Читать книгу England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia - Philip Hoare, Philip Hoare - Страница 13

… Considering the poverty of Pekin, the beggary in Constantinople, the infanticide in Paris, the political corruption in New York, and the fifty thousand thieves, one hundred thousand prostitutes, and one hundred and sixty-five thousand paupers of London, is it strange that noble souls in all lands yearn for social reconstruction? … Are not present political and social systems falling to pieces? What mean their panics, strikes, internationales, trades’ unions, and co-operative fraternities? Does not Whittier, writing of recurrent cycles, say ‘The new is old, the old is new?’

‘J. M. Peebles on Robert Owen’, Human Nature, June 1874

At the end of the twentieth century, I visited a monastery on the Isle of Wight. Quarr Abbey, close to Victoria’s retreat at Osborne, was constructed in 1911 to a modern design by one of its own brothers, Dom Paul Bellot, employing Belgian bricks and three hundred builders. Reached by a tree-lined avenue and surrounded by walled orchards, it lies on the shores of an island remaindered in time; a perpetually sunlit place where at any moment I might see a 1960s car, laden with my own family, en route for our holiday in a converted railway carriage around which the bats flew at night while the incandescent, moth-wing gas mantles glowed inside.

At Quarr, the monks rise in the dark to sing their divine office, and work until it is time to eat their high-ceilinged refectory at bare wooden tables, facing across a space from which the outside world is proscribed. As they serve themselves soup and pale cider from their orchards, an ancient silence seems to reside in the building itself. Their black habits seem to be from some remote past, too, but underneath they wear trainers on their feet.

For our rational age, faith is problematic. We find fervour suspicious; but perhaps you need faith to see. From Plato’s Atlantis to Thomas More’s u-topos and Fourier’s phalanxes, Utopia was ever a human ideal: its hope is one of the appeals of religion, for that is where paradise lies. But paradises are lost, too, and by its very perfection, Utopia’s history is a virtual one, to be created out of a metaphorical wilderness. Crowded nineteenth-century England, its primal forests felled long ago, was constricted and controlled; conversely, the vast reaches of America allowed for adventure. But it too was being privatised and industrialised, and the attraction of such sects began to pall in inverse proportion to the inexorable pull of capital. The new republic’s economic expansion reined in its religious experiments by the simple expedient of the equally expanding price of land. Utopia was priced out of the market, and among those to suffer in the exchange were the Shakers, their decline an ironic result of the progress which they had embraced as inventors of the washing machine and the clothes pin. At their peak in 1840 there were six thousand Shakers in America; by the end of the century that number would be reduced to just one thousand. The United Society of Believers had been superseded by the United States of America, and as the secular replaced the sacred, a new revival was required: one which would withstand the test of an industrial age, yet which could draw on the passion of Mother Ann’s Work. And if anyone could save Shakerism from decay, it was Frederick Evans.

Born in Worcester, England, in 1810, Evans, the former Owenite, would become the intellectual face of Shakerism, drawing radical strength from the virtues of his plain-clad sisters and brothers: ‘To the mind of the simple, unsophisticated Shaker, it seems marvellously inconsistent … that more than one half the citizens should be disfranchised because they happen to be females … while still millions of other fellow-citizens are treated as property, because they chance to possess a darker-coloured skin than their cruel brethren.’ That these objections remain is a testament to the Shakers’ moral code. From their village of Mount Lebanon, Evans would correspond with Tolstoy on the subject of non-resistance, while his other protests have the ring of modernity, as the elder spoke out against animal cruelty, class education and religious persecution. He also sought to apply Shaker principles to the government itself, suggesting that leadership be confined to ‘intellectual celibates’, male or female, ‘who would be married only to the state’.

