England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
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 … 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 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.
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
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. 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’ 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 … 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 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 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 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