England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

Particularly favoured was the work of Mr Hudson, of 2 Kensington Park Road, London, the first of the English spirit photographers. One of a pair of his pictures in the September 1874 edition displayed ‘the baby sister (#litres_trial_promo) of Dr Speer … and the shadowy form in the right front is the mother of the infant …’ The author of the accompanying article, ‘MA (Oxon)’, was William Stainton Moses, an Oxford graduate, Anglican minister and himself an accomplished medium. ‘I have written before how this child-spirit has persistently manifested at our circle almost from its formation … She passed from this sphere of life more than fifty years ago at Tours, being then only seven months old. Her joyous little message, “Je suis heureuse, très heureuse”, was the first indication we had of her presence …’ Yet to our eyes this cloth-swaddled figure is quite obviously a china doll and looks more like baby Jesus in a school Nativity than the shade of a dead infant.

Photography was still a young and plastic art, and to those untutored in its sly deceptions, the camera could not lie. Spirit photographs seemed to demonstrate the survival of the soul, and a happy survival at that. It was as if the camera were able to peer into another dimension. The immortalising power of photography had been taken one step further, and in such pictures, Human Nature revealed the extent of the desire to believe, a thirst for hard proof satisfied by cotton-wool fantasies. Encoded with an occult unconsciousness, these images prefigured the surrealist constructions of the next century, the uncanny imagined in silver nitrate. Yet their moral instability – their essential untruthfulness – turns such putative glimpses of eternity into mere psychic pornography; glossy, titillating images carefully concealed within the pages of the periodical. One print by W. H. Mumler of Boston, a jewellery engraver and pioneer of American spirit photography, shows Mrs Abraham Lincoln (whose husband was a believer, as was Wild Bill Hickok) with the assassinated president looking over her: ‘… The evidence for (#litres_trial_promo) the genuineness of Mr Mumler’s photographs, and for the integrity of Mr Mumler himself, is as strong as can well be conceived.’ But in 1871 Mrs Lincoln was declared insane and Mr Mumler was later prosecuted for witchcraft in New York.

In its acceptance of such pictures, Human Nature was betrayed by its own innocence. Opening the pages of the journal now, I look at these images with a childish sense of revelation and disappointment: in an ironic reversal of their intended function, they resonate with charlatanism and fakery, undermining my own will to believe, as much as if I had been shown videotape of Christ’s crucifixion and seen Kensington gore rather than blood oozing from His wounds. This was faith as theatre, ‘by way of (#litres_trial_promo) a singular intermediary … by way of Death’, a sensational sequence of manipulated images: from nineteenth-century tableaux vivants to Eadweard Muybridge’s calibrated human graphs and Julia Margaret Cameron’s angelic children, bedecked with wings and suspended in amniotic fluid, innocent emblems of infant mortality at the beginning of life. With the aid of muslin, montage and double exposure, the spirit photographers created equally convincing, equally fantastical visions of life after death. The final irony is that spiritualism invested its faith in such evidence, for the passing of time would ensure that these images undermined the movement more comprehensively than any amount of improbable table-tapping or levitating chairs.

The powerfully eclectic editorial stance of Human Nature was to provide a natural platform, and excellent publicity, for Frederick Evans, while James Burns was keen to promote Shakerism for his own ends. This earthly alliance suited their spiritual ambitions – a vivid example of the cross-pollination of utopian belief between England and America. Evans and Burns were as much prophets of their age as their more colourful antecedents – and they had the added benefit of new media. Cheap publishing, burgeoning literacy and photographic reproduction allowed spiritualism to be widely disseminated via the self-promoting identities of its practitioners, feeding on a trend which was even more evident: the American genius for self-invention, and an attendant sense of glamour. Thus the meeting of Evans – the intellectual embodiment of American Shakerism – and Burns – the motivating force of British Spiritualism – was an enormously potent encounter. Yet behind these men lay two female spirits; and just as the progenitor of their meeting was Ann Lee, so Mary Ann Girling would be its progeny.

