England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

In the Old World, rationality had triumphed. England had rejected Ann Lee’s visions and sent her troublesome sectarians to one colony, just as it would transport its criminal outcasts to another. Faced with its own republicanism and radicalism, a new English revolution was averted by John Wesley and his peculiar people, who subsumed rebellion in religion and what Charles Kingsley called ‘the opium (#litres_trial_promo) of the masses’. Yet faith remained an outlet for lives in thrall to industrialism, and open-air Methodist gatherings were prey to ‘swooning, groaning, crying out, weeping and falling into paroxysms’.

Although Wesley opposed such extreme reaction, it had grown rather than subsided among people alienated by enclosure and the age of the machine; and in an era paradoxically attuned to madness and hysteria by its own rational aspirations, metaphysical questions gathered currency as the century moved towards its end. Anton Mesmer, discoverer of animal magnetism, believed that the universe was filled with a mystical fluid which permeated everything and was the conduit of the influence of the stars – an alchemical connexion between the Shakers’ effluvium and the modern notion that our bodies are made of stardust. Like Isaac Newton searching for the Philosopher’s Stone even as he wrote his Principia, or the earlier scientist Sir Kenelm Digby, who had developed his curative ‘powder of sympathy’ and who joined others such as Francis Bacon in the belief in sympathetic magic – that bleeding could be stopped at a distance by applying a handkerchief soaked in the injured party’s blood to the weapon which had caused the wound – Mesmer moved between philosophy and the preternatural. Mozart was said to have written Così Fan Tutte under his influence, although in 1784 the French Academy decided that ‘imagination with magnetism (#litres_trial_promo) produces convulsions and that magnetism without imagination produces nothing’. Yet mesmerism, in its scientific reincarnation as hypnotism, would become a treatment for the neuroses which afflicted the industrial world and which filled its asylums with the mad. Was religious mania, then, a neurosis? The behaviour of Richard Brothers made a good case study.

In March 1795, Richard Brothers was arrested on the orders of the Privy Council and confined to an asylum. His crime – his madness – was to have predicted that the Thames would run with human blood in advance of the Second Coming. As his popularity grew, Brothers issued prophetic tracts whose comprehensive titles – the Downfall of the Pope; a Revolution in Spain, Portugal, and Germany; the Death of Certain Great Personages in this and other Countries. Also a dreadful Famine, Pestilence and Earthquake – evoke the apocalyptic scenes painted by John Martin, with their angel hosts on one side, and on the other, hordes thrown into hell like those Shakers who felt themselves teetering on the precipice of the inferno. In Brothers’ imagined future, France would be infected with ‘contaminated blood’, Catholicism and Islam would be destroyed, and a universal brotherhood take their place. Such predictions were a heady narcotic for those excluded by the changing centre of economic gravity. But Brothers was arrested and confined to Bedlam, and only released in 1806, still insisting that he had seen the Devil ‘walk leisurely into London (#litres_trial_promo)’ – by which time he had been superseded by an even greater cult.

The fin de siècle had produced new prophetesses, women such as Elspeth Buchan, a contemporary of Ann Lee who claimed that God’s power ‘wrought such a wonderful change’ that she was able to live without food for many weeks. She too employed holy breath, decried marriage as ‘the bondage of the law (#litres_trial_promo)’, and bid her Buchanites sleep on heather bundles in a barn. She would stand in a circle of young men and touch each with her palm, at which they would swoon away and lie about her like some human crop circle, springing upright when touched again. She also set a date for the Second Coming in July 1786, when her followers, their heads shaved save for tufts by which angels could pluck them up, waited on a wooden platform built on a nearby hill – only instead of the Lord a wind arrived and sent them crashing to the ground.

But none gathered greater crowds than Joanna Southcott. Born in Gittisham, Devon, in 1750, Southcott was a farmer’s daughter, and a zealous Methodist. At the age of forty, a change came over her: modern doctors might have discerned the menopause, but Joanna said she had been called by God and, like Elspeth Buchan, she assumed the starry mantle of the Woman Clothed with the Sun. By 1801, when she published her booklet, The Strange Effects of Faith, her Christian Israelites were particularly numerous in the North and South-West. From London, Joanna issued ominous warnings – ‘O England! (#litres_trial_promo) O England! England! the axe is laid to the tree, and it must and will be cut down; ye know not the days of your visitation’ – while in Hampshire, William Cobbett despaired, ‘It is in vain (#litres_trial_promo) that we boast of our enlightened state, while a sect like this is increasing daily.’