In search of new recruits, Evans planned to reimport these ideas to the mother country. England had been alerted to Shakerism by such writers and reformers as Robert Owen, Charles Lane and Harriet Martineau, but it was the new power of spiritualism that truly prepared the way for Evans’ mission. Writing to Owen in 1856, Evans reminded his mentor that ‘Spiritualism originated among the Shakers of America … In truth, all the members, in a greater or less degree, were mediums’, for whom ‘physical manifestations, visions, revelations, prophecies and gifts of various kinds … were as common as is gold in California’. Indeed, Evans had discovered his own mediumship at the height of Mother Ann’s Work, and would invite the medium William Eddy to Mount Lebanon to conduct seances using special cabinets built by the Shakers, in which Eddy was locked while thirty-one spirits manifested themselves in ‘ancient costume’. But among those ancestral voices, one would become all-important: ‘That noble, wonderful man Thomas Paine laid the foundations of the New Earth, as Ann Lee laid the foundations of the New Heavens.’

Thomas Paine, an ex-corset maker from Norfolk, had come to America in the same year as Ann Lee. As the author of Common Sense and The Rights of Man, he had inspired revolution on both sides of the Atlantic. He died in a back room in Greenwich Village, New York in 1809, and ten years later, William Cobbett, exiled from his farm in Botley near Southampton to Long Island, would bring Paine’s remains back to Britain as a symbolic act. But now Paine’s spirit was claimed for a new revolution. In 1850, three years after its infamous Rappings, Rochester’s Reverend Charles Hammond, who styled himself as a medium, claimed to have received an account of Paine’s posthumous conversion from sceptic to believer. Three years later, David Richmond, a Shaker convert, member of the Concordium, and witness to the Rappings, came home to Yorkshire, ostensibly as a missionary for the Shakers; but also as a proponent of spiritualism. He established a spiritualist sect in Keighley over which Paine’s spirit presided; the advance guard of a movement in which both Robert Owen and Fredrick Evans would claim Paine as a kind of patron saint.

Such esoteric faith was a response to uncertain times. Since 1848, European revolution and the publication of the Communist Manifesto had served to destabilise old regimes while offering hope to the oppressed. The British Empire was threatened by mutinies in India and Africa and, later, a possible French invasion, in response to which the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, ordered a series of fortresses to be built on the south coast and even on the sea bed of the Solent. Island Britain felt embattled, and new prophets rose to pronounce on this troubled age.

In 1857, John Brown, a soldier-turned-visionary preaching in Nottingham, presaged an apocalyptic conflict in which the Russians would invade Europe, leaving only Britain and America to hold out on the battlefields of Armageddon. He proposed a spiritual defence – among the locations in which his Community of the Great Organisation took root was the Isle of Wight – while he divided the map of England with compasses, each circled area to be entrusted to one of his twelve pseudo-apostles in a campaign directed by the Angel Gabriel through Brown’s crystal ball. At the same time, Owen’s own predictions were becoming increasingly bizarre: at his last Birthday Congress, held in May 1857, he foretold that by the end of the century, ‘the English and Irish channels [would] be crossed on dry land, the seas and oceans … navigated on islands instead of ships’. He had already proposed that Jesus Christ was ‘an inspired medium from his birth’, and that famous figures such as Shelley and Jefferson, whom he had known in life, came back in spirit form to guide him. Now Owen declared that spiritualism was either ‘one of the greatest deceptions ever practised on human credulity’, or ‘the most important event that [had] yet occurred in the history of the human race’.