That summer of 1871, as Mary Ann was making preparations for her mission to London, Evans and Peebles left New York on the new White Star liner, S.S. Atlantic. ‘The whole ship (#litres_trial_promo) is under the influence of Shakerism to some extent,’ Evans told his fellow elders. Turning the voyage into an extension of his mission, he used an onboard accident – when a cannon exploded during the Independence Day celebrations and blew off a seaman’s arms – as an endorsement of Shaker pacifism, and persuaded the captain to have the fireworks thrown overboard: ‘Thus we preached non-resistance and non-powder-explosions, at the same time, on the 4th of July.’ A week later, Evans arrived in London and set up his office at the Progressive Library and Spiritual Institution at 15 Southampton Row. In the ‘dark little shop (#litres_trial_promo)’, Evans was ‘crowded with (#litres_trial_promo) letters, papers, books, visitors, inquiries, and deputations of various kinds’, while Burns took the opportunity to make a phrenological examination of his guest, as ‘we have seen (#litres_trial_promo) only one Shaker’. It was as if the sect were an exotic tribe from some remote corner of the Empire: Burns advertised copies of Evans’ photograph and ‘stereoscopic views of groups of Shakers and their houses and gardens, all of which afford valuable data to the student of human nature’.

Elder Frederick Evans

Evans’ arrival also stirred up considerable interest among men such as the Honourable Auberon Herbert, Liberal Member of Parliament for Nottingham, with whom Evans and Peebles breakfasted at 11 o’clock (an hour which shocked Evans, who broke his fast around dawn). Their interview was ‘most interesting and profitable (#litres_trial_promo)’, wrote Peebles. ‘Elder Frederick expounded to him the principles of Shakerism. He was deeply interested – pricked in the heart; and, upon some points at least, convicted.’ That afternoon, Herbert took both men into the House of Commons, where Evans ‘preached the Gospel of Progress and Reform’. ‘Many in this English speaking nation are almost ready for the harvest,’ declared Peebles. ‘They feel that something must be done … many are inquiring the way to Zion, and asking, What shall I do to be saved … England is ripening up rapidly for the forming of Shaker Societies.’ And Evans was determined to reap the benefit. Invited by Herbert to ‘splendid rooms (#litres_trial_promo)’ to address a ‘fashionable gathering’ (‘some of the women not dressed as they ought to be, for modest women’), he was subjected to cross examination by lawyers, doctors and secretaries for nearly three hours.

But this mission was not to be limited to the professional classes. Evans’ lectures at Cleveland Hall proved so popular that they soon required a larger venue, as The Times announced on 3 August:

An Opportunity (#litres_trial_promo)

Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon, State of New York, USA, will discourse on the principles of his order next Sunday, at the St George’s Hall, Langham Place, Regent St. Mr Hepworth Dixon, author of New America, will take the chair, supported by Mr Auberon Herbert, MP, and other Members of Parliament.

William Hepworth Dixon had recently published his first-hand account of American sects; as a guest of Evans and Eldress Antoinette Dolittle at Mount Lebanon, he had been struck by the ‘singular beauty (#litres_trial_promo) and perfect success’ of the Shaker way of life, and his book was evidently The Times’ source of information. ‘The order of Shakers (#litres_trial_promo) has been in existence for nearly 100 years … They are celibates, hold property in common like Primitive Christians, are free-thinking Spiritualists, and firm believers in present Divine inspiration. They neither manufacture nor use intoxicating drink, and they entertain peace principles. They have solved those vexed problems, war, intemperance, poverty, the social evil [prostitution], and crime, with all its concommittants of police-courts, gaols, and such like.’

The paper also reported positively on Evans’ lecture itself:

SHANKAR LADY.

The proceedings were commenced with a hymn, ‘The Day is Breaking’, and a short prayer, after which Mr Hepworth Dixon introduced ‘Elder Frederick’ to the meeting with a few words expressive of the pleasure which he had felt some years ago in visiting Mount Ephraim [sic], and seeing with his own eyes the well-ordered community of the Shakers, and the peace, contentment, plenty, and morality which reigned among them, where they had ‘made the desert smile’.

