England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

The image of this bound and closeted girl recalls Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Despair’, for which she shut her adoptive daughter Cyllene in a cupboard in order to reproduce an authentic expression of terror when she was let out. There was something unsettling about this passive girl and her audience of men: a scene of contained violence and sexuality, pitched somewhere between circus sideshow and a vision of the unknown. Davies, ‘sufficiently struck’ to attend another seance at that address, wondered whether he had really been ‘in direct contact with supernatural beings or simply taken in by one of the most satisfactory “physical mediums” it was ever my good fortune to meet’.

His suspicions were well founded. The young girl was Florence Cook, whose spirit guide, Katie King, was said to be the daughter of the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan. Nine years later, in the rooms of the British National Association of Spiritualists, Sir George Sitwell, father of the famous literary trio, would squeeze Katie’s hand, and in the process prove that the ‘vivacious and apparently (#litres_trial_promo) youthful ghost’ was ‘a common cheat’. Even then, many refused to believe that Katie was composed of anything other than ectoplasm.

Yet astounding as Florence Cook’s manifestations were, Davies’ annals of the Victorian uncanny were about to produce even more extraordinary scenes as he went south of the river and into another enclosed space. This time it was to the very belly of the city’s industrial catacombs, where the fraudulent met the faithful and where those who could not afford even ‘shilling seances’ might pursue the quest for life after death; a place where believers might yet be reborn, never to die again.

‘Sect-hunting (#litres_trial_promo), like misery, makes a man acquainted with strange companions, and familiarises him with strange experiences,’ wrote Davies, ‘but of all the religious phenomena with which I had yet been brought into contact, the latest and certainly the very strangest, have been those connected with the “Jumpers” at Walworth – the Bible Christians, or Children of God …’ Having been tipped off about these odd goings-on, Davies proceeded ‘to a certain railway arch in Sutherland Street, Walworth Road, beneath which … I had been given to understand that the Bible Christians gathered thrice a week to listen to the preaching of an inspired woman from Suffolk’.

Walworth Road was then, as it is now, a bustling thoroughfare leading south from the Elephant and Castle and running parallel with the railway from Blackfriars. Leading off the broad strand of shops, businesses and trams were narrow residential streets clustered with terraces of newly-built villas. Those on Sutherland Street were tall, not without some pretensions, and led to the enclave of Sutherland Square, with its ornate railings and miniature oval park. Most residents would have worshipped at St Peter’s, whose domed tower, designed by Sir John Soane, cast its graceful shadow over the area; an orthodox venue compared to the sensational Spurgeon Tabernacle up the road.

This was the inner city parish Mary Ann chose to colonise. Davies was told that the Girlingites had been in existence for seven years, and now numbered more than two hundred. Their place of worship was leased from the London Chatham & Dover Railway by Samuel Burrows, a Girlingite and kinsman of William Bridges. Burrows, who lived in Walworth, may have been responsible for inviting Mary Ann to London: he and unnamed ‘others (#litres_trial_promo)’ had registered the arch for ‘Divine service’.

It may have been down a back street, but the arch was easy to find. By 6.30 pm a mob had already gathered round the roughtarred hoarding at the entrance, where a lone doorman was admitting the crowd one by one. ‘Young Walworth (#litres_trial_promo) in the shape of ragged shock-headed boys and draggle-tailed girls, was rigidly excluded’; the local dandy-ruffians known as the New Cut swells got in only by ‘considerable manoeuvring and no little physical persuasion’. Negotiating planks laid over mud, Davies entered the arch, which smelt of the stables next door and was boarded up with an assortment of window-sashes partly smashed by ‘the missiles of the Walworth Gentiles’. A few forms and planks faced a green baize table on which stood two cups and a collecting box; a sole gas pipe ran the length of the arch, ‘whence descended two burners that shed a dim if not exactly a religious light …’ It was a weird sight, this gloomy cavern, lit with flickering flames. A century later such arches would house car workshops or illicit nightclubs; now, this subterranean temple – a negative void in the no-man’s-land formed by the railway’s onward march – was charged with expectation. Part sacred space, part profane sanctuary beyond the jurisdiction of the common law, its barrel-vaults and restive audience echoed those of the music halls whose limelight illuminated other feats of Victorian entertainment.

