England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
the children appeared withdrawn from the scenes of time … They began to sing, talk about angels, and describe a journey they were making, under spiritual guidance, to heavenly places.’ It was the start of ‘Mother Ann’s Work’, a revival directed from beyond the grave by Ann Lee herself.
The Shakers had ever believed that they were surrounded by the spirits of the dead. Mother Ann had written to one Shaker, ‘I see the dead around you, whose visages are ghostly and very awful. Their faces almost touch thine. If you did but see what I see, you would be surprised …’ Now the sect had witnessed the birth of spiritualism, and it was a violent genesis. The music created by these human instruments was an eerie composition which superseded time and space, connecting all things in the Shakers’ eternal dance. It threw its subjects to the floor, ‘where they lay as dead, or struggling in distress until someone near lifted them up, when they would begin to speak with great clearness and composure’, although the words came in ‘native speech’ or ‘mongrel English’. These events may have recalled those at Salem, but to some, the extremity of the reactions in these, adolescents was more clearly than ever an erotic sublimation. As the phenomenon spread, the instruments were possessed by figures from the past; by dead Shakers or a panoply of Sounding Angels, Angels of Love, of Consuming Fire, and the Holy Witnessing Angel of God bearing scrolls of ‘heavenly thoughts’ from the Apostles and Old Testament prophets, from Alexander, Napoleon and George Washington, or from their ‘Heavenly Parents’, Jesus Christ and Ann Lee herself.
‘Mother Ann’s Work’ was breathtaking in the detail with which it imagined another plane. Where Enlightenment scholars had debated whether one would drink claret in heaven, Shaker feasts of invisible food were consumed and drinkers made giddy by invisible wine in what were in effect mass seances. There were extravagant manifests of fantastic objects echoing those of Revelations and the eschatological banquet of the Lamb, a festival to mark the final unfolding of time: ‘diamonds of charity’, ‘chrysolites, emeralds, sapphires, and other precious stones; golden censors, bowls, and chains; gold boxes filled with various treasures; cakes of love and “sweet-scented manna on shining plates”… plates of wisdom, baskets of simplicity, balls of promise, belts of wisdom, bands of brightness and robes of meekness; heavenly doves; leaves from the tree of life …’
It was as if the after-life was providing the Shakers with the luxuries denied them on earth, all listed in dream-like, Byzantine indices worthy of Huysmans’ À Rebours. Like later mediums, instruments employed Indian spirit guides, with brethren as braves and sisters as squaws, whooping and yelling in strange antics, ‘such as would require a Dickens to describe’, while predictions of the invention of the telegraph and coming revolution in Europe seemed, like Mother Shipton, to map out the future, opening doors to the unknown. Although the Shakers were reluctant to make public the phenomena they were experiencing, the instruments announced that ‘similar manifestations would soon break forth in the world’. Accordingly, in 1847 at Hydesville, a small town in New York State, two sisters, Margaret and Kate Fox, aged twelve and ten, heard ‘a brisk tattoo’ of raps on their bedroom wall and saw their furniture move of its own accord.
As newspapers began to report these strange events, Mrs Fox sent the girls to their married sister, Leah, in Rochester, five miles away. But the phenomena followed them, delivering messages for which Leah charged visitors a dollar a head. The Rochester Rappings ushered in commercial spiritualism. Moving to New York, the Fox sisters set up operation in P. T. Barnum’s Hotel, where they were visited by Manhattan society and such figures as the singer Jenny Lind, so impressed that she left ‘with her eyes full of tears’. Despite an investigation which concluded that the noises were made by snapping certain tendons, and Margaret Fox’s confession – subsequently retracted – that ‘the whole business is humbug from beginning to end’, an air of mystery lay over the affair. It was as if the sisters had fulfilled a need for belief in a rational age. Among those who paid their dollar admission were the members of a Shaker committee, who ‘at once recognised the presence of the spirits, and believed it to be the prelude to extensive manifestations of different kinds’. However, as spiritualism began to grip the country, other Shakers professed to be uncertain about its manifestations, declaring that ‘this form of communion with the spirit world is not for Believers in our faith’.
In those years America seemed open to a hundred Edens, from Thoreau’s Walden in Massachusetts to Keil’s Aurora in Oregon; from Josiah Warren’s Equity in Ohio to Étienne Cabet’s Icaria in California. In 1840, Emerson told Thomas Carlyle: ‘We are all a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket…’ However, Boston Transcendentalists distrusted spiritualism (a ‘Rat-revelation’, said Emerson); and Nathaniel Hawthorne, visiting the Shaker village of Hancock with his friend Herman Melville, then in the midst of writing Moby-Dick, professed to be disgusted by its ‘utter and systematic lack of privacy’, the ‘miserable pretence of cleanliness and neatness’ and the fact that two men shared a narrow bed. Yet ten years before, Hawthorne had been a shareholder in Brook Farm’s brief commune of intellectuals on 160 acres of farmland, where he laboured all day in the fields – only to find himself too tired to write at night.
Even shorter-lived was Fruitlands, a commune inspired by the Shakers and founded by Amos Bronson Alcott, the great Transcendentalist, after a visit (funded by Emerson) to the ‘Concordium’, an English commune at Ham Common which was run by his friend, Charles Lane. Back in New England, Alcott and Lane, nine other adults, and the Alcotts’ four daughters – among them the ten-year-old Louisa May – set up camp on ninety acres in Harvard, where many adopted new identities for the venture. One man, Samuel Bower, declared that clothes stifled his spirit and became a nudist, while another lived only on apples. Apart from Mrs Alcott, there was only one other woman, Ann Page, although she was expelled for eating fish. The community was strictly vegan, taking nothing whatsover from animals – no dairy products, eggs, honey, wax, or wool. No manure was used to fertilise the land, nor animals to work it. There was no lamp oil, since it came from whales and so the commune was dark at night; cotton was forbidden as it was produced by slavery. Yet such admirable, contemporary-sounding sanctions caused problems – not least what their adherents could wear (for those unwilling to adopt Samuel Bower’s sky-clad solution) in an era before man-made fibres. ‘Since cotton, silk, and wool were forbidden as the product of slave-labor, worm-slaughter, and sheep-robbery’, as Louisa May Alcott wrote in Transcendental Wild Oats, her fictional account of the commune, ‘a new dress was invented. Tunics and trousers of brown linen were the only wear … Some persecution lent a charm to the costume, and the long-haired, linen-clad reformers quite enjoyed the mild martyrdom they endured when they left home.’
Fruitlands was a utopian may-fly, lasting only one summer. Its failure lay in its membership of people already unable to cope with life, men such as Samuel Hecker, who ‘had nervous fits, heard imaginary voices, and suffered from an unidentified sexual disorder for which others advised marriage but which convinced him always to remain celibate’. Hecker tried to purify himself by eating only unleavened bread, fruit and water, and aspired to the ultimate diet of wanting ‘to do away with the digestive system entirely’. He later became a Roman Catholic priest.
By now Brook Farm and its tenants had fallen under a powerful new spell: that of François Marie Charles Fourier, a man whose influence spread across the world, even though he had never left France between his birth in 1772 and his death, kneeling by his bedside in a lowly boarding house,