cheeks and bore her blasphemous tongue with a hot iron – an attack which echoed the punishment meted out to James Nayler and portended Mary Ann’s paralysed lips, as if the word of God were as much an affliction as a blessing. And like Mary Ann, Ann Lee too had her would-be assassin: one Elizabeth Bishop, who declared she wished to shoot Ann with a silver bullet – only to fall under her influence and become a Shaker herself. It was as if Mary Ann’s trials had all been run before her, incarnate in Ann Lee.

One Sunday morning the local constabulary broke in upon the Shakers’ worship and dragged Ann downstairs by her ankles, an act of humiliation in which her skirts rode up about her waist. In Manchester’s House of Correction, she was confined in a cell so small that she was unable to straighten herself. ‘She had nothing to eat (#litres_trial_promo) or drink, except some wine and milk mixed, put into the bowl of a tobacco-pipe, and conveyed to her by inserting the stem through the key-hole once every 24 hours. This was done by James Whittaker, when a boy, whom Mother Ann brought up.’ It was a modern version of the medieval torture of ‘little ease (#litres_trial_promo)’, in which, as Linder Sterling observes, the victim became an involuntary anchoress. Or perhaps this was a political imprisonment, an augury of hunger-striking suffragettes who used consumption and its denial as an offensive weapon, only to be punished by force-feeding with mechanical contraptions and rubber tubes.

Freed once more, Ann declared, ‘It is not I (#litres_trial_promo) that speak, it is Christ who dwells in me. I converse with Christ.’ She was the Elder Sister to Jesus’s Elder Brother: mortal beings to be followed, not worshipped; yet in her ‘the Christ (#litres_trial_promo), NOT Jesus… should make a Second Appearance’. The Shakers would reject physical resurrection as ‘utterly repugnant (#litres_trial_promo) to both science, reason, and Scripture’. With their foundation, the Day of Judgement had occurred; they were now living ‘in the Resurrection Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’ – a communion in which they looked to the new world for salvation.

Over the wild Atlantic, America seemed to reflect its absence of history in its very vastness, as if the unending forests, prairies and lakes were waiting for its story to be written by the clouds scudding across its gigantic skies. This terra nullis evoked Eden before the Fall; a place in which to be reborn, as the Puritans believed, out of a state of fallen grace and back into perfection. Unseen and sublime over the horizon, this brave new world was itself a religious experiment, implicit with redemption. Even the passage there was a test of faith, just as The Tempest was inspired by a shipload of Irish rebels, gypsies, dissenters and criminals who had set off for Virginia, ‘Earth (#litres_trial_promo)’s only Paradise’, only to founder on Bermuda, Prospero’s Island.

Since their foundation by the Puritans, the colonies had been home to many such refugees. The Quaker William Penn had established Pennsylvania – a place of sylvan woods named after his father – with its biblical capital, Philadelphia. Mennonite and Amish communities would follow, as would a young Rosicrucian, Kelpius, who exchanged ‘millennial convictions’ with Mrs Leade in London, before taking his followers on a voyage during which the storm was calmed as Christ had done on Galilee. Led to their ‘new forest-homes (#litres_trial_promo) beyond the mighty sea’, they set up their wooden tabernacle near Germantown in Pennsylvania, there to await the Second Coming, living communally and identifying with the woman clothed with the sun from whom they took their name, Das Weib in der Wüste (The Woman in the Wilderness). For seven years they scanned the skies with telescopes for signs, but were rewarded only with ‘a white, obscure (#litres_trial_promo), moving body in the air … which, as it approached, assumed the form and mien of an angel’ before receding ‘into the shadows of the forest …’

Back in Manchester, the woods also beckoned to Ann Lee. One night the Shakers were resting at the roadside when James Whittaker saw ‘a large tree (#litres_trial_promo), and every leaf thereof shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch’. Like the burning bush from which Moses was commanded to lead his people out of slavery, this ‘Tree of Life’ was a sign of their new order; and so, in the words of their chroniclers, the Shakers ‘fled to the (#litres_trial_promo) wilderness of America, from the face of the “fiery flying serpent”’ – the church and state which they saw as the Image of the Beast. During their voyage – financed by a wealthy supporter, John Hocknell – the captain threatened to throw his human cargo overboard when they persisted in their strange rites, but a tempest blew up, and as waves sprang a plank in the hull, Ann saw two bright angels standing by the mast. At this another wave pounded the plank back into place.