By now the arch was filled with ‘fustian-clad men, women in about the proportion of two to one man, and babies in more than adequate force’. The swells – who declined to remove their hats – sat at the back, talking loudly. The crowd craned their heads, waiting for the show to begin. There was a ripple of excitement as the ‘Jumpers’ made their entrance, greeting each other with the kiss of charity – ‘no half-and-half stage salute, but a good whacking kiss’ – to the amusement of the swells, who ‘proceeded at once to imitate the sound, and to remark audibly, “Ain’t it nice?”’. Then, as seven o’clock struck, Mary Ann entered, her appearance all the more remarkable within this wayside grotto.

Taking the stage with the drama of an actress, she presented a potent combination for an age which demanded entertainment with its religion; the bizarre venue and its rag-tag congregation invested her with a sense of revelation. Here was a woman who claimed divine inspiration, an extraordinary assertion to make – yet more so in a railway arch in south London in 1871 – but Mary Ann drew on all the visionaries in whose footsteps she walked, a demotic parade of mystics and charlatans, believers and deceivers. She was a messiah for an industrial age, borne here to redeem the wicked city – even as the London to Dover train rattled overhead.

She was not, however, quite what Reverend Davies had expected. The figure he saw resembled less a seeress than one of those suburban mediums in whose vaguely disreputable company he had dallied. Dressed in a red merino gown and a ‘somewhat jaunty black bonnet’, to Davies she appeared to be a ‘tall, thin, Suffolk peasant woman, of middle age, with high cheek-bones and piercing eyes’ (elsewhere ascribed with a ‘peculiar bright gleam (#litres_trial_promo)’ and an ‘almost unnatural lustre’ when excited). Davies’ pathological description seemed to have some pre-knowledge of Mary Ann’s past, as though her mission were written on her face. ‘She had a large (#litres_trial_promo) prominent mouth with projecting teeth, and the muscles around the jaw bore that peculiar appearance often observed in habitual speakers, being strongly developed, and giving a sort of animal appearance to the lower portion of the face’ (others saw her thin lips as ‘betokening (#litres_trial_promo) an energetic and excitable temperament’).

Flanked by the loyal Eliza Folkard, ‘a young, good-looking girl of twenty’, and Harry Osborne, ‘an inane-visaged man in a broadcloth coat and corduroys’, Mary Ann asked – in a ‘somewhat affected tone’ – that anyone who could not stay until nine o’clock should leave at once, as the door would be closed and no exit allowed until then. This confinement was necessary ‘on account of the outsiders, whose noisy clamours for admittance combine with the frequent passage of trains to mar the tranquillity of the evening’. It was religious worship determined by railway timetable and human interruption, although in her airs and graces, Mary Ann was quite equal to the heckles of the New Cut swells: ‘I had heard … of the superior wisdom of the Londoners, but if this be London wisdom commend me to my Suffolk ignorance.’ As another observer noted drily, it was a voice ‘that could have (#litres_trial_promo) been well heard in a place much larger than a railway arch’.

Apologising for the ‘ill-convenience (#litres_trial_promo)’ of the venue, Mary Ann called for a prayer from Eliza, ‘who lifted one hand and prayed with a fervour and a certain rough but gentle eloquence for ten minutes’; Davies was reminded of Dinah Morris, the Wesleyan preacher in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. He was less impressed by Osborne’s oration. Mary Ann herself ‘prayed volubly, and used her long arms freely in gesticulation’, which to Davies resembled mesmeric passes, ‘but in this I was probably mistaken’.

The reverend summed up the sect’s tenets for the benefit of his Telegraph readers. ‘Now it must be premised that the distinguishing doctrine of these Children of God is the assurance that they will never die,’ he noted. ‘Belief not only does away with previous sin, but exempts them from bodily death. The Lord is to come speedily and gather them to Himself, without the previous process of dissolution. From the date of their conversion, in fact, they are immortal. They die at conversion, and die no more.’ Where the Quakers ‘were often (#litres_trial_promo) believed to have claimed to raise from the dead when they only meant that they had effected a conversion’, and where Swedenborg experienced a ‘future life’ between life and death, Mary Ann said that her followers had never ‘given the undertaker a job yet, and didn’t mean to’.

