England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

Even now, the influence of the Shakers on Girlingism is impossible to pin down. The English sect left almost no records of its own, and those accounts which survive in the press are often wanton in their reporting, compounding the errors of others. In the search for sensation, the complicated lines of millenarian genealogy were obscured, not least through Mary Ann’s own publicity-worthy assertions. For editors, it was easy to associate the two sects, especially as Mary Ann’s arrival in London had coincided with the advent of Elder Evans; just as Girlingism was associated with spiritualism, for the same reasons. In the wake of Hepworth Dixon’s New America and the comic sketches of Artemus Ward – a popular cartoonist who had also visited the Shakers – it was assumed Mary Ann was a Shaker and perhaps even American herself. The confusion was encouraged by the way in which the Girlingites were seen through the filter of popular culture, and remarks about Mary Ann’s apparently American accent and dress and the transatlantic mannerisms of her followers were rooted in this media confusion.

Even to informed observers, it seemed plain that Girlingism drew on the same kind of itinerant preachers and radical sectaries who had sought refuge in the New World. Ann Lee’s struggle had been one of Manichean polarities, a narrative of pioneering faith. Mary Ann’s fate, as related in the press, would follow a similar trajectory. But hers was a distorted drama enacted, not in a colonial wilderness, but under the sophisticated surveillance of the imperial metropolis. Her mission was compromised by the burgeoning press and accelerating means of communication, as if the century itself sped her story to its inevitable dénouement.

Back at Shaker headquarters, word of Mary Ann’s ambitions had reached the Society, which moved swiftly to deny the impostors, as The Times announced: ‘We have received from Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon … a communication disclaiming on the part of his community all connexion with a sect known as “the Walworth Shakers”, but whose proper cognomen, according to Elder Evans, “would appear to be Jumpers or Bible Christians”.’ Evans may have been concerned at the effect on his own recruitment drive, but his protest underlined other paradoxes. Where the Americans had become regularised in their rituals, the Girlingites were wilder, more passionate, like the early Shakers, or the Quakers. It was as if they were re-enacting Mother Ann’s Work – and gaining the kind of support which Evans had hoped for. Indeed, had Girlingism been a little more practical, its satellite communities, which would spring up in the Isle of Wight and Bristol, might have seen a national network to rival the Shaker families of America. ‘Had she been (#litres_trial_promo) supported by men of similar calibre to those who followed Ann Lee, and Joanna Southcott, there can be no doubt but that her work would have continued like the Shakers, and the Christian Israelites,’ observed one contemporary.

But the times were already moving too fast. From the outset there was a sense of a lost cause to Mary Ann’s mission, undermined, ironically, by her distinct lack of insight and administrative ability: ‘she … would not permit any interference with her absolute rule of affairs, or allow any practical person to organise the Family on sound economic principles’. The chaos in the Walworth arch had been emblematic of the essential anarchy of the Children of God. They looked forward to the millennium, but not to the immediate future. Instead, Mary Ann insisted on her immortality – an ultimately fatal mechanism – and at the same time rejected identification with the Shakers: to do otherwise would be to acknowledge another messiah. It was a crucial component in the creation of Mary Ann’s myth: she sought to obscure parallels and influences in order to make her own appearance that much more remarkable (while on a personal level, she may have been envious of Evans and antipathetic towards his masculine erudition). Although Mary Ann seemed at times to be a reincarnation of Ann Lee – and all the other prophetesses before her – for her onceorphaned, now reborn Children, there was only one Mother. And so it would remain, until they were made orphans once more.

It was left to Julia Wood, who had first-hand knowledge of both creeds, to make the distinctions. ‘The American Shakers (#litres_trial_promo) believe in Christ only as a prophet and a great man,’ she told The Times, ‘the followers of Girling believe in Him as God-man.’ ‘On the other hand,’ observed the newspaper, ‘dancing, celibacy, and community of goods are common to both sects’, and, indulging in its own little pun, it predicted that it would not be easy ‘to shake off the name’. Mary Ann’s comments were rather more disingenuous: ‘She believed (#litres_trial_promo) there was a sect of the name in America, but she had never been there and she knew nothing about them … She and her friends were more like the Quakers, but they preferred to be called the children of God …’