Such a life must have seemed attractive to many readers caught up in their quotidian duties. Cheered regularly throughout his speech, Evans warned ‘that both England (#litres_trial_promo) as a country and London as a great city had need to reform their social code and habits of life’, and ‘that other empires and cities as large and as powerful … had perished by the sword …’ Privately, he discerned a ‘desperate, drugged (#litres_trial_promo) determination … to do or die’ in that ‘great Babel (#litres_trial_promo) of a city of 3½ millions of human bodies, supposed to have souls in them’, and where he felt like a ‘pilgrim and a stranger’. ‘The poor breed like rabbits; and, when the boys are old enough, the Government takes them as soldiers. But labor is so cheap, they are (#litres_trial_promo) willing to be shot at, if they can get food to eat … This city, and all great cities, rest upon volcanoes liable to eruption at [a] time when least to be looked for or expected.’ Such observations were redolent of the Communist Manifesto. ‘This Government is wise, with all its wickedness. It watches sharply the signs of popular uprising, and yields to the demands of the great middle class, so as to propitiate them …’ While he noted that five thousand a day were dying in the siege of Paris, Evans claimed that ‘Communism is the greatest good that thousands can see in the future; and the fact that the Shakers make it a practical thing, a success, is a constant source of congratulation, and of hope … I am quite (#litres_trial_promo) sure that our Gospel will be preached and received in England before long.’ He even envisioned his own North Family at Mount Lebanon coming to London to save its citizens, ‘I am quite sure souls would gather to them as fast as they could be taken care of.’

Shakerism had caught a public imagination already alert to utopian notions. Human Nature reported that ‘from one end (#litres_trial_promo) of the country to the other the principles of Shakerism were being eagerly discussed’. Evans addressed four thousand at two open-air meetings in Bradford, ‘convened by the Spiritualists (#litres_trial_promo) and largely attended by them’; other meetings followed in Bishop Auckland, Birmingham, and Manchester, the birthplace of Ann Lee, erstwhile home to Friedrich Engels, and host to such events as a ‘Spiritualists’ Vegetarian Banquet’. Yet Evans was warned by a friend that ‘I should do better (#litres_trial_promo) not to be identified with Spiritualists too much … the Shakers are in good order and famous with the public; while the Spiritualists are in unease [sic] condition than ever before’. ‘They are holding dark circles,’ Evans noted. ‘Peebles was at a house this afternoon and the spirits threw things about, and did damage – He took no part. We ignore them.’ Evans worried that spiritualists such as Emma Hardinge – one of the most famous American mediums working in England, herself sponsored by Burns, and who had sent Evans tickets for her appearance at the Albert Hall – were doing ‘harm rather than good’. And yet the link was undeniable. ‘What have Spiritualists (#litres_trial_promo) to do with Shakerism?’ Burns asked the readers of Human Nature, and answered his own question, declaring that the Shakers were ‘an illustration of the ultimate influence of Spiritualism in its highest form upon the mind of man …’

The Shaker and Shakeress – edited by Evans – also acknowledged these claims. With reports on ‘women’s rights (#litres_trial_promo) (including the right to live a virgin life)’; sleeping on the right side (so that the stomach was in the correct position for digestion); and a debate on the notion, ‘Will Shakerism (#litres_trial_promo) depopulate the world?’ the periodical bore comparison with Human Nature. It also featured miscellanea from other newspapers, such as one article on Mother Shipton, who ‘would have taken (#litres_trial_promo) high rank as a medium in our day’ and whose last couplet was especially ominous: ‘The world to an end shall come/In eighteen hundred and eighty-one’. But The Shaker too was concerned with spiritualism as an instrument of its aim ‘to inaugurate (#litres_trial_promo) Shaker Communism on British soil …’ Recruiting advertisements appeared in Shaker tracts published by Burns: ‘Single persons (#litres_trial_promo), who are free, may come at their own option, bearing in mind the important fact that SHAKERISM is “RELIGIOUS COMMUNISM”.’ Yet for all Evans’ sterling efforts and Burns’ positive public relations, few answered the call. When he sailed home from Liverpool on 24 August, the elder took with him just four recruits – and of that ‘party of proselytes (#litres_trial_promo)’, two would return to England to join the Girlingites. It was ironic that, while the Shakers had tried to stir up their land of origin through the ministry of an intellectual, adoptive American, it was an uneducated English woman who would capitalise on the new public awareness of Shakerism. For Evans, the summer of 1871 had proved an anti-climax; for Mary Ann, it marked the beginning of her most successful phase.

From the start, the rather disparate party which accompanied Evans home across the Atlantic were not entirely convinced of what they were doing. James Haase was a twenty-six-year-old businessman whose wife Martha had died earlier that year at the age of thirty-one – perhaps a factor in his willingness to leave England. In his diary, Evans noted Haase’s address – 12 Cross Street, Islington – and that he was ‘a young man (#litres_trial_promo) who is the first that I have opened the testimony unto … James has just lost his wife’. It is possible that the grieving Haase was a visitor to Burns’ shop and a subscriber to spiritualism; certainly the bachelor Evans found him an attractive young man: ‘it is as easy to talk with him, as to breathe the air; I have hope that he will “be obedient to the Heavenly Mission”.’ Evans told Eldress Antoinette that ‘if things suit (#litres_trial_promo) him’ at Mount Lebanon, Haase would return to England to settle up his business: ‘His report … will be looked for with an amount of interest you can hardly realise.’

