Читать книгу England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia - Philip Hoare, Philip Hoare - Страница 16

Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Matthew 4:11

The train from Ipswich, a steam-spewing monster, slouched into the maw of Liverpool Street where the brick arches of the terminus, newly-built over the site of the original Bethlehem Hospital, seemed to suck the visitor into the nerve-jangling immensity of the city, exciting the spirit as much as the third-class carriages had shaken the flesh. Detraining into the hot, fetid hubbub of the subterranean concourse, Mary Ann dusted down the smuts from her gown and prepared to resume her mission, not in the heart of some dark continent, but in the backstreets of London, where factory chimneys rivalled church spires for the skyline above and the fate of the souls in the lowly terraces below.

The world had changed dramatically since the decade of Mary Ann’s birth, not least in the way one could move around it. It was one of the ironies of the modern world that many of those responsible for building the new railways were themselves Quakers; forbidden from swearing oaths which would admit them to professional positions, they excelled at other trades. It was a Quaker, George Bradshaw, who published his Railway Time Table in 1839, not for profit, but to assist his fellow man. The expanding network had standardised time itself, unifying the country and metering modern history, yet Bradshaw’s publication still bore Quaker designations – ‘First Month’ instead of January, and so on – while one visitor to the Friends’ meeting house at King’s Cross found their tracts shelved on the walls like ‘the time tables … in the stations of the Metropolitan Railway’. So too would Mary Ann’s mission be conducted by railway – under the tracks themselves.

The myth of Mary Ann’s arrival in London, like the other stories that surround her, remains almost wilfully obscure. The Bible Christians said to have invited her were originally Primitive Methodists from East Cornwall, and therefore rural imports like the Girlingites. They too had female ministers, such as Mary Toms, a faith-healer who left Tintagel for the Isle of Wight in the 1820s and was seen ‘standing on a borrowed chair one Sunday morning at East Cowes, lashed by the wind and rain’. She also claimed to have been followed down a dark lane by a ‘dimly visible creature … thought by some to have been a heavenly visitant sent to protect her, but by herself to have been a diabolical creature sent to scare her’. But ‘Bible Christian’ was a term applied to a number of sects (not least the Girlingites themselves), and on closer inspection it seems more likely that Mary Ann’s invitation came from the Peculiar People, a sect founded by a fellow Suffolk preacher and erstwhile Wesleyan, William Bridges.

Born in Woodbridge in 1802, Bridges had left Suffolk soon after his marriage in 1824, but his family still lived there and had probably come into contact with Girlingism, which seemed to share common ground with the Peculiar People. The ‘Plumstead Peculiars’, as they were later known, took their name from God’s commandment to Moses to lead His ‘peculiar people’. They believed in faith-healing, the anointing of oil and the power of prayer, and they opposed vaccination; in 1872 George Harry of Plumstead would be sent to Newgate Prison ‘for refusing to provide medical assistance or remedies of any kind’ for his daughter Cecilia who was dying of smallpox, while his wife was summonsed by a coroner’s court for the manslaughter of their second child who had also died. In the 1830s, Bridges had set up a chapel in Gravel Lane, Kennington, but one of his followers, a cobbler named John Sirgood, extended the Peculiar Gospel to rural Sussex, assembling a congregation of two hundred in the village of Loxwood – only to attract the same antipathy which the Girlingites had suffered in Suffolk. Sirgood complained that 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 ‘hope at a time when we are mostly hopeless’. His wife developed a facility for automatic writing, receiving messages from the guardian spirit who now cared for their little 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 may have been down a back street, but the arch was easy to find. By 6.30 pm a mob had already gathered round the roughtarred hoarding at the entrance, where a lone doorman was admitting the crowd one by one. ‘Young Walworth in the shape of ragged shock-headed boys and draggle-tailed girls, was rigidly excluded’; the local dandy-ruffians known as the New Cut swells got in only by ‘considerable manoeuvring and no little physical persuasion’. Negotiating planks laid over mud, Davies entered the arch, which smelt of the stables next door and was boarded up with an assortment of window-sashes partly smashed by ‘the missiles of the Walworth Gentiles’. A few forms and planks faced a green baize table on which stood two cups and a collecting box; a sole gas pipe ran the length of the arch, ‘whence descended two burners that shed a dim if not exactly a religious light …’ It was a weird sight, this gloomy cavern, lit with flickering flames. A century later such arches would house car workshops or illicit nightclubs; now, this subterranean temple – a negative void in the no-man’s-land formed by the railway’s onward march – was charged with expectation. Part sacred space, part profane sanctuary beyond the jurisdiction of the common law, its barrel-vaults and restive audience echoed those of the music halls whose limelight illuminated other feats of Victorian entertainment.