On their arrival in New York, the Shakers strode up Pearl Street and stopped outside the house of Mrs Cunningham, whose name Ann seemed to know. ‘I am commissioned (#litres_trial_promo) of the Almighty God to preach the everlasting Gospel to America, and an Angel commanded me to come to this house, and to make a home for me and my people,’ she declared, whereupon they were immediately taken inside. There they stayed until the spring of 1776 when they established a new Albion at Niskeyuna, on land bought by Hocknell in upstate New York, a place reached through ‘the immense pines (#litres_trial_promo) and hemlock trees’ of ‘that dreary forest, which blackens so large a portion of North America’. Around them raged the battle for the new nation, a revolution which, their visions had assured them, would ‘terminate successfully, and that a Civil Government would be founded, protecting all people in their liberty of conscience, person, and press’. Indeed, they had come to save Americans ‘all sunk (#litres_trial_promo) in their pollutions’.

It was a mission rooted in the virgin forest. Ann Lee was the woman living unknown in the woods of the Apocalypse, asking the trees to pray for her followers, who ran wild, hooting like owls. Witnesses claimed to have seen them dancing naked, in the belief that ‘they were angels (#litres_trial_promo), and invisible, and could go out among men and not be seen’. There was a precedent for such behaviour: the Ranters had preached unclothed, and the Quakers went ‘naked for a sign (#litres_trial_promo)’. These were symbolic states, just as Blake and his wife would sit naked in their Lambeth garden, reciting from Paradise Lost and greeting a visitor, ‘Come in! it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’

The Blakes’ back garden represented the perfection of paradise, ‘to the scandal of wondering neighbours’. Neighbours of the Shakers’ Eden were also suspicious – not least of the sect’s claims to commune with the dead: ‘Sometimes while (#litres_trial_promo) eating at the table, they say their dead parents and brethren come on the table and set on a pyre and they see them.’ The Shakers had inherited the early Quakers’ belief in ‘a certain efflux (#litres_trial_promo) or effluvium of animal volatile spirits … that flow from their bodies by the command of their will into the bodies of … new proselytes’, while Ann saw God’s power ‘visible on the faces of the believers and even on their clothing … It looked perfectly white and run in veins’. At other times a ‘strange milky substance … seemed to run over the skin and clothes of converts’. Such phenomena recalled the breath that had protected Ann like balsalm and foreshadowed spiritualistic ectoplasm – the mysterious cloudy matter which possessed its own methods of bodily extrusion as it was brought forth from mediums’ mouths and even their vaginas.

In fact, in the New World their rituals had become even more extreme. The Shakers struck grotesque shapes – ‘shaking their heads (#litres_trial_promo), in a violent manner, turning their heads half round, so that their face looks over each shoulder, their eyes being shut’ – as if God was fighting the Devil for control of their bodies. To some, such contortions were indistinguishable from the possessed victims of witchcraft. As the ritual rose to fever-pitch, worshippers would be ‘groaning most dismally; some trembling extremely; others acting as though all their nerves were convulsed; others swinging their arms, with all vigour, as though they were turning a wheel, etc. Then all break off, and have a spell of smoaking, and some times great fits of laughter … this they call the worship of God’.