Evans had hoped for good, solid, practical recruits, with their own financial backing. ‘There is a family by the name of Stephens who are going to send a boy, sixteen, and a girl, 11. They are real business people, and engaged in co-operation. That is all I know of, except a young man about 17, who wants to come, but has not the means.’ Robert Stephens, father of eleven-year-old Annie Stephens and her sixteen-year-old stepbrother Edwin Clarke, was a socialist weaver from Manchester who had run a co-operative store in London ‘for political reasons (#litres_trial_promo)’; while their parents sorted out the sale of their business, it was agreed that Annie and Edwin would go on ahead. Reverend Alsop and his two daughters, ten and fourteen, said they would come too, and Evans also worked on a Mr Atkins, ‘a great scientific (#litres_trial_promo) man’; although a ‘bore’, Evans thought he might ‘get something useful out of him’. Another application – ‘if I wd pay (#litres_trial_promo) their passage’ – came from a family in Edinburgh. But in the event, the party was complemented by its oldest, wealthiest and most eccentric member. Fifty-three-year-old Julia Wood, born at Codsall, Staffordshire, was the third of eight children whose father had made his money from distilleries – a somewhat uneasy source which, given the temperance of the new age, may have made for family disagreements. As a young girl, Julia had exhibited a fervent spirituality, to the extent that her own family had had her confined to the Staffordshire Asylum on grounds of religious mania. Like Haase, she lived in Islington – in one of the grander Georgian terraces of Duncan Street – but was a less certain recruit: next to her address, Evans noted merely ‘thinks of going (#litres_trial_promo)’.

Thus this ill-matched group of would-be Shakers arrived at Mount Lebanon, where they were greeted warmly as the vanguard of a new contingent: there was even a hymn written for them, ‘A Welcome (#litres_trial_promo) For the Company from England’. One hundred and fifty miles up the Hudson River from New York and just across the state border from Massachusetts, Mount Lebanon’s setting seemed paradisiacal. ‘Hills, mountains (#litres_trial_promo), and valleys, trees, gardens, farmhouses and farms spread around and above you in ever-varying beauty,’ wrote Henry Vincent, another Englishman who accepted an invitation from Evans, and who declared, ‘The dream of Utopia (#litres_trial_promo) is here realized … they work hard; they enjoy the fruits of their industry; they live simply and frugally. For ten years they have ceased to eat swine, or drink alcoholic drinks … Within the past forty years, the Owenite experiments in England and America have failed; but Shakerism is a living and triumphant fact.’

Such transcendentalism eluded David Brown, another young man drawn to America by Evans’ mission. A northerner of communist inclinations, Brown had heard the elder lecture at the Temperance Hall in Manchester. He listened patiently, but thought Evans took liberties with the facts: ‘He stated (#litres_trial_promo) that while every other community in America had been a failure, the Shakers alone had been a success. But this was a wrong statement. There are the German Rappites in Pennsylvania who have acquired immense wealth. There are also the Free Lovers at Oneida Creek, and others who have been very prosperous, and are established on a better basis in many respects than the Shakers. If Elder F. W. Evans had stated that there had been a falling off among the Shakers, and that he had come over to England to replenish their number, he would have come nearer the truth, but he knew better than that.’

At Mount Lebanon, Brown found his hopes fractured by reality, just as later visitors to communist states would be disabused of their utopian expectations. Brown thought the sect overdisciplined and its religious principles claustrophobic; he was also suspicious of Evans’ eagerness for publicity. ‘Whenever any person visits Mount Lebanon who is of high standing in literature, the elders are most anxious for such to write on Shakerism (#litres_trial_promo) … Elder F. W. Evans wanted me to write to Mr Burns, editor of the Medium and Daybreak, England, but I refused, saying that I wished to give it a fair trial, and then I would write.’ Brown’s account, published in Human Nature in 1876, voiced the opinion that the Shakers must wholeheartedly embrace spiritualism or perish, and was hardly likely to gather converts with its statement, ‘Shakerism is most unquestionably slavery modified’. It was a conclusion with which Burns would come to agree.