‘Why did Lazarus come back?’ she asked her congregation.

‘Because he had got a return ticket,’ someone shouted.

Riding the laughter and the noise of the trains, Mary Ann answered, ‘No; he never was dead. He had died before …’

As she spoke, Davies noticed ‘more than one lady subside into an apparently comatose condition’ with ‘a peculiar twitching of the limbs, and an expression of face like that which I have observed on the features of the mesmerised … what mesmerisers call “the superior condition”’. The women woke up at the end of the sermon ‘as though nothing had happened’. It was time for a performance, and the Jumpers duly obliged.

Two young girls got up and began to dance, ‘much in the same way as they might do if a grinding-organ had struck up an appropriate air’. These infant phenomena were then joined by a young man aged about eighteen: it seemed to Davies that their strangely vacant expressions were ‘suggestive of animal magnetism’, and he could only conclude there was more than mere abandon in their antics. It was as though they drew on some primal energy within the modern city, whose darker alleys could still encompass such mysteries as Spring-heeled Jack, a caped ghoul breathing fire in its own devilish leaping; or later, Jack the Ripper, an apocalyptic, sacrificial reaper stalking the harlot-strewn streets. In such places residual belief sought shamans to counter evil times, and Mary Ann offered an alternative to the shackles of working-class life.

On engaging a ‘respectable woman’ in conversation, Davies was told, ‘Every member of this sect, upon conversion, undergoes death – an actual process analogous to physical death, and exactly corresponding with it in external signs, only that it is not permanent.’ Even for a man accustomed to mediums summoning the dead, this was a remarkable development. ‘Some die very hard, in great agony,’ said the woman, ‘others quite peacefully. Only then would they ‘jump’; and like the Shakers, ‘once under the influence, it may recur at any moment’. In order to obtain the complete gift, ‘probationary believers (#litres_trial_promo)’ had to embrace celibacy; this would ensure their immortality. This was no allegorical state, no erudite metaphor teased out from biblical texts by a learned parson; it was the literal truth: ‘Once dead (#litres_trial_promo), not only will they die no more, but they suffer no pain, they feel no sorrow.’

The Children of God believed they had discovered the secret of eternal life, and in a world in which death was a daily fact, this promise was beyond prize and almost beyond imagination. Suspended in their state of grace, they awaited the millennium. Where Ann Lee had lain for hours ‘with but little (#litres_trial_promo) appearance of life’ before her own rebirth, Mary Ann’s Children emerged from their comas into the bright light of an assured place in heaven. Like Ann Lee, Mary Ann was living out a biblical narrative of her own. Why should she not be a prophet of modern times? After all, if Scripture was a battleground over which faiths had fought for centuries, then her exegesis looked back to the original, Primitive Church. It was as if she had only just discovered the Word of God (as indeed she had), and was now a missionary in her own country. And where the Shakers had believed they were living ‘in the Resurrection (#litres_trial_promo) Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’, here in Walworth Christ’s coming was divined daily, to a timetable set by Mrs Girling, as though that railway arch were a portal through which some spiritual steam engine might take them all into another world.

When James J. Morse attended his first spiritualist meeting in Whitechapel in 1868, he found himself ‘endowed with (#litres_trial_promo) another personality … I shouted, rolled around the room, I swore, and … the more I tried not to do these things, the more perfectly were they accomplished!’ After three-quarters of an hour the fit subsided, and he ‘sank exhausted upon a settee’. As a connoisseur of such events, Davies equated the altered states of mesmerism and spiritualism with the Jumpers’ ecstasy (in its original meaning, exstasis, to stand outside oneself), although when he interviewed Mary Ann, she was eager to disown such comparisons. Nevertheless, Davies was convinced that ‘whatever be (#litres_trial_promo) the origin of the so-called mesmeric condition, the same is the cause of “jumping”. The magnetic “sleep-walking” may be produced without contact or passes … and religious excitement is certainly an adequate cause to produce such an effect.’

