England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
boy. Davies would spend fifteen years seeking ‘to prove unbroken continuity between the life in this world and the life beyond’, a quest in which he was guided by influential spiritualists.
Despite this hidden agenda, the clergyman’s commentary was often acidulous. He found the Irvingites of Bloomsbury singular for their spirit voices and three-hour rituals, for which they adopted every colour of robe – ‘black tippets … puce tippets … short surplices … coloured stoles’, while in the Swedenborgians of King’s Cross he detected other traces of spiritualism. The eighteenth-century Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had experienced ‘a sort of middle state between sleeping and waking’; a kind of permanent Near Death Experience, not the stuff of dreams, but of a spiritual ‘future life’. He believed that man and angel were consubstantial, and ‘decoded’ Scripture in his book, The Apocalypse Explained. An influence on writers and artists from Blake to Browning and Emerson, his presence still lingers in the Swedenborg Society, its panelled rooms presided over by his marble bust – just a street away from the site of Burns’ institution, where Davies was drawn in search of yet stranger beliefs.
Having discovered the availability of ‘shilling seances’ at Burns’ premises, Davies decided to attend this psychic pot-luck, where the visitor could not summon spirits at will, but had to take them as they came. As a ‘slim, artistic-looking’ young man in his early twenties played the piano, the gas was turned down and the seance began.
‘Had I been altogether unused to the manners and customs of trance mediums, I should have thought that the poor young man was taken suddenly ill, for he turned up his eyes and wriggled about in his chair … in the most alarming manner.’ One ‘simpering voice’ belonged to ‘Maria Crook, late of the Crown and Can, Clerkenwell, and now of Highgate Cemetery’; another to a navvy who had worked on the south London drains; and when a third declared, ‘I never break my word, sir; Thomas Paine never did whilst on earth’, Davies deduced ‘that we had been listening to the voice of the author of the “Age of Reason,” redivivus’. ‘It does certainly seem remarkable that such things should be going on amid the very roar of Holborn in this nineteenth century,’ Davies concluded; and in that pioneering vein, he set off on another foray, this time to Hackney to visit a medium who claimed to be able to produce ‘spirit-faces’: ‘a pretty, Jewish-like little girl’ of sixteen ‘managed’ by her father at their home in the eastern suburb.
It was an authentically bizarre scene. ‘Little Miss Blank’ sat inside a ‘sort of corner cupboard … like a pot of jam or a pound of candles’ with a rope on her lap, while the rest of the party sat round, ‘grown-up children waiting for the magic lantern’. As the gathering – which included the editor of a spiritualist journal, a country doctor and an elderly gentleman from Manchester – sang spiritualist hymns, the cupboard doors opened to reveal ‘pretty Miss Blank tied round the neck, arms, and legs to the chair, in a very uncomfortable and apparently secure manner’. The knots were sealed and the cupboard shut again, leaving an opening at the top, like that in a seaside Punch and Judy show.
After some delay a face rose gently to the aperture rather far back, but presently came well to the front. It was slightly pale, and the head was swathed in white drapery. The eyes were fixed, and altogether it looked ghostly. It remained for some time, disappeared and re-appeared; and the lamp was turned full upon it, but the eyes never lost their fixed stare, and showed no symptom of winking. After several minutes it went altogether.
The cupboard was then opened and its inmate revealed still tightly bound, the seals unbroken. The exhausted girl was taken into the garden for a walk to revive her, and repeated the process three times that evening, summoning a ‘Parsee doctor’ with a turban and a ‘decidedly Eastern expression of countenance and dark complexion’, and another face, ‘still surmounted by white drapery, but a black band was over the forehead, like a nun’s hood. The teeth were projecting, and the expression of the face sad. They fancied it was a spirit that was pained at not being recognized.’ The spirit guide, Katie, invited Davies to touch her face and hand after asking him, ‘Do you squeeze?’ Assuring her he ‘did not do anything so improper’, Davies was permitted his ‘manipulations’.
The image of this bound and closeted girl recalls Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Despair’, for which she shut her adoptive daughter Cyllene in a cupboard in order to reproduce an authentic expression of terror when she was let out. There was something unsettling about this passive girl and her audience of men: a scene of contained violence and sexuality, pitched somewhere between circus sideshow and a vision of the unknown. Davies, ‘sufficiently struck’ to attend another seance at that address, wondered whether he had really been ‘in direct contact with supernatural beings or simply taken in by one of the most satisfactory “physical mediums” it was ever my good fortune to meet’.
His suspicions were well founded. The young girl was Florence Cook, whose spirit guide, Katie King, was said to be the daughter of the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan. Nine years later, in the rooms of the British National Association of Spiritualists, Sir George Sitwell, father of the famous literary trio, would squeeze Katie’s hand, and in the process prove that the ‘vivacious and apparently youthful ghost’ was ‘a common cheat’. Even then, many refused to believe that Katie was composed of anything other than ectoplasm.
Yet astounding as Florence Cook’s manifestations were, Davies’ annals of the Victorian uncanny were about to produce even more extraordinary scenes as he went south of the river and into another enclosed space. This time it was to the very belly of the city’s industrial catacombs, where the fraudulent met the faithful and where those who could not afford even ‘shilling seances’ might pursue the quest for life after death; a place where believers might yet be reborn, never to die again.
‘Sect-hunting, like misery, makes a man acquainted with strange companions, and familiarises him with strange experiences,’ wrote Davies, ‘but of all the religious phenomena with which I had yet been brought into contact, the latest and certainly the very strangest, have been those connected with the “Jumpers” at Walworth – the Bible Christians, or Children of God …’ Having been tipped off about these odd goings-on, Davies proceeded ‘to a certain railway arch in Sutherland Street, Walworth Road, beneath which … I had been given to understand that the Bible Christians gathered thrice a week to listen to the preaching of an inspired woman from Suffolk’.
Walworth Road was then, as it is now, a bustling thoroughfare leading south from the Elephant and Castle and running parallel with the railway from Blackfriars. Leading off the broad strand of shops, businesses and trams were narrow residential streets clustered with terraces of newly-built villas. Those on Sutherland Street were tall, not without some pretensions, and led to the enclave of Sutherland Square, with its ornate railings and miniature oval park. Most residents would have worshipped at St Peter’s, whose domed tower, designed by Sir John Soane, cast its graceful shadow over the area; an orthodox venue compared to the sensational Spurgeon Tabernacle up the road.
This was the inner city parish Mary Ann chose to colonise. Davies was told that the Girlingites had been in existence for seven years, and now numbered more than two hundred. Their place of worship was leased from the London Chatham & Dover Railway by Samuel Burrows, a Girlingite and kinsman of William Bridges. Burrows, who lived in Walworth, may have been responsible for inviting Mary Ann to London: he and unnamed ‘others’ had registered the arch for ‘Divine service’.
It