One day, sweeping out a house after a sale, Southcott ‘was permitted by the Lord (#litres_trial_promo) to find, as if by accident’, a commonplace seal. In her hands it became the English Seal of Revelation, and her SEALED PEOPLE rapidly approached the mystical number predicted in the book of the Apocalypse: ‘Then I heard (#litres_trial_promo) the count of those who were sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand of them’. This was followed by a yet more extraordinary announcement: that the sixty-three-year-old Southcott was pregnant with the messiah who would rule the nations with a rod of iron. This was not a new phenomenon – in the Interregnum, Ranter women had professed to be with Christ’s child – but now all England awaited Shiloh’s birth. Expectation grew, as did Joanna’s belly, but fatally she cast doubt on her state, and when no child appeared, she fell ill and died on 27 December 1814. Her followers waited three days for her resurrection, keeping her body warm with hot water bottles (and thus accelerating its putrefaction). On the fourth day they permitted a postmortem, which revealed that her phantom pregnancy (as if to bear the Holy Spirit) was due to dropsy, the same watery disease which had flooded the unfortunate corpus of Bunhill’s Mary Page.

Southcott left (#litres_trial_promo) behind twenty-five boxes filled with her visions, one sealed and to be opened only in time of national crisis. Attempts were made to have it opened during the Crimean War and the First World War – the same points at which a ghostly hart appeared at the Rufus Stone. The Panacea Society – formed in Bedford by the suffragette Mary Bulthrop, who believed herself to be the reincarnation of Shiloh – campaigned for its opening, but when it was finally unlocked in 1927, the box was found to contain some insignificant papers and a lottery ticket. The Panaceans, however, contend that this was not the authentic box, and that even now, Joanna’s secrets lie in a rural repository awaiting ultimate revelation, while her followers prepare for Christ’s arrival at 18 Albany Street, Bedford, the original site, they claim, of the Garden of Eden.

In New England, Shakerism had settled down to become an institution, with a written constitution and divided ‘orders (#litres_trial_promo)’ as if in mimesis of the new republic. The Shakers lived like monks and nuns, their daily routines of worship and work strictly regulated, even as to how they should eat: noiselessly and without conversation. The outside world was kept at bay: surgeons were summoned only in the case of broken bones or serious wounds; otherwise, trust was put in God’s healing. Industry became an expression of their faith; as Ann Lee had declared: ‘Put your hands (#litres_trial_promo) to work and give your hearts to God’. Their clothes were symbols of their unity and their otherness – and, perhaps, of suppressed individuality, a uniqueness in itself homogenous. With long gowns, aprons and caps for the women, and coats, capes, breeches and stocks for the men, they resembled a cross between Puritans and workers in a Lancashire factory. Such subfusc costumes reflected their connexion with nature, in felt and wool and linen and cotton, woven and dyed with the levelling unchemical colours of drab, nutgall, butternut or pursley blue to blend with the land – just as the paint used by the Sabbathday Lake family for their meeting house was composed of crushed blueberry skins, sage leaves, and indigo. The Shakers saw God in the natural kingdom, in the animals they kept, in the food they ate: many were vegetarians or even vegans.

Their villages aspired to a similar purity. Built of plain white clapboard, they were unadorned places in which to live out lives of innocence. They now rehearsed their steps before dancing, and on Sundays, carriages would arrive at Sabbathday Lake from the spa hotels of Poland Springs, as though the Shakers were another attraction laid on for their amusement. In a complicated world, Shakerism presented an uncluttered appeal. Free from possessions and responsible to no government but God, they were ‘the children of one (#litres_trial_promo) family, enjoying equal rights and privileges in things spiritual and temporal, because … love is the only bond of their union’.

Bonded by love: it was that simple.

The Shakers seemed to reinvent the way the world could work, and they inspired the Welsh-born reformer Robert Owen in his plans for a new society, founded on a series of co-operatives – although Britain remained sceptical about his plans: ‘Can Mr Owen reverse (#litres_trial_promo) the decrees of Fate, and so regulate the accidents to which human beings are liable, as to remove from them all temptation to sin, and exempt them from all chance of mistery?’ Nonetheless, this wealthy visionary arrived in America in the wake of Ann Lee, with an equally presumptuous ambition. ‘I am come (#litres_trial_promo) to this country,’ he declared in 1825, ‘to introduce an entire new system of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system … and remove all causes for contest between individuals.’ And as he explained to President John Adams, who himself opposed slavery, he would achieve his aim by building utopia, for that was the only way Man might change, if his circumstances dignified his ambitions.