The vexed question of whether Mary Ann hypnotised her followers would haunt her mission – and produce new accusations of witchcraft. That night in the railway arch, one woman who had been ‘grimacing and gesticulating in a slightly idiotic manner, jumped up and joined the dance. Her demeanour, however, was anything but happy; she prayed as in an unknown tongue, and called out “The devil! the devil!”’ Davies was told by his confidante, ‘Yes, there is something wrong. You see when they are in that state they have the gift of prophecy and clear vision. She can see the state of those around.’ Perhaps, like the Shakers, the Girlingites could see the dead walking – although Davies offered the explanation that, like the onlookers who had spoiled Dr Emes’s resurrection from Bunhill Fields, the New Cut swells had ‘“disturbed the conditions”… as the spiritists would say … When deprecating to me any use of mesmerism or chloroform, the minister said, “I wish I had been able to use the one or the other once or twice tonight”.’

The reference to anaesthesia was apposite. Hypnotism and chloroform were seen to induce bodily abandonment beyond the control of consciousness; both evoked notions of surrender and perhaps violation (in 1865, Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, had been accused of ‘chloroforming’ a young patient before seducing her), and spiritualists and mesmerists were accused of taking sexual advantage of their entranced subjects. Similarly, Mary Ann would stand accused of moral transgression when her followers danced themselves into unconsciousness and ‘death’, as if experiencing the petite mort of sexual ecstasy. For a world which would be shocked by the waltz, it was little wonder that such rites were regarded with suspicion and fascination. This peasant woman had imported pagan ways into the city and had thrown the formalised choreography of polite society into uninhibited abandon; these diseased fits presaged the St Vitus-like jerks of jazz dancers yet to come: one newspaper compared the Jumpers’ rituals to ‘a performance between (#litres_trial_promo) a nigger break-down and the jig of the wandering Savoyards that we see in our streets’. Or perhaps their terpsichorean excesses were fuelled by narcotics imported from the Orient to the nearby docklands of the East End, where the exports were said to include the drugged and abducted young women of the white slave trade.

In Davies’ conspiratorial narrative, cloaked in mystery like a clerical detective novel, anything might be possible, and the plot deepened with an invitation to a private meeting at an address given to him in confidence by his Girlingite friend. Here, he was promised, ‘deaths’ were more frequent – perhaps because they were conducted out of range of the swells’ ridicule, and more lethal antipathies: ‘Some of the men (#litres_trial_promo) wait for our brothers and almost kill them’, Davies was told. South London was a wild place, as the clergyman found for himself on leaving the rented railway arch. ‘It took two policemen to get us quietly out … lest some honest Walworthian should mistake me for a “brother”.’ With that somewhat edgy exit, the reverend concluded his account, for the time being.

London was undergoing a transformation. Vast new buildings were rising at its centre like new geological formations, from the gothic cliffs of Kensington’s Natural History Museum – built by the Quaker, Alfred Waterhouse – to Charles Barry’s Italianate canyons of Portland stone along Whitehall, and the jagged stalagmites of Westminster. It was a city skyline newly framed by medieval crenellations; Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras, seen romantically against a fiery sunset like some gigantic monastery out of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, was in fact a modern hotel undercoursed by grinding locomotives and commuters hurrying through its tiled caverns. The entire metropolis was in a state of reinvention; one giant construction site for secular cathedrals dedicated to the imperial saints of science, technology, governance and capital. So too Mary Ann’s arrival had seen an extension in her mission, as if London’s burgeoning architecture encouraged her to produce yet more extraordinary effects. But hers was a spiritual phalanx populated by her Children of God, and unlike the leviathan monuments which her fellow Victorians were erecting, it did not need a grand temple to state its certainties. The Girlingites’ rites were conducted underneath those constructions, in the dead space which progress had left behind – a vacuum filled by their immortal faith.

Mary Ann lodged with a family in Chelsea (possibly apostates of the Peculiar People), whose twenty-four-year-old daughter Violet was chosen, like Eliza Folkard, to receive the ‘gift of the Spirit (#litres_trial_promo)’. Having accompanied her parents to Walworth to hear Mary Ann speak, Violet fell unconscious to the floor where she remained for two hours, then suddenly she began to speak under inspiration, prophesying ‘great and terrible judgements from God’ on anyone who refused to accept Mrs Girling’s message. Violet declared that she too would leave her family and follow Mary Ann wherever she went. Her conversion – which went one step further than the Peculiar People’s gospel of salvation, and resembled the trance-like fervour of the young Shakeress instruments – was a cornerstone in the Girlingites’ mission. It became a talisman for Mary Ann’s followers, raising their sense of identity and encouraging new converts.