Fourteen years later, as Evans prepared his own mission, utopia remained a topic of the day. In 1871 no fewer than three English texts proposed visions of utopia or apocalypse, from the social Darwinian science fiction of Lord Lytton’s The Coming Race, to George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, a John Brown vision of a war to end all wars; and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, a Swiftian satire on the impossibility of utopia, the ‘nowhere’ of the book’s anagrammatic title. It was as if that summer had been ordained as a new season of utopian intent. Evans’ transatlantic adventure was a mirror image of Ann Lee’s American venture a century before: he intended to exorcise the old country of its ‘spirits of devils’, and as spiritualism had been exported from America, so he was determined that Shakerism should follow in its wake. Indeed, his campaign was made possible by two highly influential spiritualists. Reverend James Martin Peebles was a professor at the Eclectic Medical College, Cincinnati; an anti-vaccinationist and honourary Shaker, were it not for Peebles, Evans ‘would have come to an unploughed field unfit to receive the seed’. His other sponsor was one of the most important British practitioners. James Burns had come south from Scotland to work as a gardener, but was inspired by American tracts to found his Progressive Library and Spiritual Institution in Holborn. A longtime vegetarian and teetotaller, he also began spiritualist Sunday schools to which believers could send their children for corrective education, and in 1865 proposed a People’s University at which would be taught ‘Cosmology, Spiritualism, Immortality etc.’ – a notion which had its echo a century later in the Anti-University of London, founded in Hoxton in 1969 with a syllabus featuring R. D. Laing on anti-psychiatry, Yoko Ono on ‘The Connexion’, and Francis Huxley on dragons.

James Burns

Burns was satirised in a contemporary novel, Maud Blount, Medium, as Mr Blathersby of the Spiritual Lyceum, ‘a kind of Universal Provider for Spiritualists from the cradle to the grave, catching them at the former extremity of life in the hope of making Infant Phenomenons of them, and retaining their hold upon them until the last, on the chance of converting them into Rapping Spirits when in articulo mortis. It was a kind of school, clubhouse, and chapel rolled into one, and all comprised in the not very spacious accommodation of a first-floor over a barber’s shop, in a back street of the W. C. district.’ Here, ‘where the spiritualistic force of the metropolis was concentrated’, Burns edited Human Nature, a veritable compendium of new beliefs, as its first edition announced on 1 April 1867:

HUMAN NATURE

A Monthly Record of Zoistic Science and Intelligence, embodying

PHYSIOLOGY, PHRENOLOGY, PSYCHOLOGY, SPIRITUALISM,

PHILOSOPHY, THE LAWS OF HEALTH, AND SOCIOLOGY

An Educational and Family Magazine

Human Nature – which took its cue from the New Age journal published by the Ham Common Concordium – was a kind of esoteric à la carte from which readers could pick and choose. The ‘Psychological Department’ had features on ‘What is Mesmerism’, while the ‘Physiology and Hygiene’ section included a pertinent essay calling for ‘REFORM IN WOMEN’S DRESS’, noting that at a recent inquest, ‘Dr Lankester remarked that there were 300 women burnt to death annually in England and Wales … this being the case, it might well be said that there was room for a reform in women’s dress, not only in the mode, but in the material’. Victorian crinolines were indeed a fatal fashion: in January 1875 there were two such immolations in Southampton alone: Elizabeth Cleall, seventy-eight, was discovered ‘with the upper portion of her body enveloped in flames … dreadfully burnt about the arms and head’, telling witnesses ‘to take the lamp out of her hand’, while Harriet Mills, a fifteen-year-old servant, was found in the wash-house, ‘exclaiming repeatedly, “Oh! Oh!”… her clothes being all in flames. She was told to lie down so that a rug could be put over her, but was too frightened to do as she was instructed …’ Other victims of this incendiary epidemic included Oscar Wilde’s half-sisters, who perished in 1871 when one’s dress caught fire and the other attempted to put out the flames.

A sense of social justice underpinned Human Nature. One article on ‘Life in the Factories’ attacked Victorian philanthropy; noting that a Bradford factory had recently given a ‘substantial knife and fork tea’ for their workers, its author complained that ‘No slave is so helpless as the factory operative. He is doomed to privations, of which the savage negro cannot complain, viz., want of fresh air and sunshine. Till the radical defects of this iniquitous system are altered, we feel that gluttonous suppers and “mutual admiration meetings” are only opiates to induce the victims to submit to further injury, and thus postpone the day of readministration and retribution.’ It was no coincidence that Bradford was a stronghold of spiritualism, or that in 1851 the philanthropic Titus Salt was moved to build his industrial utopia, Saltaire, on the outskirts of the town, where my own father was born in 1915.