Owen’s vision was a new Jerusalem, about to rise in the New World – in Indiana. He proposed a great hollow square, one thousand feet long, which would contain all his community needed: a school and a university, a library, chapel, ballrooms. Kitchens, dining rooms and laundries would occupy other blocks, while the upper storeys would house the inhabitants like some gigantic hotel. This ‘new empire (#litres_trial_promo) of peace and goodwill’ foresaw the city of the future; but just as that would for many become a dystopia, Owen and his architect, Stedman Whitwell, also had to accept a different reality. Having taken over a former Rappite community, hundreds flocked to Owen’s New Harmony, drawn by its utopian dream or its founder’s substantial fortune. But the colony did not live up to its name: it lacked the religious principles, the discipline and the cohesion of celibacy, as practised by the Shakers, and there were disputes over the system which should be adopted to run the place. Yet it sowed radical seeds, not least in the work carried on by Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, who would join Fanny Wright (one of the first to arrive at New Harmony and founder of Nashoba (#litres_trial_promo), a community to educate liberated slaves) in proposing free education and women’s rights, ideas which would influence the Democratic party, while among other Owenites championing these same radical ideas was an Englishman, Frederick Evans. In a reverse arc to Owen’s inspiration, Evans would convert to Shakerism in 1831 and become its most able proponent. He was also the man who would oversee their venture into another world.

THE WILLING GIFT

In 1837, Shakerism was suddenly disrupted by a violent eruption. That August at Niskeyuna, a class of adolescent girls ‘began to shake (#litres_trial_promo) and whirl’. In the summer evening, ‘the senses of three of the children appeared withdrawn from the scenes of time … They began to sing, talk about angels, and describe a journey they were making, under spiritual guidance, to heavenly places.’ It was the start of ‘Mother Ann’s Work’, a revival directed from beyond the grave by Ann Lee herself.

The Shakers had ever believed that they were surrounded by the spirits of the dead. Mother Ann had written to one Shaker, ‘I see (#litres_trial_promo) the dead around you, whose visages are ghostly and very awful. Their faces almost touch thine. If you did but see what I see, you would be surprised …’ Now the sect had witnessed the birth of spiritualism, and it was a violent genesis. The music created by these human instruments was an eerie composition which superseded time and space, connecting all things in the Shakers’ eternal dance. It threw its subjects to the floor, ‘where they lay (#litres_trial_promo) as dead, or struggling in distress until someone near lifted them up, when they would begin to speak with great clearness and composure’, although the words came in ‘native speech’ or ‘mongrel English’. These events may have recalled those at Salem, but to some, the extremity of the reactions in these, adolescents was more clearly than ever an erotic sublimation. As the phenomenon spread, the instruments were possessed by figures from the past; by dead Shakers or a panoply of Sounding Angels, Angels of Love, of Consuming Fire, and the Holy Witnessing Angel of God bearing scrolls of ‘heavenly thoughts (#litres_trial_promo)’ from the Apostles and Old Testament prophets, from Alexander, Napoleon and George Washington, or from their ‘Heavenly Parents’, Jesus Christ and Ann Lee herself.

‘Mother Ann’s Work’ was breathtaking in the detail with which it imagined another plane. Where Enlightenment scholars had debated whether one would drink claret in heaven, Shaker feasts of invisible food were consumed and drinkers made giddy by invisible wine in what were in effect mass seances. There were extravagant manifests of fantastic objects echoing those of Revelations and the eschatological banquet of the Lamb, a festival to mark the final unfolding of time: ‘diamonds of charity (#litres_trial_promo)’, ‘chrysolites, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones; golden censors, bowls, and chains; gold boxes filled with various treasures; cakes of love and “sweet-scented manna on shining plates”… plates of wisdom, baskets of simplicity, balls of promise, belts of wisdom, bands of brightness and robes of meekness; heavenly doves; leaves from the tree of life …’

It was as if the after-life was providing the Shakers with the luxuries denied them on earth, all listed in dream-like, Byzantine indices worthy of Huysmans’ À Rebours. Like later mediums, instruments employed Indian spirit guides, with brethren as braves and sisters as squaws, whooping and yelling in strange antics, ‘such as would (#litres_trial_promo) require a Dickens to describe’, while predictions of the invention of the telegraph and coming revolution in Europe seemed, like Mother Shipton, to map out the future, opening doors to the unknown. Although the Shakers were reluctant to make public the phenomena they were experiencing, the instruments announced that ‘similar manifestations (#litres_trial_promo) would soon break forth in the world’. Accordingly, in 1847 at Hydesville, a small town in New York State, two sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, aged twelve and ten, heard ‘a brisk tattoo (#litres_trial_promo)’ of raps on their bedroom wall and saw their furniture move of its own accord.