That winter at Walworth, Violet’s visions had a galvanising effect. Many exhibited similar manifestations in the services, which attracted up to three hundred people – as well as the attention of the press. Crowds milling around the arch had swollen tenfold to two or three thousand, and the South London Press in particular followed the ‘extraordinary proceedings … among the “Shakers” at Walworth’ – reports all the more notable for their comparison of the Girlingites with the American sect. Next to an article on ‘Mr Spurgeon’s Return (#litres_trial_promo) to South London’ (from Rome, where ‘the Papal system [was] as full of idolatry as ever Hindooism was’), the journalist ‘C.E.P.’ posed the question, ‘What is a Shaker?’ It was one which would ‘naturally be asked by those who have not read Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America”’ – or perhaps by those who had attended one of Frederick Evans’ lectures that summer – and it might be difficult to answer ‘were it not for the fact that in South London, scarcely a hundred yards from the Walworth-road station, is the meeting-house of a Shaker community, where the inquirer may see with his own eyes …’

Arriving at Sutherland Street for a Sunday morning service, C.E.P. found Mary Ann seated behind her green baize table, a cup of tea at her side ‘with which she occasionally refreshed herself’. The atmosphere was electric. Despite the winter weather it was hot and stuffy inside, and the correspondent watched as a group bent over a heavy-looking youth who lay in his companion’s arms. Two young women had their arms around the boy’s neck and were mumbling in excited, incoherent tongues. They then jumped up to dance, twirling and twisting ‘as if they were bitten by the tarantula’ (it was no coincidence that the poisonous spider also lent its name to a leaping mania and a feverish Italian dance). All the while another young man with slicked-back hair and a sickly smile dabbed at their faces with a handkerchief, helping an ‘unhealthy-looking girl’ out of her jacket when she grew too hot.

C.E.P. was particularly disgusted by ‘a pale child of stunted growth’ and the way she threw her head back over her shoulder ‘and cast her eyes upwards, until almost nothing but the whites were visible … one almost felt tempted to jump up and rescue the silly fools …’ But the dance went on. One girl began to stagger with her eyes closed and ‘a wild unmeaning smile on her features’, her cheeks ‘streaked with white and red patches’; another respectably-dressed man in his fifties danced on one leg. The two young women had grabbed hold of the recumbent youth’s head and were pulling his face towards them, kissing him violently as he submitted in a placid, cow-like manner’. The Brueghel-like scene was completed by a dark, swarthy man who performed like a dancing bear, his appearance ‘as if … mesmerized’ and his face ‘more like that of a corpse’.

Evidently Mary Ann felt some explanation was necessary for this bizarre circus. She told the audience that the spirit of the Lord had a quickening effect. ‘Ah’, she said, ‘if you could get people to do this, you might shut up all your dancing places.’ Then she declared that ‘Parents have (#litres_trial_promo) a difficulty to get their children to places of worship; we have nothing of that kind; so far from it, we can’t keep our children away. They like dancing, and cry to come.’ To others, however, the presence of children in these rites – like that of adolescent mediums – was worrying, and would lead to questions about the Girlingites’ treatment of their youngest and most vulnerable members.

One ‘matron of some (#litres_trial_promo) 35 years’ attested that ‘having once died the relation of a husband and wife ceases: A wife is ever after a housekeeper – nothing more’; while the preacher that night – probably Harry Osborne – declared, ‘My sisters, if your desire be to your husbands, I pray you let it be so no more; for every child born is the offspring of lust!’ The sect had inverted the relationship between adult and child; by surrendering to Mary Ann’s control, they gave up responsibility for their own lives and became Children of God, leaving their offspring to be moulded in the Girlingite faith. Later, it seems, they would adopt orphans, as well as caring for children whose parents had joined but then left the sect; these young members would ensure a new generation for the celibate Family. Their role in such wild scenes was discomforting – especially when they made the front page of the Illustrated Police News (a consequence of the fact that the local police station stood directly behind Sutherland Street). The front page of the issue for January 1872 was a Grand Guignol display of a man eaten by rats, a lion tamer killed by his charges, and a violent poaching ‘affray’. Set below these exhibits in a graphic predella, as though caught in a photographer’s stark magnesium flash, were thrilling glimpses of the arch, with the figure of Mary Ann presiding over two dancers almost levitating in their ecstasy.