In publishing such critiques, Burns allied spiritualism to a radical agenda, and addressed other means of social control. In ‘The Vaccination Humbug’, he examined the harmful effects of compulsory immunisation – medicine as violation – and quoted Richard Gibbs of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League: ‘I believe we have hundreds of cases here, from being poisoned with vaccination, I deem incurable … We strongly advise parents to go to prison, rather than submit to have their helpless offspring inoculated with scrofula, syphilis, and mania …’ Diet was another issue, and although Human Nature did not go as far as Fruitlands, it exhorted the readers to abandon ‘alcoholic liquors and hot stimulants, such as tea, coffee &c … and substitute the juicy fruits which will at once remove a heavy tax from the pocket of the individual, and promote health, happiness, and long-life’.

In this era of mass production, questions of consumption and abstinence defined the new age. Burns published a report on The Cases of the Welsh Fasting Girl & Her Father. On the Possibility of LONG CONTINUED ABSTINENCE FROM FOOD, a bizarre account of Sarah Jacobs, the daughter of a Carmarthenshire farmer, who had gone without food for two years. Burns had visited the girl at her parents’ farm, where he found her lying in a bed covered with books and pamphlets. ‘In length she measures about 4 feet 8 inches. She has not the power of moving her body [and] has fits several times a day,’ he noted. In 1869 the case was investigated by a committee which appointed four nurses from Guy’s Hospital, under whose scrutiny the girl died. ‘Her death was a triumph for science, which took no account of the influence of these four death-watchers upon a frail hysterical girl living on the very precipes of this life, whom a puff of air or of feeling threw into convulsions.’ Her parents were found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment; the judge decided that their daughter must have been fed in the previous two years, ‘and that when she was watched she of course died’. It seemed a drastic manner in which to prove the fact. Citing instances of living toads found in rocks, Burns proposed a number of reasons as to how Sarah had been able to survive, including the possibility of absorbing nutrition through the skin and from organic particles in the air.

Human Nature’s -isms would not be out of place in a modern Sunday supplement. Subscribers could turn to fiction by Eliza W. Farnham (The Ideal Attained), pick up hints on the conservation of fuel, and read essays on ‘Walt Whitman; or, the Religion of Art’ and extracts from Thomas Lake Harris’s poetry, ‘Music from the Spirit Shore’. They might wonder WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE POISONED BECAUSE WE ARE SICK, and under the heading PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA, discover titbits on ‘Mysterious Photographs on Window Panes’ in Milan, Ohio, or an account of a nine-year-old negro girl from Kentucky able to memorise entire pages from books. But Human Nature’s most important function was to assemble news of spiritualist progress in places as far apart as Liverpool, Paris and America, from where J. H. Powell reported on Vineland, a ‘modern miracle of some 10,000 human beings, who are solving the question of colonisation with spirit. Six years ago, it was a houseless tract of 50 square miles, mostly covered with timber; now, a considerable part of it is a blooming township. Here are congregated men and women of intellect’, among them Robert Dale Owen, himself a committed spiritualist. Meanwhile, the English medium J. J. Morse attended a psychic festival of 15,000 spiritualists at Lake Pleasant, complete with displays of animals, ‘alive and stuffed’, and a tent for ‘mesmeric entertainments’.

But if there was a particular ‘science’ to which Human Nature was drawn, it was spirit photography. The capture of psychic manifestations in photographic emulsion was an exciting development; and in the excitement, it seems, rational observers suspended their critical faculties. Human Nature incorporated actual examples – all the more unreal for being stuck onto stiff, pale cream pages and outlined in thin red frames like photographs in a Victorian album. Yet their glossy physical presence still speaks of implicit faith: someone fixed them there; someone believed in them.