As newspapers began to report these strange events, Mrs Fox sent the girls to their married sister, Leah, in Rochester, five miles away. But the phenomena followed them, delivering messages for which Leah charged visitors a dollar a head. The Rochester Rappings ushered in commercial spiritualism. Moving to New York, the Fox sisters set up operation in P. T. Barnum’s Hotel, where they were visited by Manhattan society and such figures as the singer Jenny Lind, so impressed that she left ‘with her eyes (#litres_trial_promo) full of tears’. Despite an investigation which concluded that the noises were made by snapping certain tendons, and Margaret Fox’s confession – subsequently retracted – that ‘the whole business is humbug from beginning to end’, an air of mystery lay over the affair. It was as if the sisters had fulfilled a need for belief in a rational age. Among those who paid their dollar admission were the members of a Shaker committee, who ‘at once recognised (#litres_trial_promo) the presence of the spirits, and believed it to be the prelude to extensive manifestations of different kinds’. However, as spiritualism began to grip the country, other Shakers professed to be uncertain about its manifestations, declaring that ‘this form of communion with the spirit world is not for Believers in our faith’.

In those years America seemed open to a hundred Edens, from Thoreau’s Walden in Massachusetts to Keil’s Aurora in Oregon; from Josiah Warren’s Equity in Ohio to Étienne Cabet’s Icaria in California. In 1840, Emerson told Thomas Carlyle: ‘We are all (#litres_trial_promo) a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket…’ However, Boston Transcendentalists distrusted spiritualism (a ‘Rat-revelation (#litres_trial_promo)’, said Emerson); and Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting the Shaker village of Hancock with his friend Herman Melville, then in the midst of writing Moby-Dick, professed to be disgusted by its ‘utter and systematic (#litres_trial_promo) lack of privacy’, the ‘miserable pretence of cleanliness and neatness’ and the fact that two men shared a narrow bed. Yet ten years before, Hawthorne had been a shareholder in Brook Farm’s brief commune of intellectuals on 160 acres of farmland, where he laboured all day in the fields – only to find himself too tired to write at night.

Even shorter-lived was Fruitlands, a commune inspired by the Shakers and founded by Amos Bronson Alcott, the great Transcendentalist, after a visit (funded by Emerson) to the ‘Concordium (#litres_trial_promo)’, an English commune at Ham Common which was run by his friend, Charles Lane. Back in New England, Alcott and Lane, nine other adults, and the Alcotts’ four daughters – among them the ten-year-old Louisa May – set up camp on ninety acres in Harvard, where many adopted new identities for the venture. One man, Samuel Bower, declared that clothes stifled his spirit and became a nudist, while another lived only on apples. Apart from Mrs Alcott, there was only one other woman, Ann Page, although she was expelled for eating fish. The community was strictly vegan, taking nothing whatsover from animals – no dairy products, eggs, honey, wax, or wool. No manure was used to fertilise the land, nor animals to work it. There was no lamp oil, since it came from whales and so the commune was dark at night; cotton was forbidden as it was produced by slavery. Yet such admirable, contemporary-sounding sanctions caused problems – not least what their adherents could wear (for those unwilling to adopt Samuel Bower’s sky-clad solution) in an era before man-made fibres. ‘Since cotton, silk, and wool (#litres_trial_promo) were forbidden as the product of slave-labor, worm-slaughter, and sheep-robbery’, as Louisa May Alcott wrote in Transcendental Wild Oats, her fictional account of the commune, ‘a new dress was invented. Tunics and trousers of brown linen were the only wear … Some persecution lent a charm to the costume, and the long-haired, linen-clad reformers quite enjoyed the mild martyrdom they endured when they left home.’

Fruitlands was a utopian may-fly, lasting only one summer. Its failure lay in its membership of people already unable to cope with life, men such as Samuel Hecker, who ‘had nervous fits, heard imaginary voices, and suffered from an unidentified sexual disorder for which others advised marriage but which convinced him always to remain celibate’. Hecker tried to purify himself by eating only unleavened bread, fruit and water, and aspired to the ultimate diet of wanting ‘to do away (#litres_trial_promo) with the digestive system entirely’. He later became a Roman Catholic priest.

By now Brook Farm and its tenants had fallen under a powerful new spell: that of François Marie Charles Fourier, a man whose influence spread across the world, even though he had never left France between his birth in 1772 and his death, kneeling by his bedside in a lowly boarding house, in 1837. Yet Fourier devised a world of mutually interdependent communities built up through layer over layer of human endeavour, and inhabiting gigantic three-storey dwellings spread over three square miles. In order to succeed where Owen had failed, these colonies would contain a high proportion of farmers and mechanics to capitalists, artists and scientists; the least pleasant work would receive the highest pay, and leisure hours be devoted to the uplifting pursuit of pleasure. This hedonistic army paraded – in Fourier’s mind – in ascending phalanxes of one thousand six hundred and twenty individuals ready to take over the world when their number reached 2,985,984. By that time, Fourier predicted, the sea would have turned to lemonade, the stars and planets (‘sentient beings (#litres_trial_promo) like ourselves’) continued to reproduce, and men would have grown tails with eyes in them. The dangerous beasts of the wilderness would be replaced by ‘anti-lions’ and ‘anti-sharks’, and the Arctic would dispense perfumed dew.