David Brown’s unhappy experience may have reflected that of Julia Wood and James Haase. Of the four English visitors to Mount Lebanon, only one – Annie Stephens – found Shakerism compelling enough to become a permanent member. The others all returned to England – James Haase and Julia Wood as soon as 23 September, barely a month later. Still considering his position, Haase wrote to Evans from Islington on 8 November, complaining that his ‘trials have been (#litres_trial_promo) very severe and persecutions great from family relations. But I feel the more opposition I meet with, the firmer and more steadfast I become …’ James was evidently a passionate young man: ‘Life to me is earnest, life to me is real. I know that I am going to live for ever and am conscious that every thought and every action is moulding my character for eternity … I will follow the truth – at any cost.’

That pursuit for immortality would lead him to Mary Ann. Haase told Evans that ‘the interest manifested by the English Spiritualists to know what my experiences have been has been very interesting. The brief account I gave to the Medium brought forth many enquiries from several parts of the Country which I responded to. A brother from Manchester intends visiting me at Christmas and intends returning with me in the Spring.’ But Haase also noted that his neighbour, Miss Wood, ‘has called upon me once or twice since her return and I have visited her as often. She has grown very dissatisfied having been told by the “spirits” that she is not to go. She considers herself a lady and much more advanced than her Shaker Sisters – more refined – which I very much doubt. I felt inclined to say to her on one or two occasions whilst making frivolous objections “get thee behind me Satan’. She dwells considerably on her fortune, giving up her fortune and being placed at the wash tub.’ Evans had good reason to doubt Julia’s seriousness, but as she paid her own fare to America (the others had been subsidised by the Shakers), he had not dissuaded her, perhaps seeing in her a potential source of funds for future missions. Indeed, Evans would return to England twelve years later, but by that time the country had heard of a new and different kind of Shaker altogether.

PART TWO (#ulink_1bc7de83-b14e-5020-9647-c5d3208c8ebc)

O Clouds Unfold! (#ulink_1bc7de83-b14e-5020-9647-c5d3208c8ebc)

The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience.

Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

FOUR (#ulink_6e438a45-e986-52e6-b904-b3d04d2220cb)

The Walworth Jumpers (#ulink_6e438a45-e986-52e6-b904-b3d04d2220cb)

Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Matthew 4:11

The train from Ipswich, a steam-spewing monster, slouched into the maw of Liverpool Street where the brick arches of the terminus, newly-built over the site of the original Bethlehem Hospital, seemed to suck the visitor into the nerve-jangling immensity of the city, exciting the spirit as much as the third-class carriages had shaken the flesh. Detraining into the hot, fetid hubbub of the subterranean concourse, Mary Ann dusted down the smuts from her gown and prepared to resume her mission, not in the heart of some dark continent, but in the backstreets of London, where factory chimneys rivalled church spires for the skyline above and the fate of the souls in the lowly terraces below.

The world had changed dramatically since the decade of Mary Ann’s birth, not least in the way one could move around it. It was one of the ironies of the modern world that many of those responsible for building the new railways were themselves Quakers; forbidden from swearing oaths which would admit them to professional positions, they excelled at other trades (#litres_trial_promo). It was a Quaker, George Bradshaw, who published his Railway Time Table in 1839, not for profit, but to assist his fellow man. The expanding network had standardised time itself, unifying the country and metering modern history, yet Bradshaw’s publication still bore Quaker designations – ‘First Month (#litres_trial_promo)’ instead of January, and so on – while one visitor to the Friends’ meeting house at King’s Cross found their tracts shelved on the walls like ‘the time tables (#litres_trial_promo) … in the stations of the Metropolitan Railway’. So too would Mary Ann’s mission be conducted by railway – under the tracks themselves.

The myth of Mary Ann’s arrival in London, like the other stories that surround her, remains almost wilfully obscure. The Bible Christians said to have invited her were originally Primitive Methodists from East Cornwall, and therefore rural imports like the Girlingites. They too had female ministers, such as Mary Toms, a faith-healer who left Tintagel for the Isle of Wight in the 1820s and was seen ‘standing on (#litres_trial_promo) a borrowed chair one Sunday morning at East Cowes, lashed by the wind and rain’. She also claimed to have been followed down a dark lane by a ‘dimly visible (#litres_trial_promo) creature … thought by some to have been a heavenly visitant sent to protect her, but by herself to have been a diabolical creature sent to scare her’. But ‘Bible Christian’ was a term applied to a number of sects (not least the Girlingites themselves), and on closer inspection it seems more likely that Mary Ann’s invitation came from the Peculiar People, a sect founded by a fellow Suffolk preacher and erstwhile Wesleyan, William Bridges.