Particularly favoured was the work of Mr Hudson, of 2 Kensington Park Road, London, the first of the English spirit photographers. One of a pair of his pictures in the September 1874 edition displayed ‘the baby sister of Dr Speer … and the shadowy form in the right front is the mother of the infant …’ The author of the accompanying article, ‘MA (Oxon)’, was William Stainton Moses, an Oxford graduate, Anglican minister and himself an accomplished medium. ‘I have written before how this child-spirit has persistently manifested at our circle almost from its formation … She passed from this sphere of life more than fifty years ago at Tours, being then only seven months old. Her joyous little message, “Je suis heureuse, très heureuse”, was the first indication we had of her presence …’ Yet to our eyes this cloth-swaddled figure is quite obviously a china doll and looks more like baby Jesus in a school Nativity than the shade of a dead infant.

Photography was still a young and plastic art, and to those untutored in its sly deceptions, the camera could not lie. Spirit photographs seemed to demonstrate the survival of the soul, and a happy survival at that. It was as if the camera were able to peer into another dimension. The immortalising power of photography had been taken one step further, and in such pictures, Human Nature revealed the extent of the desire to believe, a thirst for hard proof satisfied by cotton-wool fantasies. Encoded with an occult unconsciousness, these images prefigured the surrealist constructions of the next century, the uncanny imagined in silver nitrate. Yet their moral instability – their essential untruthfulness – turns such putative glimpses of eternity into mere psychic pornography; glossy, titillating images carefully concealed within the pages of the periodical. One print by W. H. Mumler of Boston, a jewellery engraver and pioneer of American spirit photography, shows Mrs Abraham Lincoln (whose husband was a believer, as was Wild Bill Hickok) with the assassinated president looking over her: ‘… The evidence for the genuineness of Mr Mumler’s photographs, and for the integrity of Mr Mumler himself, is as strong as can well be conceived.’ But in 1871 Mrs Lincoln was declared insane and Mr Mumler was later prosecuted for witchcraft in New York.

In its acceptance of such pictures, Human Nature was betrayed by its own innocence. Opening the pages of the journal now, I look at these images with a childish sense of revelation and disappointment: in an ironic reversal of their intended function, they resonate with charlatanism and fakery, undermining my own will to believe, as much as if I had been shown videotape of Christ’s crucifixion and seen Kensington gore rather than blood oozing from His wounds. This was faith as theatre, ‘by way of a singular intermediary … by way of Death’, a sensational sequence of manipulated images: from nineteenth-century tableaux vivants to Eadweard Muybridge’s calibrated human graphs and Julia Margaret Cameron’s angelic children, bedecked with wings and suspended in amniotic fluid, innocent emblems of infant mortality at the beginning of life. With the aid of muslin, montage and double exposure, the spirit photographers created equally convincing, equally fantastical visions of life after death. The final irony is that spiritualism invested its faith in such evidence, for the passing of time would ensure that these images undermined the movement more comprehensively than any amount of improbable table-tapping or levitating chairs.

The powerfully eclectic editorial stance of Human Nature was to provide a natural platform, and excellent publicity, for Frederick Evans, while James Burns was keen to promote Shakerism for his own ends. This earthly alliance suited their spiritual ambitions – a vivid example of the cross-pollination of utopian belief between England and America. Evans and Burns were as much prophets of their age as their more colourful antecedents – and they had the added benefit of new media. Cheap publishing, burgeoning literacy and photographic reproduction allowed spiritualism to be widely disseminated via the self-promoting identities of its practitioners, feeding on a trend which was even more evident: the American genius for self-invention, and an attendant sense of glamour. Thus the meeting of Evans – the intellectual embodiment of American Shakerism – and Burns – the motivating force of British Spiritualism – was an enormously potent encounter. Yet behind these men lay two female spirits; and just as the progenitor of their meeting was Ann Lee, so Mary Ann Girling would be its progeny.