Not since Thomas More’s Island of Utopia had paradise been so specifically charted. And such were these promises, so precise and so wonderful, that in an industrial century longing for its own lost Eden, Fourierism was taken up with a wild popularity. Brook Farm (#litres_trial_promo) itself became a phalanx, but in the process lost its intellectual sheen: the transcendentalists stopped coming, and the farm burnt down. Meanwhile, part of New York State was declared a Burnt Over Region through which revivalism had raged, leaving behind the stubble of faith. From this eschatological geography – from the Great Awakening to the New Light Stir and now this incindered zone – a gothic New England was created, evoked in Hawthorne’s Shaker Bridal, The Blithedale Romance and The House of the Seven Gables. The latter was set in his hometown of Salem, with its ‘Daguerreotypist (#litres_trial_promo)’ as a latter-day witch, a photographer-radical suspected of practising animal magnetism and who had ‘the strangest companions imaginable; – men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments; –… who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other people’s cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare’; while in Moby-Dick, Melville depicted the young ‘archangel Gabriel (#litres_trial_promo)’ as a maniacal figure in a ‘cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge’ who was ‘nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyuna Shakers’, and who declared the White Whale itself to be ‘the Shaker God incarnate’.

One New England sect truly prospered, however: John Humphrey Noyes’ Perfectionists or ‘Bible Communists (#litres_trial_promo)’. In 1834 Noyes had announced that Christ had absolved him of sin, and that the Second Coming had actually occurred thirty years after the Saviour’s crucifixion. The Perfectionists were now living in a state of regenerated innocence – ‘In a holy community (#litres_trial_promo), there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be’ – and where the Shakers sublimated desire in the dance, Noyes liberated women via coitus reservatus. He even envisaged a kind of early eugenicism by preaching against ‘random procreation (#litres_trial_promo)’. Members lived in a centrally-heated Mansion House at Oneida in New York State, with a visitor’s parlour and a library which contained the latest works by Huxley and Darwin. Next door there was a school, photographic and chemistry laboratories, and a printing press producing the weekly Circular, with mock ‘classifieds’ advertising ‘Shares of Second-Coming Stock (#litres_trial_promo)’. Entertainment was provided by an orchestra, with a stereopticon for the children. Inhabitants rose when they liked, their workload lightened by hired labour. From its graceful lawns, Oneida presented a civilised image, with men in suits and women in liberated short skirts and bloomers; only the notion of radical sexual practices lent an edge to such genteel scenes.

THREE (#ulink_b4955129-e367-56a2-b440-2a498f373412)

Human Nature (#ulink_b4955129-e367-56a2-b440-2a498f373412)

… Considering the poverty of Pekin, the beggary in Constantinople, the infanticide in Paris, the political corruption in New York, and the fifty thousand thieves, one hundred thousand prostitutes, and one hundred and sixty-five thousand paupers of London, is it strange that noble souls in all lands yearn for social reconstruction? … Are not present political and social systems falling to pieces? What mean their panics, strikes, internationales, trades’ unions, and co-operative fraternities? Does not Whittier, writing of recurrent cycles, say ‘The new is old, the old is new?’

‘J. M. Peebles on Robert Owen’, Human Nature, June 1874

At the end of the twentieth century, I visited a monastery on the Isle of Wight. Quarr Abbey, close to Victoria’s retreat at Osborne, was constructed in 1911 to a modern design by one of its own brothers, Dom Paul Bellot, employing Belgian bricks and three hundred builders. Reached by a tree-lined avenue and surrounded by walled orchards, it lies on the shores of an island remaindered in time; a perpetually sunlit place where at any moment I might see a 1960s car, laden with my own family, en route for our holiday in a converted railway carriage around which the bats flew at night while the incandescent, moth-wing gas mantles glowed inside.

At Quarr, the monks rise in the dark to sing their divine office, and work until it is time to eat their high-ceilinged refectory at bare wooden tables, facing across a space from which the outside world is proscribed. As they serve themselves soup and pale cider from their orchards, an ancient silence seems to reside in the building itself. Their black habits seem to be from some remote past, too, but underneath they wear trainers on their feet.