Such voyeuristic images made the Jumpers’ chapel look more like Bedlam; and although the sect may have regarded their place of worship as an asylum in the other sense of the word, their disruptive presence was not beyond the law – whether used for or against them. In a rerun of their Suffolk trials, the Girlingites now appeared in London’s courts, and at Lambeth on 8 February 1872, an Edward Ball was charged with ‘indecent behaviour (#litres_trial_promo) in a certain chapel of the religious denomination called Bible Christians’.

The magistrate, Mr Chance, heard how the ‘excitement and turmoil’ at the arch necessitated a constant police presence from the nearby station to maintain order. The sect had decided to prosecute Ball, having been ‘so much annoyed by parties interfering with them for some time’. Samuel Burrows maintained theirs were ‘manifestations’, not dances, and an integral part of their worship. Then Harry Osborne testified that he travelled with ‘the female speaker’. This did not sound entirely respectable.

Mr Chance: What do you mean by travelling with her?

Witness: We go about reading the word of God.

Mr Chance: Do you live with her?

Witness: I live in the same house.

Now came Mary Ann’s court debut. ‘… Gurling [sic]… said her husband allowed her to travel about, which she had done for six years. She now travelled with the witness Osborn [sic] and a young girl from the country, who were helpers in the work.’

Edward Ball was allowed to cross-examine his accuser:

Defendant: Are you not called the ‘Shakers’?

Witness (sternly): Some may call us so.

Asked to explain their manifestations, Mary Ann said, ‘When they take place I have no power. It is when they feel the word of God, and when it falls on them they remain in an unconscious state for a time, followed by a quickening effect which turns to a dance.’ Fired by the laughter which greeted this statement, she confronted the mockers with their own mortality: ‘All who dance have passed from death to life, and if you read the Bible you will understand it to be so.’ This was met with a sharp intake of breath.

‘Well, I am at present in the depths of darkness concerning it,’ said Mr Chance. ‘When are the dancers supposed to die?’

‘They do not dance for dancing sake,’ said Mary Ann, ‘but it is the spirit of God moved them. I can tell when they pass from death to life by the symptoms. There is always some indication, such as their not being able to move. I have known some upwards of seven hours passing from the old state of Adam to the new.’

Inspector Fife of P Division told the magistrate that he had seen a crowd of some five hundred trying to gain entry to the arch. Despite the ‘sad delusion’ of its inhabitants, it was registered as a place of worship and had the right to be protected as such, Mr Chance conceded; but he also advised ‘sensible people’ to keep away from the place. As they left the court late that night, the Girlingites ‘were scrutinized in a most unenviable manner’.

With Mary Ann’s court appearance came the first reports of her millenarian message to the metropolis, ‘to the effect that the end of all things was at hand and that she was to gather together the “hundred and forty and four thousand” who are to meet the Lord at His second coming …’ It was a reiteration of Southcott’s call to the ‘sealed’ of the Apocalypse. Meanwhile the South London Press reported on another local inhabitant with an interest in eschatology: ‘Why Mr Ruskin (#litres_trial_promo) leaves Denmark Hill: Frankenstein flying from monsters of his own creation is the character Mr John Ruskin declares he now personates.’ Twenty years previously the author of The Stones of Venice had helped revive gothic architecture; now he protested, ‘I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between here and Bromley, and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin-and-bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals …’ As an habitué of Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and the Camden Chapel on Walworth Road, Ruskin must have known of the Girlingites; although with their enemies outnumbering friends in the area, they too were on the move. The residents of Sutherland Square complained that the streets were ‘infested, from (#litres_trial_promo) 6 o’clock until after 9, by a swarm of overgrown boys … hooting and shouting every time a member of the sect passed in or out’, and by April Mary Ann had switched her operation to Salisbury Row, Lock’s Fields, near the Old Kent Road, where she took a room in a private house. Her landlord soon regretted the lease. On Tuesday nights, when the sect assembled, the house was besieged by ‘a crowd of women (#litres_trial_promo) fearful lest their husbands should be converted and become “dead” to them in the flesh’. These wives ‘smashed every pane of glass in the windows, tore up the palings round the house’, shouting ‘Down with the Shakers!’ and ‘No more dead-alive husbands!’ It was, in its way, an augury of the prostitutes who would demonstrate outside the Old Bailey during Oscar Wilde’s trial.