By now the arch was filled with ‘fustian-clad men, women in about the proportion of two to one man, and babies in more than adequate force’. The swells – who declined to remove their hats – sat at the back, talking loudly. The crowd craned their heads, waiting for the show to begin. There was a ripple of excitement as the ‘Jumpers’ made their entrance, greeting each other with the kiss of charity – ‘no half-and-half stage salute, but a good whacking kiss’ – to the amusement of the swells, who ‘proceeded at once to imitate the sound, and to remark audibly, “Ain’t it nice?”’. Then, as seven o’clock struck, Mary Ann entered, her appearance all the more remarkable within this wayside grotto.

Taking the stage with the drama of an actress, she presented a potent combination for an age which demanded entertainment with its religion; the bizarre venue and its rag-tag congregation invested her with a sense of revelation. Here was a woman who claimed divine inspiration, an extraordinary assertion to make – yet more so in a railway arch in south London in 1871 – but Mary Ann drew on all the visionaries in whose footsteps she walked, a demotic parade of mystics and charlatans, believers and deceivers. She was a messiah for an industrial age, borne here to redeem the wicked city – even as the London to Dover train rattled overhead.

She was not, however, quite what Reverend Davies had expected. The figure he saw resembled less a seeress than one of those suburban mediums in whose vaguely disreputable company he had dallied. Dressed in a red merino gown and a ‘somewhat jaunty black bonnet’, to Davies she appeared to be a ‘tall, thin, Suffolk peasant woman, of middle age, with high cheek-bones and piercing eyes’ (elsewhere ascribed with a ‘peculiar bright gleam’ and an ‘almost unnatural lustre’ when excited). Davies’ pathological description seemed to have some pre-knowledge of Mary Ann’s past, as though her mission were written on her face. ‘She had a large prominent mouth with projecting teeth, and the muscles around the jaw bore that peculiar appearance often observed in habitual speakers, being strongly developed, and giving a sort of animal appearance to the lower portion of the face’ (others saw her thin lips as ‘betokening an energetic and excitable temperament’).

Flanked by the loyal Eliza Folkard, ‘a young, good-looking girl of twenty’, and Harry Osborne, ‘an inane-visaged man in a broadcloth coat and corduroys’, Mary Ann asked – in a ‘somewhat affected tone’ – that anyone who could not stay until nine o’clock should leave at once, as the door would be closed and no exit allowed until then. This confinement was necessary ‘on account of the outsiders, whose noisy clamours for admittance combine with the frequent passage of trains to mar the tranquillity of the evening’. It was religious worship determined by railway timetable and human interruption, although in her airs and graces, Mary Ann was quite equal to the heckles of the New Cut swells: ‘I had heard … of the superior wisdom of the Londoners, but if this be London wisdom commend me to my Suffolk ignorance.’ As another observer noted drily, it was a voice ‘that could have been well heard in a place much larger than a railway arch’.

Apologising for the ‘ill-convenience’ of the venue, Mary Ann called for a prayer from Eliza, ‘who lifted one hand and prayed with a fervour and a certain rough but gentle eloquence for ten minutes’; Davies was reminded of Dinah Morris, the Wesleyan preacher in George Eliot’s Adam Bede. He was less impressed by Osborne’s oration. Mary Ann herself ‘prayed volubly, and used her long arms freely in gesticulation’, which to Davies resembled mesmeric passes, ‘but in this I was probably mistaken’.

The reverend summed up the sect’s tenets for the benefit of his Telegraph readers. ‘Now it must be premised that the distinguishing doctrine of these Children of God is the assurance that they will never die,’ he noted. ‘Belief not only does away with previous sin, but exempts them from bodily death. The Lord is to come speedily and gather them to Himself, without the previous process of dissolution. From the date of their conversion, in fact, they are immortal. They die at conversion, and die no more.’ Where the Quakers ‘were often believed to have claimed to raise from the dead when they only meant that they had effected a conversion’, and where Swedenborg experienced a ‘future life’ between life and death, Mary Ann said that her followers had never ‘given the undertaker a job yet, and didn’t mean to’.

‘Why did Lazarus come back?’ she asked her congregation.

‘Because he had got a return ticket,’ someone shouted.

Riding the laughter and the noise of the trains, Mary Ann answered, ‘No; he never was dead. He had died before …’

As she spoke, Davies noticed ‘more than one lady subside into an apparently comatose condition’ with ‘a peculiar twitching of the limbs, and an expression of face like that which I have observed on the features of the mesmerised … what mesmerisers call “the superior condition”’. The women woke up at the end of the sermon ‘as though nothing had happened’. It was time for a performance, and the Jumpers duly obliged.

Two young girls got up and began to dance, ‘much in the same way as they might do if a grinding-organ had struck up an appropriate air’. These infant phenomena were then joined by a young man aged about eighteen: it seemed to Davies that their strangely vacant expressions were ‘suggestive of animal magnetism’, and he could only conclude there was more than mere abandon in their antics. It was as though they drew on some primal energy within the modern city, whose darker alleys could still encompass such mysteries as Spring-heeled Jack, a caped ghoul breathing fire in its own devilish leaping; or later, Jack the Ripper, an apocalyptic, sacrificial reaper stalking the harlot-strewn streets. In such places residual belief sought shamans to counter evil times, and Mary Ann offered an alternative to the shackles of working-class life.