For our rational age, faith is problematic (#litres_trial_promo). We find fervour suspicious; but perhaps you need faith to see. From Plato’s Atlantis to Thomas More’s u-topos and Fourier’s phalanxes, Utopia was ever a human ideal: its hope is one of the appeals of religion, for that is where paradise lies. But paradises are lost, too, and by its very perfection, Utopia’s history is a virtual one, to be created out of a metaphorical wilderness. Crowded nineteenth-century England, its primal forests felled long ago, was constricted and controlled; conversely, the vast reaches of America allowed for adventure. But it too was being privatised and industrialised, and the attraction of such sects began to pall in inverse proportion to the inexorable pull of capital. The new republic’s economic expansion reined in its religious experiments by the simple expedient of the equally expanding price of land. Utopia was priced out (#litres_trial_promo) of the market, and among those to suffer in the exchange were the Shakers, their decline an ironic result of the progress which they had embraced as inventors of (#litres_trial_promo) the washing machine and the clothes pin. At their peak in 1840 there were six thousand Shakers in America; by the end of the century that number would be reduced to just one thousand. The United Society of Believers had been superseded by the United States of America, and as the secular replaced the sacred, a new revival was required: one which would withstand the test of an industrial age, yet which could draw on the passion of Mother Ann’s Work. And if anyone could save Shakerism from decay, it was Frederick Evans.

Born in Worcester, England, in 1810, Evans, the former Owenite, would become the intellectual face of Shakerism, drawing radical strength from the virtues of his plain-clad sisters and brothers: ‘To the mind (#litres_trial_promo) of the simple, unsophisticated Shaker, it seems marvellously inconsistent … that more than one half the citizens should be disfranchised because they happen to be females … while still millions of other fellow-citizens are treated as property, because they chance to possess a darker-coloured skin than their cruel brethren.’ That these objections remain is a testament to the Shakers’ moral code. From their village of Mount Lebanon, Evans would correspond with Tolstoy on the subject of non-resistance, while his other protests have the ring of modernity, as the elder spoke out against animal cruelty, class education and religious persecution. He also sought to apply Shaker principles to the government itself, suggesting that leadership be confined to ‘intellectual celibates (#litres_trial_promo)’, male or female, ‘who would be married only to the state’.

In search of new recruits, Evans planned to reimport these ideas to the mother country. England had been alerted to Shakerism by such writers and reformers as Robert Owen, Charles Lane and Harriet Martineau, but it was the new power of spiritualism that truly prepared the way for Evans’ mission. Writing to Owen in 1856, Evans reminded his mentor that ‘Spiritualism originated (#litres_trial_promo) among the Shakers of America … In truth, all the members, in a greater or less degree, were mediums’, for whom ‘physical manifestations, visions, revelations, prophecies and gifts of various kinds … were as common as is gold in California’. Indeed, Evans had discovered his own mediumship at the height of Mother Ann’s Work, and would invite the medium William Eddy to Mount Lebanon to conduct seances using special cabinets built by the Shakers, in which Eddy was locked while thirty-one spirits manifested themselves in ‘ancient costume (#litres_trial_promo)’. But among those ancestral voices, one would become all-important: ‘That noble (#litres_trial_promo), wonderful man Thomas Paine laid the foundations of the New Earth, as Ann Lee laid the foundations of the New Heavens.’

Thomas Paine, an ex-corset maker from Norfolk, had come to America in the same year as Ann Lee. As the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, he had inspired revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. He died in a back room in Greenwich Village, New York in 1809, and ten years later, William Cobbett, exiled from his farm in Botley near Southampton to Long Island, would bring Paine’s remains back to Britain as a symbolic act. But now Paine’s spirit was claimed for a new revolution. In 1850, three years after its infamous Rappings, Rochester’s Reverend Charles Hammond, who styled himself as a medium, claimed to have received an account of Paine’s posthumous conversion from sceptic to believer. Three years later, David Richmond, a Shaker convert, member of the Concordium, and witness to the Rappings, came home to Yorkshire, ostensibly as a missionary for the Shakers; but also as a proponent of spiritualism. He established a spiritualist sect in Keighley over which Paine’s spirit presided; the advance guard of a movement in which both Robert Owen and Fredrick Evans would claim Paine as a kind of patron saint.

Such esoteric faith was a response to uncertain times. Since 1848, European revolution and the publication of the Communist Manifesto had served to destabilise old regimes while offering hope to the oppressed. The British Empire was threatened by mutinies in India and Africa and, later, a possible French invasion, in response to which the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, ordered a series of fortresses to be built on the south coast and even on the sea bed of the Solent. Island Britain felt embattled, and new prophets rose to pronounce on this troubled age.