Born in Woodbridge in 1802, Bridges had left Suffolk soon after his marriage in 1824, but his family still lived there and had probably come into contact with Girlingism, which seemed to share common ground with the Peculiar People. The ‘Plumstead Peculiars’, as they were later known, took their name from God’s commandment to Moses to lead His ‘peculiar people’. They believed in faith-healing, the anointing of oil and the power of prayer, and they opposed vaccination; in 1872 George Harry of Plumstead would be sent to Newgate Prison ‘for refusing (#litres_trial_promo) to provide medical assistance or remedies of any kind’ for his daughter Cecilia who was dying of smallpox, while his wife was summonsed by a coroner’s court for the manslaughter of their second child who had also died. In the 1830s, Bridges had set up a chapel in Gravel Lane, Kennington, but one of his followers, a cobbler named John Sirgood, extended the Peculiar Gospel to rural Sussex, assembling a congregation of two hundred in the village of Loxwood – only to attract the same antipathy which the Girlingites had suffered in Suffolk. Sirgood complained that his faithful were ‘derided, reproached, insulted (#litres_trial_promo) … thrown down into the mud … and women and children filled with terror’. One particularly terrifying night, assailants armed with bludgeons, their faces painted and ‘disguised in the most grotesque manner … beat about the house to the breaking up of the windows and the crockery, threatening the life of the Preacher’. And just as Mary Ann had left Suffolk, so by 1860, Sirgood had returned to south London.

Despite their obscure history, it is clear that these part rural, part city evangelists paved the way for Mary Ann. Through their south London mission she would gain access to a new following, and in the process she would divide Bridges’ Southwark citadel. At first the Peculiar People allowed Mary Ann to preach in their chapel on Sunday evenings, where she maintained she was only the ‘Messenger’ of the Second Coming. But when she began to claim her own divinity, it proved too much for the Peculiars. Like the Methodists, they asked Mary Ann to ‘withdraw from (#litres_trial_promo) their communion’, which she did, taking many of their followers with her. As in Suffolk, she began preaching in private houses, where ‘spiritual manifestations’ took place. Emboldened by their move to the imperial capital as the Shakers had been by their American migration, the Girlingites’ fainting fits were now fully-fledged ecstasies; quivering, quaking rites. And like the Camisards before them, news of these strange phenomena attracted crowds wanting to see this woman from Suffolk, who was publicly declaring that she would not die.

It was an exhortative season for the esoteric gospel. That summer, as Elder Evans hired ever larger halls to enable his words to be heard, Mary Ann acquired a new place of worship – an altogether more unconventional venue for one of the most extraordinary eruptions of religious zeal London had ever seen. In the sinful city which Cobbett had called the Great Wen, she would meet with opposition all the more violent for its metropolitan cynicism. Yet hadn’t Christ instructed his apostles to leave their fishing nets and families and follow in His footsteps? Her rural sectaries shamed the city-dwellers with their faith. Entire clans had given up their worldly goods and birthrights to be born again; and while their peers made similar migrations in pursuit of employment and wages, the Girlingites rejected work for anyone but God, and saw money as personally worthless. They placed their faith in Mary Ann. And just as her predecessor Joanna Southcott had drawn supporters to her House of God in the Elephant and Castle, so Mary Ann’s mission would operate from a railway arch off the Walworth Road.

The Southcottians had proved to be pervasive in south London, where their loud orisons still brought irate neighbours out into the street. Other preachers inspired the people of Southwark, too: the evangelist Charles Spurgeon drew thousands to his Metropolitan Tabernacle at the Elephant and Castle, a theatrical auditorium with a grandiose façade of Corinthian pillars still visible from today’s pink-painted roundabout. With ‘triumphant (#litres_trial_promo)’ acoustics and curving stairs ending in a deep pool where believers were baptised, the chapel was host to visitors such as John Ruskin, a resident of nearby Denmark Hall who contributed £100 to the Tabernacle fund, and whose taste for Spurgeon’s sermons would emerge in his own apocalyptic essays, Unto this Last.