Nonetheless, the Girlingites and the Shakers continued to be connected, often in a manner which reflected well on neither. One commentator on the Walworth Jumpers quoted from Charles Dickens’ 1842 visit to Mount Lebanon which, like Brown and Hawthorne’s accounts, contradicted the rosy pastoral portraits of that New England paradise. The novelist particularly disliked Shaker chairs, which ‘partook so strongly (#litres_trial_promo) of the general grimness, that one would have much rather sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to them’. His greater complaint was philosophic, however. Like Hawthorne, Dickens saw Shakerism as forever living in the shadow of an apocalyptic future rather than rejoicing in the pragmatic present; and where Evans’ Autobiography of a Shaker, and Revelation of The Apocalypse (with an Appendix) had the epigram, ‘The spirit searcheth (#litres_trial_promo) all things, yea, the deep things of God’, Dickens declared, ‘I so abhor (#litres_trial_promo), and from my soul detest that bad spirit … which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave …’

That struggle for spiritual integrity had its casualties back in Walworth, where the Girling whirlwind had left the Peculiar People and John Sirgood in disarray. Sirgood had initially been won over by Mary Ann, and that August had written, ‘I do not think (#litres_trial_promo) any of them knows what the power in the soul is but the woman that is their chief …’ Like some vampire, Mary Ann fed on the Peculiar People, seducing them with her promise of immortality; the glamour of Girlingism put Bridges’ beliefs in the shade, and ‘those who believed the new docrine are of course getting the joy’, observed Harriet Sirgood. She attended a meeting ‘under the Arch’, where Mary Ann pressed the urgency of gathering the 144,000: ‘You better make haste, don’t wait for others or the number will be made and the Saviour come.’ Harriet watched as one member ‘died’ at the meeting and was still unconscious at ten o’clock. Her husband now felt that he had been ‘led astray’ by Mary Ann, and saw her as an equivalent of the vision of Satan as an angel of light which had once appeared to him. It was as if he feared for his own attraction to Mary Ann: ‘the more I gave place to her the less I felt towards others, which caused me to see that it was a deception of the devil come closer to me than ever before’. William Bridges went so far as to claim: ‘They had even (#litres_trial_promo) brought the tar to tar the woman over; to set fire to her but was prevented.’ It was a potent vision of violence: Mary Ann in flames, a tarred but not feathered witch, a blackened angel, her gown afire, too late for any Human Nature campaign to save this Joan of Arc of the Walworth Road.

After three weeks at Milton Hall – which appears to have been a generic name for a railway arch, this time a dark and damp void close to Waterloo station – the Girlingites were driven out by ‘a volley of stones (#litres_trial_promo), a general melee, and a grand “skedaddle” of the saints’. After a brief stay in Finsbury, by June they were in West London where, under the management of James Haase and financed by Julia Wood, they rented Victoria Hall, in Little College Place, ‘a back slum in Chelsea (#litres_trial_promo) … situated about midway between the South Kensington and Sloane Square Stations on the Metropolitan District Railway’, as Maurice Davies reported.

Davies duly arrived by tube to find the sect newly installed in a whitewashed and well-lit chapel, a contrast to their chimney-sweep neighbour. It seemed that in their move to Chelsea, the Girlingites were ‘gravitating towards (#litres_trial_promo) common sense’: the meeting was conducted ‘in a more decorous fashion’, with a ‘most excellent choir’. But this raised a new problem: with sensation came income, especially in a city with so many rival sideshows, and as the meeting ended without any manifestations, some of the congregation demanded their money back. Having stayed behind to engage Mary Ann in conversation – she was perfectly amenable to questions on Scriptural theory, but her answers were less satisfactory – Davies left (#litres_trial_promo) thinking he had heard the last of the Jumpers. He could not know that of all the sects he had visited on his capitalwide trawl of the eerie, the faithful and the fraudulent, the Children of God would soon return to the pages of the newspapers, and in a manner more sensational than anyone could have predicted.

