England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare
by the tarantula’ (it was no coincidence that the poisonous spider also lent its name to a leaping mania and a feverish Italian dance). All the while another young man with slicked-back hair and a sickly smile dabbed at their faces with a handkerchief, helping an ‘unhealthy-looking girl’ out of her jacket when she grew too hot.
C.E.P. was particularly disgusted by ‘a pale child of stunted growth’ and the way she threw her head back over her shoulder ‘and cast her eyes upwards, until almost nothing but the whites were visible … one almost felt tempted to jump up and rescue the silly fools …’ But the dance went on. One girl began to stagger with her eyes closed and ‘a wild unmeaning smile on her features’, her cheeks ‘streaked with white and red patches’; another respectably-dressed man in his fifties danced on one leg. The two young women had grabbed hold of the recumbent youth’s head and were pulling his face towards them, kissing him violently as he submitted in a placid, cow-like manner’. The Brueghel-like scene was completed by a dark, swarthy man who performed like a dancing bear, his appearance ‘as if … mesmerized’ and his face ‘more like that of a corpse’.
Evidently Mary Ann felt some explanation was necessary for this bizarre circus. She told the audience that the spirit of the Lord had a quickening effect. ‘Ah’, she said, ‘if you could get people to do this, you might shut up all your dancing places.’ Then she declared that ‘Parents have a difficulty to get their children to places of worship; we have nothing of that kind; so far from it, we can’t keep our children away. They like dancing, and cry to come.’ To others, however, the presence of children in these rites – like that of adolescent mediums – was worrying, and would lead to questions about the Girlingites’ treatment of their youngest and most vulnerable members.
One ‘matron of some 35 years’ attested that ‘having once died the relation of a husband and wife ceases: A wife is ever after a housekeeper – nothing more’; while the preacher that night – probably Harry Osborne – declared, ‘My sisters, if your desire be to your husbands, I pray you let it be so no more; for every child born is the offspring of lust!’ The sect had inverted the relationship between adult and child; by surrendering to Mary Ann’s control, they gave up responsibility for their own lives and became Children of God, leaving their offspring to be moulded in the Girlingite faith. Later, it seems, they would adopt orphans, as well as caring for children whose parents had joined but then left the sect; these young members would ensure a new generation for the celibate Family. Their role in such wild scenes was discomforting – especially when they made the front page of the Illustrated Police News (a consequence of the fact that the local police station stood directly behind Sutherland Street). The front page of the issue for January 1872 was a Grand Guignol display of a man eaten by rats, a lion tamer killed by his charges, and a violent poaching ‘affray’. Set below these exhibits in a graphic predella, as though caught in a photographer’s stark magnesium flash, were thrilling glimpses of the arch, with the figure of Mary Ann presiding over two dancers almost levitating in their ecstasy.
Such voyeuristic images made the Jumpers’ chapel look more like Bedlam; and although the sect may have regarded their place of worship as an asylum in the other sense of the word, their disruptive presence was not beyond the law – whether used for or against them. In a rerun of their Suffolk trials, the Girlingites now appeared in London’s courts, and at Lambeth on 8 February 1872, an Edward Ball was charged with ‘indecent behaviour in a certain chapel of the religious denomination called Bible Christians’.
The magistrate, Mr Chance, heard how the ‘excitement and turmoil’ at the arch necessitated a constant police presence from the nearby station to maintain order. The sect had decided to prosecute Ball, having been ‘so much annoyed by parties interfering with them for some time’. Samuel Burrows maintained theirs were ‘manifestations’, not dances, and an integral part of their worship. Then Harry Osborne testified that he travelled with ‘the female speaker’. This did not sound entirely respectable.
Mr Chance: What do you mean by travelling with her?
Witness: We go about reading the word of God.
Mr Chance: Do you live with her?
Witness: I live in the same house.
Now came Mary Ann’s court debut. ‘… Gurling [sic]… said her husband allowed her to travel about, which she had done for six years. She now travelled with the witness Osborn [sic] and a young girl from the country, who were helpers in the work.’
Edward Ball was allowed to cross-examine his accuser:
Defendant: Are you not called the ‘Shakers’?
Witness (sternly): Some may call us so.
Asked to explain their manifestations, Mary Ann said, ‘When they take place I have no power. It is when they feel the word of God, and when it falls on them they remain in an unconscious state for a time, followed by a quickening effect which turns to a dance.’ Fired by the laughter which greeted this statement, she confronted the mockers with their own mortality: ‘All who dance have passed from death to life, and if you read the Bible you will understand it to be so.’ This was met with a sharp intake of breath.
‘Well, I am at present in the depths of darkness concerning it,’ said Mr Chance. ‘When are the dancers supposed to die?’
‘They do not dance for dancing sake,’ said Mary Ann, ‘but it is the spirit of God moved them. I can tell when they pass from death to life by the symptoms. There is always some indication, such as their not being able to move. I have known some upwards of seven hours passing from the old state of Adam to the new.’
Inspector Fife of P Division told the magistrate that he had seen a crowd of some five hundred trying to gain entry to the arch. Despite the ‘sad delusion’ of its inhabitants, it was registered as a place of worship and had the right to be protected as such, Mr Chance conceded; but he also advised ‘sensible people’ to keep away from the place. As they left the court late that night, the Girlingites ‘were scrutinized in a most unenviable manner’.
With Mary Ann’s court appearance came the first reports of her millenarian message to the metropolis, ‘to the effect that the end of all things was at hand and that she was to gather together the “hundred and forty and four thousand” who are to meet the Lord at His second coming …’ It was a reiteration of Southcott’s call to the ‘sealed’ of the Apocalypse. Meanwhile the South London Press reported on another local inhabitant with an interest in eschatology: ‘Why Mr Ruskin leaves Denmark Hill: Frankenstein flying from monsters of his own creation is the character Mr John Ruskin declares he now personates.’ Twenty years previously the author of The Stones of Venice had helped revive gothic architecture; now he protested, ‘I have had indirect influence on nearly every cheap villa-builder between here and Bromley, and there is scarcely a public-house near the Crystal Palace but sells its gin-and-bitters under pseudo-Venetian capitals …’ As an habitué of Spurgeon’s Tabernacle and the Camden Chapel on Walworth Road, Ruskin must have known of the Girlingites; although with their enemies outnumbering friends in the area, they too were on the move. The residents of Sutherland Square complained that the streets were ‘infested, from 6 o’clock until after 9, by a swarm of overgrown boys … hooting and shouting every time a member of the sect passed in or out’, and by April Mary Ann had switched her operation to Salisbury Row, Lock’s Fields, near the Old Kent Road, where she took a room in a private house. Her landlord soon regretted the lease. On Tuesday nights, when the sect assembled, the house was besieged by ‘a crowd of women fearful lest their husbands should be converted and become “dead” to them in the flesh’. These wives ‘smashed every pane of glass in the windows,