In fact, the entire city seemed sensitised to new beliefs. In the teeming streets of Southwark and Bermondsey, in meeting houses in King’s Cross, in Hoxton’s dark squares and along Belgravia’s rich terraces, all manner of practitioners gathered believers to their causes. The salons of the wealthy might host after-dinner entertainment by a mesmerist or medium, while hastily-built chapels or squatted semi-industrial spaces became cells for lower-class dissent. The sheer range of creeds available to mid-Victorian Londoners was a reflection of the extent of the imperial project; in a commodified world, the choice of faiths mirrored an age of mass production. From its centre to its suburbs, the world’s biggest city encompassed Peculiar People and phrenologists, Quakers and Swedenborgians, homeopaths and hypnotists. For this cosmopolitan parish, the catchment area was the Empire itself, an ever-shifting congregation swelled by the Thames’ wide reach and supplied by the speedy railway. Here a home could be found for any belief, no matter how odd. And here was a ready-made market for Mary Ann’s offer of immortality.

In that summer of 1871, a third and equally eccentric figure embarked on his own metropolitan mission. The Reverend Charles Maurice Davies was compiling a series of reports for the Daily Telegraph – ‘strictly descriptive (#litres_trial_promo) … expressing no opinion pro or con’ – on the remarkable spectrum of alternative beliefs, later to be collected in a volume entitled Unorthodox London, Or, Phases of Religious Life in the Metropolis. As a Fellow of Durham University, this sinecured cleric struck an authorial stance between a sceptic relaying the latest craze for the amusement of his Telegraph readers, and an intellectual with an interest in the strange sects sprouting up almost weekly. Like one of M. R. James’s learned professors, Davies’ religious-academic background gave a sense of authority to his narrative as he explored the city’s penumbral streets, reporting from the shadows thrown by the imperial glare. His ‘unorthodox London’ was a spiritual precursor of the colourcoded chart to be created by the radical statistician Charles Booth (on which my own street in Hoxton is coloured black and described as ‘the leading criminal (#litres_trial_promo) quarter of London and indeed of all England’). As Booth presented his socio-economic topography of the city, so Davies surveyed its dark heart of faith: ‘On the plane (#litres_trial_promo) of working from the circumference to the centre, I set off on a recent Sunday morning, resolved to make my first study at the widest possible radius, the very Ultima Thule of religious London.’

Turning the pages of his book in the British Library, with their indented type punctuated by the odd squashed fly preserved as if in amber, the clergyman’s gothic peregrinations come to life. He travelled by the newly-installed Underground, tunnelling into esoteric arenas like some clerical mole: from the Theists of the South Place Chapel ‘close to the Moorgate Street (#litres_trial_promo) Station of the Metropolitan Railway’, to ‘Colonel Wentworth Higginson (#litres_trial_promo) on Buddha’ (author of Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson had commanded one of the Black Camisard regiments in the American Civil War), taking in the Tabernacle Ranters of Newington, with their ‘loud and long (#litres_trial_promo)-continued’ hallelujahs, along the way. It was as if these nodes of unconvention were intimately connected by rail – the neural network by which their dissension spread – and on these public transport expeditions into urban anthropology, Davies’ own character and opinion emerged slyly, as though in an aside to a passenger.

Ordained in 1852, Davies had served the Church in Somerset and London, but had since concentrated on writing as a career, contributing to the Western Morning News and the National Press Agency, as well as producing religious novels such as Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love Story. His true interest lay in spiritualism, however, as his skittish Maud Blount, Medium. A Story of Modern Spiritualism indicates. The book follows the adventures of ‘a splendid specimen (#litres_trial_promo) of a spoiled child’ who, as ‘a splendid specimen of womanhood, too’, discovers her psychic talents. ‘The very latest (#litres_trial_promo) novelty had been Spiritualism … Young ladies called it “charmingly dreadful”. Scientific men scoffed at it, and clergymen said it was either conjuring or the devil’, although one character – the Reverend Ball – proposes ‘these modern miracles … to be evidential just as those we find in Scripture’. It was the same justification employed by Christian spiritualists, who equated the exorcism of demons with the work of the seance table.