Their services may have calmed down in Chelsea, but the Girlingites still found themselves assailed by the mobs they thought they had left behind in Walworth. Paying threepence to view their antics, sightseers came expecting marvels or freaks, just as visitors to the East End’s Commercial Road would gawp at John Merrick, the Elephant Man. Some were disappointed with what they found; others took exception to the ‘Shaker (#litres_trial_promo)s’ Tea Meeting’ and its orgiastic scenes: ‘The men kissed each other, the women kissed each other, then the men ran about kissing the women, and the girls then ran and kissed the men. Their kisses were not single kisses or mere salutes of love and peace: they were regular running fires of kisses and love chirps, which lasted for several minutes. Their arms were first round each other’s waists, then round each other’s necks: then they were looking into each other’s eyes, then laying their heads on one another’s shoulders, and then kissing again, as though entirely lost to all around in feelings of the most exquisite ecstasy.’

O CLOUDS UNFOLD!

Audiences stood on their benches to get a better look: ‘Oh crikey, look here at that girl: ain’t her having it nice: I should like to be kissing her’, while an offended observer said, ‘You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you ought: it’s disgraceful.’ Then, as Eliza – assumed to be Mary Ann’s daughter – sang a hymn, the crowd struck up a rival tune, sung to the air of ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’ –

There lives an ancient party

At the end of Ipswich town,

Who keeps a little preaching shop

In Chelsea college town.

She has only got one daughter,

Such a party I never saw;

By jingo I would like to be

That woman’s son-in-law

– with the ironic refrain, ‘Mother Girling’s daughter is a proper sort of girl’. The parody was itself an indication of Mary Ann’s celebrity, as was a satirical A Shaker’s ‘Service’ pamphlet, cashing in on the sensational Girlingites. Accordingly, the crowd at Chelsea were rewarded with yet more extraordinary manifestations, as if in reaction to that fame. ‘Numbers of people were thrown into trances, from which they were not aroused, and apparently could not be aroused, at the time of leaving. In their apparently mesmeric state they related visions and prophesied most startling events. While in their unconscious state they danced and violently jumped to a height of several feet. They also spoke and sang in unknown tongues. There were several professed spiritualists present …’

Littered with comatose bodies and supercharged with emotion, it is little wonder that the chapel attracted spiritualists, for its jabbering tongues and ecstatic rites rivalled mediumistic trances for sensation, and seemed to tap into the same strange energies. Another newspaper witnessed an uproarious atmosphere akin to ‘the gallery (#litres_trial_promo) of the “Vic” on Boxing Night’. The noise was ‘absolutely deafening; cat-calls, whistling cries for “the old woman … to come on”, groans and shouts of mocking laughter … No one took the trouble to take off his hat, and stale cutties and penny smokes filled the place with sickening odours’. Mary Ann finally descended from the loft, dressed ‘in the orthodox black silk dress, whose glories had long since departed, leaving a rusty brown predominant in its shades’ – as if London’s acid pollution had begun to eat away at the prophetess. ‘A tight-fitting jacket of the same material, and a black and white bonnet of puritanical simplicity completed her attire … Ascending the platform she surveyed her audience for a few seconds in silence, then in accents which almost set one’s teeth on edge, shouted, “Get hoff them seats, or I’ll close the meeting. If you are gentlemen show yourselves sich”.’

As the hubbub rose, Mary Ann folded her arms like a long-suffering school mistress and stared at the rafters until the noise subsided. Some took this to mean that she had ‘seen something’ (‘“Cobwebs”, suggested a shock-headed youth’), while a greenogrocer offered, ‘’Ave a drop of short, missus.’ ‘Turning sharp round, the goddess thundered forth, “You are a disgrace to the name of Englishmen; if you were in the lowest place of worship in the land you would not behave so”.’ After the dancing, during which Eliza’s flaxen hair flew ‘as wildly as the snakes that … supply the Furies with chignons’, Mary Ann declared, ‘I’m not afraid of death’, to an ‘Oh, Oh’ from the audience. ‘You are, but I am not,’ she replied. ‘I shall never die. I was dead once’ – at which a voice interrupted, ‘What a shake you must have given to have got out of yer coffin’ – ‘but I have been born again.’ As the meeting disintegrated, Mary Ann ‘abused the press’ and ‘maintained that she and her followers were not such fools as they looked. She repudiated the assertion that their religion was an American importation, but gave no explanation of its origin.’ The session ended with the police clearing the room. Afterwards, the reporter spoke to one of the elders: ‘“Is your religion an American invention?” we inquired. “Certainly not.” “Let us look at your hymn-book.” The saint looked confused, but seeing we would take no refusal, he let us open it. It was headed “The American