That summer of 1871, as Mary Ann was making preparations for her mission to London, Evans and Peebles left New York on the new White Star liner, S.S. Atlantic. ‘The whole ship is under the influence of Shakerism to some extent,’ Evans told his fellow elders. Turning the voyage into an extension of his mission, he used an onboard accident – when a cannon exploded during the Independence Day celebrations and blew off a seaman’s arms – as an endorsement of Shaker pacifism, and persuaded the captain to have the fireworks thrown overboard: ‘Thus we preached non-resistance and non-powder-explosions, at the same time, on the 4th of July.’ A week later, Evans arrived in London and set up his office at the Progressive Library and Spiritual Institution at 15 Southampton Row. In the ‘dark little shop’, Evans was ‘crowded with letters, papers, books, visitors, inquiries, and deputations of various kinds’, while Burns took the opportunity to make a phrenological examination of his guest, as ‘we have seen only one Shaker’. It was as if the sect were an exotic tribe from some remote corner of the Empire: Burns advertised copies of Evans’ photograph and ‘stereoscopic views of groups of Shakers and their houses and gardens, all of which afford valuable data to the student of human nature’.

Elder Frederick Evans

Evans’ arrival also stirred up considerable interest among men such as the Honourable Auberon Herbert, Liberal Member of Parliament for Nottingham, with whom Evans and Peebles breakfasted at 11 o’clock (an hour which shocked Evans, who broke his fast around dawn). Their interview was ‘most interesting and profitable’, wrote Peebles. ‘Elder Frederick expounded to him the principles of Shakerism. He was deeply interested – pricked in the heart; and, upon some points at least, convicted.’ That afternoon, Herbert took both men into the House of Commons, where Evans ‘preached the Gospel of Progress and Reform’. ‘Many in this English speaking nation are almost ready for the harvest,’ declared Peebles. ‘They feel that something must be done … many are inquiring the way to Zion, and asking, What shall I do to be saved … England is ripening up rapidly for the forming of Shaker Societies.’ And Evans was determined to reap the benefit. Invited by Herbert to ‘splendid rooms’ to address a ‘fashionable gathering’ (‘some of the women not dressed as they ought to be, for modest women’), he was subjected to cross examination by lawyers, doctors and secretaries for nearly three hours.

But this mission was not to be limited to the professional classes. Evans’ lectures at Cleveland Hall proved so popular that they soon required a larger venue, as The Times announced on 3 August:

An Opportunity

Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon, State of New York, USA, will discourse on the principles of his order next Sunday, at the St George’s Hall, Langham Place, Regent St. Mr Hepworth Dixon, author of New America, will take the chair, supported by Mr Auberon Herbert, MP, and other Members of Parliament.

William Hepworth Dixon had recently published his first-hand account of American sects; as a guest of Evans and Eldress Antoinette Dolittle at Mount Lebanon, he had been struck by the ‘singular beauty and perfect success’ of the Shaker way of life, and his book was evidently The Times’ source of information. ‘The order of Shakers has been in existence for nearly 100 years … They are celibates, hold property in common like Primitive Christians, are free-thinking Spiritualists, and firm believers in present Divine inspiration. They neither manufacture nor use intoxicating drink, and they entertain peace principles. They have solved those vexed problems, war, intemperance, poverty, the social evil [prostitution], and crime, with all its concommittants of police-courts, gaols, and such like.’

The paper also reported positively on Evans’ lecture itself:

SHANKAR LADY.

The proceedings were commenced with a hymn, ‘The Day is Breaking’, and a short prayer, after which Mr Hepworth Dixon introduced ‘Elder Frederick’ to the meeting with a few words expressive of the pleasure which he had felt some years ago in visiting Mount Ephraim [sic], and seeing with his own eyes the well-ordered community of the Shakers, and the peace, contentment, plenty, and morality which reigned among them, where they had ‘made the desert smile’.