In 1857, John Brown (#litres_trial_promo), a soldier-turned-visionary preaching in Nottingham, presaged an apocalyptic conflict in which the Russians would invade Europe, leaving only Britain and America to hold out on the battlefields of Armageddon. He proposed a spiritual defence – among the locations in which his Community of the Great Organisation took root was the Isle of Wight – while he divided the map of England with compasses, each circled area to be entrusted to one of his twelve pseudo-apostles in a campaign directed by the Angel Gabriel through Brown’s crystal ball. At the same time, Owen’s own predictions were becoming increasingly bizarre: at his last Birthday Congress, held in May 1857, he foretold that by the end of the century, ‘the English and Irish channels [would] be crossed on dry land, the seas and oceans … navigated on islands instead of ships’. He had already proposed that Jesus Christ was ‘an inspired medium from his birth’, and that famous figures such as Shelley and Jefferson, whom he had known in life, came back in spirit form to guide him. Now Owen declared that spiritualism was either ‘one of the greatest (#litres_trial_promo) deceptions ever practised on human credulity’, or ‘the most important event that [had] yet occurred in the history of the human race’.

Fourteen years later, as Evans prepared his own mission, utopia remained a topic of the day. In 1871 no fewer than three English texts proposed visions of utopia or apocalypse, from the social Darwinian science fiction of Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race, to George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, a John Brown vision of a war to end all wars; and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a Swiftian satire on the impossibility of utopia, the ‘nowhere’ of the book’s anagrammatic title. It was as if that summer had been ordained as a new season of utopian intent. Evans’ transatlantic adventure was a mirror image of Ann Lee’s American venture a century before: he intended to exorcise the old country of its ‘spirits of devils (#litres_trial_promo)’, and as spiritualism had been exported from America, so he was determined that Shakerism should follow in its wake. Indeed, his campaign was made possible by two highly influential spiritualists. Reverend James Martin Peebles was a professor at the Eclectic Medical College, Cincinnati; an anti-vaccinationist and honourary Shaker, were it not for Peebles, Evans ‘would have (#litres_trial_promo) come to an unploughed field unfit to receive the seed’. His other sponsor was one of the most important British practitioners. James Burns had come south from Scotland to work as a gardener, but was inspired by American tracts to found his Progressive Library and Spiritual Institution in Holborn. A longtime vegetarian and teetotaller, he also began spiritualist Sunday schools to which believers could send their children for corrective education, and in 1865 proposed a People’s University at which would be taught ‘Cosmology (#litres_trial_promo), Spiritualism, Immortality etc.’ – a notion which had its echo a century later in the Anti-University of London, founded in Hoxton in 1969 with a syllabus featuring R. D. Laing on anti-psychiatry, Yoko Ono on ‘The Connexion (#litres_trial_promo)’, and Francis Huxley on dragons.

James Burns

Burns was satirised in a contemporary novel, Maud Blount, Medium, as Mr Blathersby of the Spiritual Lyceum, ‘a kind of Universal Provider (#litres_trial_promo) for Spiritualists from the cradle to the grave, catching them at the former extremity of life in the hope of making Infant Phenomenons of them, and retaining their hold upon them until the last, on the chance of converting them into Rapping Spirits when in articulo mortis. It was a kind of school, clubhouse, and chapel rolled into one, and all comprised in the not very spacious accommodation of a first-floor over a barber’s shop, in a back street of the W. C. district.’ Here, ‘where the spiritualistic force of the metropolis was concentrated’, Burns edited Human Nature, a veritable compendium of new beliefs, as its first edition announced on 1 April 1867:

HUMAN NATURE

A Monthly Record of Zoistic Science and Intelligence, embodying

PHYSIOLOGY, PHRENOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, SPIRITUALISM,

PHILOSOPHY, THE LAWS OF HEALTH, AND SOCIOLOGY

An Educational and Family Magazine

Human Nature – which took its cue from the New Age journal published by the Ham Common Concordium – was a kind of esoteric à la carte from which readers could pick and choose. The ‘Psychological Department (#litres_trial_promo)’ had features on ‘What is Mesmerism’, while the ‘Physiology and Hygiene’ section included a pertinent essay calling for ‘REFORM IN WOMEN’S DRESS’, noting that at a recent inquest, ‘Dr Lankester remarked that there were 300 women burnt to death annually in England and Wales … this being the case, it might well be said that there was room for a reform in women’s dress, not only in the mode, but in the material’. Victorian crinolines were indeed a fatal fashion: in January 1875 there were two such immolations in Southampton alone: Elizabeth Cleall, seventy-eight, was discovered ‘with the upper portion (#litres_trial_promo) of her body enveloped in flames … dreadfully burnt about the arms and head’, telling witnesses ‘to take the lamp out of her hand’, while Harriet Mills, a fifteen-year-old servant, was found in the wash-house, ‘exclaiming repeatedly (#litres_trial_promo), “Oh! Oh!”… her clothes being all in flames. She was told to lie down so that a rug could be put over her, but was too frightened to do as she was instructed …’ Other victims of this incendiary epidemic included Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters, who perished in 1871 when one’s dress caught fire and the other attempted to put out the flames.

