England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
his faithful were ‘derided, reproached, insulted … thrown down into the mud … and women and children filled with terror’. One particularly terrifying night, assailants armed with bludgeons, their faces painted and ‘disguised in the most grotesque manner … beat about the house to the breaking up of the windows and the crockery, threatening the life of the Preacher’. And just as Mary Ann had left Suffolk, so by 1860, Sirgood had returned to south London.
Despite their obscure history, it is clear that these part rural, part city evangelists paved the way for Mary Ann. Through their south London mission she would gain access to a new following, and in the process she would divide Bridges’ Southwark citadel. At first the Peculiar People allowed Mary Ann to preach in their chapel on Sunday evenings, where she maintained she was only the ‘Messenger’ of the Second Coming. But when she began to claim her own divinity, it proved too much for the Peculiars. Like the Methodists, they asked Mary Ann to ‘withdraw from their communion’, which she did, taking many of their followers with her. As in Suffolk, she began preaching in private houses, where ‘spiritual manifestations’ took place. Emboldened by their move to the imperial capital as the Shakers had been by their American migration, the Girlingites’ fainting fits were now fully-fledged ecstasies; quivering, quaking rites. And like the Camisards before them, news of these strange phenomena attracted crowds wanting to see this woman from Suffolk, who was publicly declaring that she would not die.
It was an exhortative season for the esoteric gospel. That summer, as Elder Evans hired ever larger halls to enable his words to be heard, Mary Ann acquired a new place of worship – an altogether more unconventional venue for one of the most extraordinary eruptions of religious zeal London had ever seen. In the sinful city which Cobbett had called the Great Wen, she would meet with opposition all the more violent for its metropolitan cynicism. Yet hadn’t Christ instructed his apostles to leave their fishing nets and families and follow in His footsteps? Her rural sectaries shamed the city-dwellers with their faith. Entire clans had given up their worldly goods and birthrights to be born again; and while their peers made similar migrations in pursuit of employment and wages, the Girlingites rejected work for anyone but God, and saw money as personally worthless. They placed their faith in Mary Ann. And just as her predecessor Joanna Southcott had drawn supporters to her House of God in the Elephant and Castle, so Mary Ann’s mission would operate from a railway arch off the Walworth Road.
The Southcottians had proved to be pervasive in south London, where their loud orisons still brought irate neighbours out into the street. Other preachers inspired the people of Southwark, too: the evangelist Charles Spurgeon drew thousands to his Metropolitan Tabernacle at the Elephant and Castle, a theatrical auditorium with a grandiose façade of Corinthian pillars still visible from today’s pink-painted roundabout. With ‘triumphant’ acoustics and curving stairs ending in a deep pool where believers were baptised, the chapel was host to visitors such as John Ruskin, a resident of nearby Denmark Hall who contributed £100 to the Tabernacle fund, and whose taste for Spurgeon’s sermons would emerge in his own apocalyptic essays, Unto this Last.
In fact, the entire city seemed sensitised to new beliefs. In the teeming streets of Southwark and Bermondsey, in meeting houses in King’s Cross, in Hoxton’s dark squares and along Belgravia’s rich terraces, all manner of practitioners gathered believers to their causes. The salons of the wealthy might host after-dinner entertainment by a mesmerist or medium, while hastily-built chapels or squatted semi-industrial spaces became cells for lower-class dissent. The sheer range of creeds available to mid-Victorian Londoners was a reflection of the extent of the imperial project; in a commodified world, the choice of faiths mirrored an age of mass production. From its centre to its suburbs, the world’s biggest city encompassed Peculiar People and phrenologists, Quakers and Swedenborgians, homeopaths and hypnotists. For this cosmopolitan parish, the catchment area was the Empire itself, an ever-shifting congregation swelled by the Thames’ wide reach and supplied by the speedy railway. Here a home could be found for any belief, no matter how odd. And here was a ready-made market for Mary Ann’s offer of immortality.
In that summer of 1871, a third and equally eccentric figure embarked on his own metropolitan mission. The Reverend Charles Maurice Davies was compiling a series of reports for the Daily Telegraph – ‘strictly descriptive … expressing no opinion pro or con’ – on the remarkable spectrum of alternative beliefs, later to be collected in a volume entitled Unorthodox London, Or, Phases of Religious Life in the Metropolis. As a Fellow of Durham University, this sinecured cleric struck an authorial stance between a sceptic relaying the latest craze for the amusement of his Telegraph readers, and an intellectual with an interest in the strange sects sprouting up almost weekly. Like one of M. R. James’s learned professors, Davies’ religious-academic background gave a sense of authority to his narrative as he explored the city’s penumbral streets, reporting from the shadows thrown by the imperial glare. His ‘unorthodox London’ was a spiritual precursor of the colourcoded chart to be created by the radical statistician Charles Booth (on which my own street in Hoxton is coloured black and described as ‘the leading criminal quarter of London and indeed of all England’). As Booth presented his socio-economic topography of the city, so Davies surveyed its dark heart of faith: ‘On the plane of working from the circumference to the centre, I set off on a recent Sunday morning, resolved to make my first study at the widest possible radius, the very Ultima Thule of religious London.’
Turning the pages of his book in the British Library, with their indented type punctuated by the odd squashed fly preserved as if in amber, the clergyman’s gothic peregrinations come to life. He travelled by the newly-installed Underground, tunnelling into esoteric arenas like some clerical mole: from the Theists of the South Place Chapel ‘close to the Moorgate Street Station of the Metropolitan Railway’, to ‘Colonel Wentworth Higginson on Buddha’ (author of Army Life in a Black Regiment, Higginson had commanded one of the Black Camisard regiments in the American Civil War), taking in the Tabernacle Ranters of Newington, with their ‘loud and long-continued’ hallelujahs, along the way. It was as if these nodes of unconvention were intimately connected by rail – the neural network by which their dissension spread – and on these public transport expeditions into urban anthropology, Davies’ own character and opinion emerged slyly, as though in an aside to a passenger.
Ordained in 1852, Davies had served the Church in Somerset and London, but had since concentrated on writing as a career, contributing to the Western Morning News and the National Press Agency, as well as producing religious novels such as Philip Paternoster: A Tractarian Love Story. His true interest lay in spiritualism, however, as his skittish Maud Blount, Medium. A Story of Modern Spiritualism indicates. The book follows the adventures of ‘a splendid specimen of a spoiled child’ who, as ‘a splendid specimen of womanhood, too’, discovers her psychic talents. ‘The very latest novelty had been Spiritualism … Young ladies called it “charmingly dreadful”. Scientific men scoffed at it, and clergymen said it was either conjuring or the devil’, although one character – the Reverend Ball – proposes ‘these modern miracles … to be evidential just as those we find in Scripture’. It was the same justification employed by Christian spiritualists, who equated the exorcism of demons with the work of the seance table.
‘Spiritualism is emphatically a question of the hour, and has been fairly described by one of its adherents to be “either a gigantic delusion or the most important subject that can possibly be broached”,’ Davies declared. And like so many, he had a personal sense of its importance. In 1865 his young son died of scarlet fever, and Davies found that spiritualism gave ‘