Sometimes the dancing grew so intense that the entire company would jump up and down, making the house tremble ‘as if there (#litres_trial_promo) were an earthquake’. Nor were these convulsions confined to indoors. They could happen while travelling by foot or horseback, digging in the fields, or cutting trees; their subjects would not interrupt their chores, but carried on working as their heads turned from left to right, ‘with eyes closed or raised towards the sky, with an expression which proclaims ecstasy, anguish, and pain’. Such scenes must have been truly disturbing for passersby, and perhaps even for the Shakers themselves. Yet they had been licensed to act in this way by the freedom of America, as though their removal to a new world had liberated them from England’s little ease and allowed their ranks to swell. The American colonies had already witnessed George Whitefield’s Great Awakening and the revival known as the New Light Stir. Now, with the Dark Day of 10 May 1780, when candles had to be lit at noon – in fact, the clouds were the carbonised remains of the forest itself, burnt in clearings and suspended in the air like great trails of incense – hundreds came over to Shakerism, drawn by this apocalyptic sign.

It seemed the Shakers were summoning spirits, or were possessed by them, sometimes to be purged by Mother Ann. After all, was not Christ an exorcist? But in New England, these were dangerous ideas in the lee of Salem, the harbour town due east of Niskeyuna. Only eighty years previously, in 1692, several girls of the town had begun to display strange symptoms. ‘Their motions (#litres_trial_promo) in their fits are preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into,’ wrote Reverend Lawson, while Reverend Hale noted: ‘Their arms, necks, and backs were turned this way and that, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.’ Others spoke in voices which were not their own; some felt bitten or pinched, and even had actual marks on their skin. Later explanations for these phenomena would include multiple personality, an extreme form of ‘hysterical fugue’, or even ergotism, St Antony’s Fire, in which the victim contorts their body in pain, shaking and suffering delusions. But such pathology was not available to those who witnessed the Shakers’ strange convulsions; and as Matthew Hopkins’ campaign would haunt Mary Ann Girling, so Salem’s memory cast these forest rites as a kind of Goyaesque coven.

For the Shakers, who saw time in heaven-directed dispensations which extended beyond human measure, it was the beginning of a new age. To seal the success of their ‘federated communal order (#litres_trial_promo)’, an echo of the new states of America, they set off to tour New England. Travelling by night, they sang to keep their spirits up in the pitch-black darkness of the forest, and carried their faith as far north as Maine and the plantation by Sabbathday Lake. Yet in these shadowy sorties they were accused of unAmerican activities, of harbouring weapons and ‘being unfriendly (#litres_trial_promo)to the patriotic cause, from the fact of their bearing a testimony against war in general’. Their pacifism was in itself an offence, and Mother Ann was abducted by vigilantes with blackened faces like the ‘Red Indian’ protesters of the Boston Tea Party, and her dress torn off to reveal ‘a British emissary (#litres_trial_promo) in a woman’s habit’, while her followers were accused of being Indian-lovers. And just as Salem’s witches were suspected of contracts with the devil – to ‘over Come (#litres_trial_promo) the Kingdome of Christ and set up [his own] Kingdome’ – so the Shakers seemed to pose a new threat to the virgin territory. They had become the enemy within. Enraged by their enacted, allegorical war between Michael and the dragon, colonists besieged the Shakers in their houses or route-marched them out of town. Still they bore their sufferings selflessly, like Christian and Faithful in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, jumping on each others’ backs to save one another from the whippings, and thanking God ‘that He had (#litres_trial_promo) found them worthy of persecution’.

These years of opposition took their toll on Ann Lee, and on 8 September 1784 she succumbed to what may have been leukaemia, visible as bruise-like marks on her body: pathological stigmata. Ann had never believed in her own immortality, although her followers expected her ministry to last a thousand years. Under her appointed successor, her surrogate son James Whittaker, the sect financed the building of a ship, the Union, ‘to bear (#litres_trial_promo) the testimony to foreign lands’. With its Shaker crew and cargo of horses, flour and other supplies, this latter-day Mayflower must have made an extraordinary sight as it sailed out of Boston Harbour, bound for Haiti and Havanna. We know nothing of its journey, nor is there any record of Cubans converting to the cause, no secret Caribbean colony of Shakers conducting their rites in the tropical wilderness, observed only by parakeets and snakes.