A sense of social justice underpinned Human Nature. One article on ‘Life in the Factories (#litres_trial_promo)’ attacked Victorian philanthropy; noting that a Bradford factory had recently given a ‘substantial knife and fork tea’ for their workers, its author complained that ‘No slave is so helpless as the factory operative. He is doomed to privations, of which the savage negro cannot complain, viz., want of fresh air and sunshine. Till the radical defects of this iniquitous system are altered, we feel that gluttonous suppers and “mutual admiration meetings” are only opiates to induce the victims to submit to further injury, and thus postpone the day of readministration and retribution.’ It was no coincidence that Bradford was a stronghold of spiritualism, or that in 1851 the philanthropic Titus Salt was moved to build his industrial utopia, Saltaire, on the outskirts of the town, where my own father was born in 1915.

In publishing such critiques, Burns allied spiritualism to a radical agenda, and addressed other means of social control. In ‘The Vaccination Humbug (#litres_trial_promo)’, he examined the harmful effects of compulsory immunisation – medicine as violation – and quoted Richard Gibbs of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League: ‘I believe we have hundreds of cases here, from being poisoned with vaccination, I deem incurable … We strongly advise parents to go to prison, rather than submit to have their helpless offspring inoculated with scrofula, syphilis, and mania …’ Diet was another issue, and although Human Nature did not go as far as Fruitlands, it exhorted the readers to abandon ‘alcoholic liquors (#litres_trial_promo) and hot stimulants, such as tea, coffee &c … and substitute the juicy fruits which will at once remove a heavy tax from the pocket of the individual, and promote health, happiness, and long-life’.

In this era of mass production, questions of consumption and abstinence defined the new age. Burns published a report on The Cases of the Welsh Fasting Girl & Her Father. On the Possibility of LONG CONTINUED ABSTINENCE FROM FOOD, a bizarre account of Sarah Jacobs, the daughter of a Carmarthenshire farmer, who had gone without food for two years. Burns had visited the girl at her parents’ farm, where he found her lying in a bed covered with books and pamphlets. ‘In length she measures about 4 feet 8 inches. She has not the power of moving her body [and] has fits several times a day,’ he noted. In 1869 the case was investigated by a committee which appointed four nurses from Guy’s Hospital, under whose scrutiny the girl died. ‘Her death was a triumph for science, which took no account of the influence of these four death-watchers upon a frail hysterical girl living on the very precipes of this life, whom a puff of air or of feeling threw into convulsions.’ Her parents were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; the judge decided that their daughter must have been fed in the previous two years, ‘and that when she was watched she of course died’. It seemed a drastic manner in which to prove the fact. Citing instances of living toads found in rocks, Burns proposed a number of reasons as to how Sarah had been able to survive, including the possibility of absorbing nutrition through the skin and from organic particles (#litres_trial_promo) in the air.

Human Nature’s -isms would not be out of place in a modern Sunday supplement. Subscribers could turn to fiction by Eliza W. Farnham (The Ideal Attained), pick up hints on the conservation of fuel, and read essays on ‘Walt Whitman (#litres_trial_promo); or, the Religion of Art’ and extracts from Thomas Lake Harris’s poetry, ‘Music from the (#litres_trial_promo) Spirit Shore’. They might wonder WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE POISONED BECAUSE WE ARE SICK, and under the heading PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA, discover titbits on ‘Mysterious Photographs on Window Panes’ in Milan, Ohio, or an account of a nine-year-old negro girl from Kentucky able to memorise entire pages from books. But Human Nature’s most important function was to assemble news of spiritualist progress in places as far apart as Liverpool, Paris and America, from where J. H. Powell reported on Vineland, a ‘modern miracle of some 10,000 human beings, who are solving the question of colonisation with spirit. Six years ago, it was a houseless tract of 50 square miles, mostly covered with timber; now, a considerable part of it is a blooming township. Here are congregated men and women of intellect’, among them Robert Dale Owen, himself a committed spiritualist. Meanwhile, the English medium J. J. Morse attended a psychic festival of 15,000 spiritualists at Lake Pleasant, complete with displays of animals, ‘alive and stuffed (#litres_trial_promo)’, and a tent for ‘mesmeric entertainments’.

But if there was a particular ‘science’ to which Human Nature was drawn, it was spirit photography. The capture of psychic manifestations in photographic emulsion was an exciting development; and in the excitement, it seems, rational observers suspended their critical faculties. Human Nature incorporated actual examples – all the more unreal for being stuck onto stiff, pale cream pages and outlined in thin red frames like photographs in a Victorian album. Yet their glossy physical presence still speaks of implicit faith: someone fixed them there; someone believed in them.