England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
travelling by foot or horseback, digging in the fields, or cutting trees; their subjects would not interrupt their chores, but carried on working as their heads turned from left to right, ‘with eyes closed or raised towards the sky, with an expression which proclaims ecstasy, anguish, and pain’. Such scenes must have been truly disturbing for passersby, and perhaps even for the Shakers themselves. Yet they had been licensed to act in this way by the freedom of America, as though their removal to a new world had liberated them from England’s little ease and allowed their ranks to swell. The American colonies had already witnessed George Whitefield’s Great Awakening and the revival known as the New Light Stir. Now, with the Dark Day of 10 May 1780, when candles had to be lit at noon – in fact, the clouds were the carbonised remains of the forest itself, burnt in clearings and suspended in the air like great trails of incense – hundreds came over to Shakerism, drawn by this apocalyptic sign.
It seemed the Shakers were summoning spirits, or were possessed by them, sometimes to be purged by Mother Ann. After all, was not Christ an exorcist? But in New England, these were dangerous ideas in the lee of Salem, the harbour town due east of Niskeyuna. Only eighty years previously, in 1692, several girls of the town had begun to display strange symptoms. ‘Their motions in their fits are preternatural, both as to the manner, which is so strange as a well person could not screw their body into,’ wrote Reverend Lawson, while Reverend Hale noted: ‘Their arms, necks, and backs were turned this way and that, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect.’ Others spoke in voices which were not their own; some felt bitten or pinched, and even had actual marks on their skin. Later explanations for these phenomena would include multiple personality, an extreme form of ‘hysterical fugue’, or even ergotism, St Antony’s Fire, in which the victim contorts their body in pain, shaking and suffering delusions. But such pathology was not available to those who witnessed the Shakers’ strange convulsions; and as Matthew Hopkins’ campaign would haunt Mary Ann Girling, so Salem’s memory cast these forest rites as a kind of Goyaesque coven.
For the Shakers, who saw time in heaven-directed dispensations which extended beyond human measure, it was the beginning of a new age. To seal the success of their ‘federated communal order’, an echo of the new states of America, they set off to tour New England. Travelling by night, they sang to keep their spirits up in the pitch-black darkness of the forest, and carried their faith as far north as Maine and the plantation by Sabbathday Lake. Yet in these shadowy sorties they were accused of unAmerican activities, of harbouring weapons and ‘being unfriendly to the patriotic cause, from the fact of their bearing a testimony against war in general’. Their pacifism was in itself an offence, and Mother Ann was abducted by vigilantes with blackened faces like the ‘Red Indian’ protesters of the Boston Tea Party, and her dress torn off to reveal ‘a British emissary in a woman’s habit’, while her followers were accused of being Indian-lovers. And just as Salem’s witches were suspected of contracts with the devil – to ‘over Come the Kingdome of Christ and set up [his own] Kingdome’ – so the Shakers seemed to pose a new threat to the virgin territory. They had become the enemy within. Enraged by their enacted, allegorical war between Michael and the dragon, colonists besieged the Shakers in their houses or route-marched them out of town. Still they bore their sufferings selflessly, like Christian and Faithful in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, jumping on each others’ backs to save one another from the whippings, and thanking God ‘that He had found them worthy of persecution’.
These years of opposition took their toll on Ann Lee, and on 8 September 1784 she succumbed to what may have been leukaemia, visible as bruise-like marks on her body: pathological stigmata. Ann had never believed in her own immortality, although her followers expected her ministry to last a thousand years. Under her appointed successor, her surrogate son James Whittaker, the sect financed the building of a ship, the Union, ‘to bear the testimony to foreign lands’. With its Shaker crew and cargo of horses, flour and other supplies, this latter-day Mayflower must have made an extraordinary sight as it sailed out of Boston Harbour, bound for Haiti and Havanna. We know nothing of its journey, nor is there any record of Cubans converting to the cause, no secret Caribbean colony of Shakers conducting their rites in the tropical wilderness, observed only by parakeets and snakes.
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 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 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’ – 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’, and bid her Buchanites sleep on heather bundles in a barn. She would