England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

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

ENGLAND’S LOST EDEN

PHILIP HOARE

DEDICATION

CONTENTS

MAP

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

Green and Pleasant Land

ONE

A Voice in the Wilderness

TWO

Turning the World Upside-Down

THREE

Human Nature

PART TWO

O Clouds Unfold!

FOUR

The Walworth Jumpers

FIVE

The New Forest Shakers

SIX

The Dark and Trying Hour

PART THREE

Arrows of Desire

SEVEN

The Sphere of Love

EIGHT

The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

NINE

The Names of Butterflies

PART FOUR

The Countenance Divine

TEN

This Muddy Eden

ELEVEN

Mr Peterson’s Tower

TWELVE

The Close of the Dispensation

PART FIVE

A New Jerusalem

THIRTEEN

In Borderland

FOURTEEN

Resurgam

EPILOGUE

SOURCE AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

PART I

Chapter Two Turning the World Upside-Down

Chapter Three Human Nature

PART II O Clouds Unfold!

Chapter Four The Walworth Jumpers

Chapter Five The New Forest Shakers

Chapter Six The Dark and Trying Hour

PART III Arrows of Desire

Chapter Eight The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

PART IV The Countenance Divine

PART V A New Jerusalem

Epilogue

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PRAISE

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

Title Page

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There were other reasons to fear Girlingism: it created tensions not just between families, but between communities. In an era of insecurity and high unemployment – exemplified by the agricultural strikes which hit East Suffolk in the early 1870s as the newly formed Agricultural Labourers’ Union clashed with the Farmers’ Association – men lost their jobs because of Mary Ann. In the market and barrack town of Woodbridge, her teachings began to concern clergy and upset landowners, anxious at her effect on their flocks and labour force: ‘Many of the males were discharged from their situations, and others suffered loss in a variety of ways’. To some it seemed they had lost their senses to religious mania, and were suitable subjects for the local lunatic asylum at Melton – an establishment of more than four hundred disturbed souls, their occupations, listed next to their initials in the 1871 census, representative of Mary Ann’s constituency: farm labourers and their wives; factory girls and seamen’s wives; soldiers and needlewomen; chimney sweeps and policemen’s wives; brush makers and lime burners; or simply, in the case of ‘V. F.’, a ‘loose character’.

They were the psychiatric casualties of an industrial era, the kind of minds susceptible to a woman who might have found herself similarly incarcerated. Or perhaps Mary Ann evoked an older belief, when people had laid votive offerings in the lakes and rivers, reaching down to that elemental world beneath their feet. Whatever the source of her power, it seemed there was a primal force gathering around this prophetess, one which would invoke spirits and provoke opposition. One man bet his friends that he would shoot Mary Ann on a certain night – although in the event the would-be assassin himself converted and became a Girlingite, a miracle taken by her followers as proof that their leader was protected by God. That which did not kill her made Mary Ann stronger, and in this sensational narrative – something between penny dreadful and missionary tract – she had become a symbolic, almost revolutionary figure.

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