‘Spiritualism is (#litres_trial_promo) emphatically a question of the hour, and has been fairly described by one of its adherents to be “either a gigantic delusion or the most important subject that can possibly be broached”,’ Davies declared. And like so many, he had a personal sense of its importance. In 1865 his young son died of scarlet fever, and Davies found that spiritualism gave ‘hope at a time (#litres_trial_promo) when we are mostly hopeless’. His wife developed a facility for automatic writing, receiving messages from the guardian spirit who now cared for their little boy. Davies would spend fifteen years seeking ‘to prove unbroken continuity between the life in this world and the life beyond’, a quest in which he was guided by influential spiritualists.

Despite this hidden agenda, the clergyman’s commentary was often acidulous. He found the Irvingites of Bloomsbury singular for their spirit voices and three-hour rituals, for which they adopted every colour of robe – ‘black tippets (#litres_trial_promo) … puce tippets … short surplices … coloured stoles’, while in the Swedenborgians of King’s Cross he detected other traces of spiritualism. The eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had experienced ‘a sort of middle (#litres_trial_promo) state between sleeping and waking’; a kind of permanent Near Death Experience, not the stuff of dreams, but of a spiritual ‘future life (#litres_trial_promo)’. He believed that man and angel were consubstantial, and ‘decoded (#litres_trial_promo)’ Scripture in his book, The Apocalypse Explained. An influence on writers and artists from Blake to Browning and Emerson, his presence still lingers in the Swedenborg Society, its panelled rooms presided over by his marble bust – just a street away from the site of Burns’ institution, where Davies was drawn in search of yet stranger beliefs.

Having discovered the availability of ‘shilling seances (#litres_trial_promo)’ at Burns’ premises, Davies decided to attend this psychic pot-luck, where the visitor could not summon spirits at will, but had to take them as they came. As a ‘slim, artistic-looking’ young man in his early twenties played the piano, the gas was turned down and the seance began.

‘Had I been (#litres_trial_promo) altogether unused to the manners and customs of trance mediums, I should have thought that the poor young man was taken suddenly ill, for he turned up his eyes and wriggled about in his chair … in the most alarming manner.’ One ‘simpering voice’ belonged to ‘Maria Crook, late of the Crown and Can, Clerkenwell, and now of Highgate Cemetery’; another to a navvy who had worked on the south London drains; and when a third declared, ‘I never break (#litres_trial_promo) my word, sir; Thomas Paine never did whilst on earth’, Davies deduced ‘that we had been listening to the voice of the author of the “Age of Reason,” redivivus’. ‘It does certainly (#litres_trial_promo) seem remarkable that such things should be going on amid the very roar of Holborn in this nineteenth century,’ Davies concluded; and in that pioneering vein, he set off on another foray, this time to Hackney to visit a medium who claimed to be able to produce ‘spirit-faces’: ‘a pretty, Jewish-like little girl’ of sixteen ‘managed’ by her father at their home in the eastern suburb.

It was an authentically bizarre scene. ‘Little Miss Blank (#litres_trial_promo)’ sat inside a ‘sort of corner cupboard … like a pot of jam or a pound of candles’ with a rope on her lap, while the rest of the party sat round, ‘grown-up children waiting for the magic lantern’. As the gathering – which included the editor of a spiritualist journal, a country doctor and an elderly gentleman from Manchester – sang spiritualist hymns, the cupboard doors opened to reveal ‘pretty Miss Blank tied round the neck, arms, and legs to the chair, in a very uncomfortable and apparently secure manner’. The knots were sealed and the cupboard shut again, leaving an opening at the top, like that in a seaside Punch and Judy show.

After some delay a face rose gently to the aperture rather far back, but presently came well to the front. It was slightly pale, and the head was swathed in white drapery. The eyes were fixed, and altogether it looked ghostly. It remained for some time, disappeared and re-appeared; and the lamp was turned full upon it, but the eyes never lost their fixed stare, and showed no symptom of winking. After several minutes it went altogether.

The cupboard was then opened and its inmate revealed still tightly bound, the seals unbroken. The exhausted girl was taken into the garden for a walk to revive her, and repeated the process three times that evening, summoning a ‘Parsee doctor (#litres_trial_promo)’ with a turban and a ‘decidedly Eastern expression of countenance and dark complexion’, and another face, ‘still surmounted by white drapery, but a black band was over the forehead, like a nun’s hood. The teeth were projecting, and the expression of the face sad. They fancied it was a spirit that was pained at not being recognized.’ The spirit guide, Katie, invited Davies to touch her face and hand after asking him, ‘Do you squeeze?’ Assuring her he ‘did not do anything so improper’, Davies was permitted his ‘manipulations’.