Mary Ann now assumed the title of Mother, as had Ann Lee, an action which symbolically coincided with the conversion of her own son, William Walter, now seventeen, to the cause. The comparison with the Shakers was also underlined by two more new recruits: James Haase and Julia Wood, newly returned from Mount Lebanon. They were important additions. Haase brought (#litres_trial_promo) his business sense to this English eruption of religious communism – perhaps with the prospect of gathering the Children of God for Elder Evans – while Miss Wood’s money would finance their establishment as a community. When told of the poverty of the followers back in Suffolk – where Mary Ann’s mission had continued in her absence, a kind of holding bay of the faithful as converts awaited her confirmation – Wood acquired a home for the Girlingites at 107 Battersea Bridge Road. Here, by the banks of the river Thames, was a London Mount Lebanon, founded by ‘the first twelve’, the dozen Suffolk elders who sought to follow the lives of the apostles. For their neighbours, however – who included the congregation of a Wesleyan chapel and William D. Sumner, a professor of music – the arrival of this commune, preceded by reports of riots and court cases, was probably as welcome as that of a bail hostel in a modern suburb.

In April 1872, Mrs Dawe, the wife of a mechanic living at 4 Agate Street, Walworth, told Lambeth court that her husband ‘had for some (#litres_trial_promo) weeks belonged to the “Shakers”. He had not entirely left her, but had ceased cohabitation, and she believed he would shortly proceed with the party to America.’ The case was heard by Mr Chance, who was becoming all too familiar with south London’s sects (two months later he would direct one of the Peculiar People ‘to have his (#litres_trial_promo) son vaccinated on pain of a fine of 2/6’). The magistrate told Mrs Dawe that he could hardly interfere between man and wife, despite her protests: ‘What she had (#litres_trial_promo) witnessed on Sunday week, when she went with her husband, was quite shocking, and enough to outrage any decent woman. She saw men and women embracing one another for a quarter of an hour at a time …’ When her husband came home, he ‘looked vacant, and seemed lost, and took no notice of anything. He had what the “Shakers” called “died”, and had passed from death to “newness of life”,’ and she feared he was about to leave for America.

The recruitment of Evans’ erstwhile acolytes seemed to encourage such ideas: the lure of the New World as a religious refuge held as good in the 1870s as it had in the 1770s, and perhaps – with Julia Wood’s patronage – Mary Ann even considered a Girlingite exodus across the Atlantic, just as John Hocknell had financed the Shakers’ move. In the event, however, theirs was only a trek up the Old Kent Road. The equally familiar figure of Inspector Fife told the court that the sect had ‘received notice to leave Sunderland Street, and on Thursday would open Milton Hall, near a railway station’.

Although he would remain with Mary Ann for the next ten years at least, James Haase was ambivalent about Girlingism, as if he could not quite bring himself to embrace its more extreme tenets. That May, a labourer named John Tyseen was charged with using abusive language to Haase. In court Haase claimed that he was not a member of the group, and ‘did not altogether (#litres_trial_promo) agree with the worship of dancing’. It was a disclaimer which, with its overtones of Peter’s denial of Christ, seemed to echo Mary Ann’s generally equivocal relationship to the Shakers. What did she know of the American sect with which she was associated? Did she draw on their beliefs in the same way as she had parasitised the Peculiar People? Her new recruits must have discussed their experiences at Mount Lebanon with Mary Ann; it is even possible that she had attended one of Evans’ lectures, although there is no trace of any encounter. The connexion, as indisputable as it is in one respect, is at the same time comprehensively denied. It is one reason why Mary Ann remains such an elusive figure.