Such a life must have seemed attractive to many readers caught up in their quotidian duties. Cheered regularly throughout his speech, Evans warned ‘that both England as a country and London as a great city had need to reform their social code and habits of life’, and ‘that other empires and cities as large and as powerful … had perished by the sword …’ Privately, he discerned a ‘desperate, drugged determination … to do or die’ in that ‘great Babel of a city of 3½ millions of human bodies, supposed to have souls in them’, and where he felt like a ‘pilgrim and a stranger’. ‘The poor breed like rabbits; and, when the boys are old enough, the Government takes them as soldiers. But labor is so cheap, they are willing to be shot at, if they can get food to eat … This city, and all great cities, rest upon volcanoes liable to eruption at [a] time when least to be looked for or expected.’ Such observations were redolent of the Communist Manifesto. ‘This Government is wise, with all its wickedness. It watches sharply the signs of popular uprising, and yields to the demands of the great middle class, so as to propitiate them …’ While he noted that five thousand a day were dying in the siege of Paris, Evans claimed that ‘Communism is the greatest good that thousands can see in the future; and the fact that the Shakers make it a practical thing, a success, is a constant source of congratulation, and of hope … I am quite sure that our Gospel will be preached and received in England before long.’ He even envisioned his own North Family at Mount Lebanon coming to London to save its citizens, ‘I am quite sure souls would gather to them as fast as they could be taken care of.’

Shakerism had caught a public imagination already alert to utopian notions. Human Nature reported that ‘from one end of the country to the other the principles of Shakerism were being eagerly discussed’. Evans addressed four thousand at two open-air meetings in Bradford, ‘convened by the Spiritualists and largely attended by them’; other meetings followed in Bishop Auckland, Birmingham, and Manchester, the birthplace of Ann Lee, erstwhile home to Friedrich Engels, and host to such events as a ‘Spiritualists’ Vegetarian Banquet’. Yet Evans was warned by a friend that ‘I should do better not to be identified with Spiritualists too much … the Shakers are in good order and famous with the public; while the Spiritualists are in unease [sic] condition than ever before’. ‘They are holding dark circles,’ Evans noted. ‘Peebles was at a house this afternoon and the spirits threw things about, and did damage – He took no part. We ignore them.’ Evans worried that spiritualists such as Emma Hardinge – one of the most famous American mediums working in England, herself sponsored by Burns, and who had sent Evans tickets for her appearance at the Albert Hall – were doing ‘harm rather than good’. And yet the link was undeniable. ‘What have Spiritualists to do with Shakerism?’ Burns asked the readers of Human Nature, and answered his own question, declaring that the Shakers were ‘an illustration of the ultimate influence of Spiritualism in its highest form upon the mind of man …’

The Shaker and Shakeress – edited by Evans – also acknowledged these claims. With reports on ‘women’s rights (including the right to live a virgin life)’; sleeping on the right side (so that the stomach was in the correct position for digestion); and a debate on the notion, ‘Will Shakerism depopulate the world?’ the periodical bore comparison with Human Nature. It also featured miscellanea from other newspapers, such as one article on Mother Shipton, who ‘would have taken high rank as a medium in our day’ and whose last couplet was especially ominous: ‘The world to an end shall come/In eighteen hundred and eighty-one’. But The Shaker too was concerned with spiritualism as an instrument of its aim ‘to inaugurate Shaker Communism on British soil …’ Recruiting advertisements appeared in Shaker tracts published by Burns: ‘Single persons, who are free, may come at their own option, bearing in mind the important fact that SHAKERISM is “RELIGIOUS COMMUNISM”.’ Yet for all Evans’ sterling efforts and Burns’ positive public relations, few answered the call. When he sailed home from Liverpool on 24 August, the elder took with him just four recruits – and of that ‘party of proselytes’, two would return to England to join the Girlingites. It was ironic that, while the Shakers had tried to stir up their land of origin through the ministry of an intellectual, adoptive American, it was an uneducated English woman who would capitalise on the new public awareness of Shakerism. For Evans, the summer of 1871 had proved an anti-climax; for Mary Ann, it marked the beginning of her most successful phase.

From the start, the rather disparate party which accompanied Evans home across the Atlantic were not entirely convinced of what they were doing. James Haase was a twenty-six-year-old businessman whose wife Martha had died earlier that year at the age of thirty-one – perhaps a factor in his willingness to leave England. In his diary, Evans noted Haase’s address – 12 Cross Street, Islington – and that he was ‘a young man who is the first that I have opened the testimony unto … James has just lost his wife’. It is possible that the grieving Haase was a visitor to Burns’ shop and a subscriber to spiritualism; certainly the bachelor Evans found him an attractive young man: ‘it is as easy to talk with him, as to breathe the air; I have hope that he will “be obedient to the Heavenly Mission”.’ Evans told Eldress Antoinette that ‘if things suit him’ at Mount Lebanon, Haase would return to England to settle up his business: ‘His report … will be looked for with an amount of interest you can hardly realise.’

Evans had hoped for good, solid, practical recruits, with their own financial backing. ‘There is a family by the name of Stephens who are going to send a boy, sixteen, and a girl, 11. They are real business people, and engaged in co-operation. That is all I know of, except a young man about 17, who wants to come, but has not the means.’ Robert Stephens, father of eleven-year-old Annie Stephens and her sixteen-year-old stepbrother Edwin Clarke, was a socialist weaver from Manchester who had run a co-operative store in London ‘for political reasons’; while their parents sorted out the sale of their business, it was agreed that Annie and Edwin would go on ahead. Reverend Alsop and his two daughters, ten and fourteen, said they would come too, and Evans also worked on a Mr Atkins, ‘a great scientific man’; although a ‘bore’, Evans thought he might ‘get something useful out of him’. Another application – ‘if I wd pay their passage’ – came from a family in Edinburgh. But in the event, the party was complemented by its oldest, wealthiest and most eccentric member. Fifty-three-year-old Julia Wood, born at Codsall, Staffordshire, was the third of eight children whose father had made his money from distilleries – a somewhat uneasy source which, given the temperance of the new age, may have made for family disagreements. As a young girl, Julia had exhibited a fervent spirituality, to the extent that her own family had had her confined to the Staffordshire Asylum on grounds of religious mania. Like Haase, she lived in Islington – in one of the grander Georgian terraces of Duncan Street – but was a less certain recruit: next to her address, Evans noted merely ‘thinks of going’.

Thus this ill-matched group of would-be Shakers arrived at Mount Lebanon, where they were greeted warmly as the vanguard of a new contingent: there was even a hymn written for them, ‘A Welcome For the Company from England’. One hundred and fifty miles up the Hudson River from New York and just across the state border from Massachusetts, Mount Lebanon’s setting seemed paradisiacal. ‘Hills, mountains, and valleys, trees, gardens, farmhouses and farms spread around and above you in ever-varying beauty,’ wrote Henry Vincent, another Englishman who accepted an invitation from Evans, and who declared, ‘The dream of Utopia is here realized … they work hard; they enjoy the fruits of their industry; they live simply and frugally. For ten years they have ceased to eat swine, or drink alcoholic drinks … Within the past forty years, the Owenite experiments in England and America have failed; but Shakerism is a living and triumphant fact.’

Such transcendentalism eluded David Brown, another young man drawn to America by Evans’ mission. A northerner of communist inclinations, Brown had heard the elder lecture at the Temperance Hall in Manchester. He listened patiently, but thought Evans took liberties with the facts: ‘He stated that while every other community in America had been a failure, the Shakers alone had been a success. But this was a wrong statement. There are the German Rappites in Pennsylvania who have acquired immense wealth. There are also the Free Lovers at Oneida Creek, and others who have been very prosperous, and are established on a better basis in many respects than the Shakers. If Elder F. W. Evans had stated that there had been a falling off among the Shakers, and that he had come over to England to replenish their number, he would have come nearer the truth, but he knew better than that.’

At Mount Lebanon, Brown found his hopes fractured by reality, just as later visitors to communist states would be disabused of their utopian expectations. Brown thought the sect overdisciplined and its religious 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.