On engaging a ‘respectable woman’ in conversation, Davies was told, ‘Every member of this sect, upon conversion, undergoes death – an actual process analogous to physical death, and exactly corresponding with it in external signs, only that it is not permanent.’ Even for a man accustomed to mediums summoning the dead, this was a remarkable development. ‘Some die very hard, in great agony,’ said the woman, ‘others quite peacefully. Only then would they ‘jump’; and like the Shakers, ‘once under the influence, it may recur at any moment’. In order to obtain the complete gift, ‘probationary believers’ had to embrace celibacy; this would ensure their immortality. This was no allegorical state, no erudite metaphor teased out from biblical texts by a learned parson; it was the literal truth: ‘Once dead, not only will they die no more, but they suffer no pain, they feel no sorrow.’

The Children of God believed they had discovered the secret of eternal life, and in a world in which death was a daily fact, this promise was beyond prize and almost beyond imagination. Suspended in their state of grace, they awaited the millennium. Where Ann Lee had lain for hours ‘with but little appearance of life’ before her own rebirth, Mary Ann’s Children emerged from their comas into the bright light of an assured place in heaven. Like Ann Lee, Mary Ann was living out a biblical narrative of her own. Why should she not be a prophet of modern times? After all, if Scripture was a battleground over which faiths had fought for centuries, then her exegesis looked back to the original, Primitive Church. It was as if she had only just discovered the Word of God (as indeed she had), and was now a missionary in her own country. And where the Shakers had believed they were living ‘in the Resurrection Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’, here in Walworth Christ’s coming was divined daily, to a timetable set by Mrs Girling, as though that railway arch were a portal through which some spiritual steam engine might take them all into another world.

When James J. Morse attended his first spiritualist meeting in Whitechapel in 1868, he found himself ‘endowed with another personality … I shouted, rolled around the room, I swore, and … the more I tried not to do these things, the more perfectly were they accomplished!’ After three-quarters of an hour the fit subsided, and he ‘sank exhausted upon a settee’. As a connoisseur of such events, Davies equated the altered states of mesmerism and spiritualism with the Jumpers’ ecstasy (in its original meaning, exstasis, to stand outside oneself), although when he interviewed Mary Ann, she was eager to disown such comparisons. Nevertheless, Davies was convinced that ‘whatever be the origin of the so-called mesmeric condition, the same is the cause of “jumping”. The magnetic “sleep-walking” may be produced without contact or passes … and religious excitement is certainly an adequate cause to produce such an effect.’

The vexed question of whether Mary Ann hypnotised her followers would haunt her mission – and produce new accusations of witchcraft. That night in the railway arch, one woman who had been ‘grimacing and gesticulating in a slightly idiotic manner, jumped up and joined the dance. Her demeanour, however, was anything but happy; she prayed as in an unknown tongue, and called out “The devil! the devil!”’ Davies was told by his confidante, ‘Yes, there is something wrong. You see when they are in that state they have the gift of prophecy and clear vision. She can see the state of those around.’ Perhaps, like the Shakers, the Girlingites could see the dead walking – although Davies offered the explanation that, like the onlookers who had spoiled Dr Emes’s resurrection from Bunhill Fields, the New Cut swells had ‘“disturbed the conditions”… as the spiritists would say … When deprecating to me any use of mesmerism or chloroform, the minister said, “I wish I had been able to use the one or the other once or twice tonight”.’

The reference to anaesthesia was apposite. Hypnotism and chloroform were seen to induce bodily abandonment beyond the control of consciousness; both evoked notions of surrender and perhaps violation (in 1865, Sir William Wilde, Oscar’s father, had been accused of ‘chloroforming’ a young patient before seducing her), and spiritualists and mesmerists were accused of taking sexual advantage of their entranced subjects. Similarly, Mary Ann would stand accused of moral transgression when her followers danced themselves into unconsciousness and ‘death’, as if experiencing the petite mort of sexual ecstasy. For a world which would be shocked by the waltz, it was little wonder that such rites were regarded with suspicion and fascination. This peasant woman had imported pagan ways into the city and had thrown the formalised choreography of polite society into uninhibited abandon; these diseased fits presaged the St Vitus-like jerks of jazz dancers yet to come: one newspaper compared the Jumpers’ rituals to ‘a performance between a nigger break-down and the jig of the wandering Savoyards that we see in our streets’. Or perhaps their terpsichorean excesses were fuelled by narcotics imported from the Orient to the nearby docklands of the East End, where the exports were said to include the drugged and abducted young women of the white slave trade.

In Davies’ conspiratorial narrative, cloaked in mystery like a clerical detective novel, anything might be possible, and the plot deepened with an invitation to a private meeting at an address given to him in confidence by his Girlingite friend. Here, he was promised, ‘deaths’ were more frequent – perhaps because they were conducted out of range of the swells’ ridicule, and more lethal antipathies: ‘Some of the men wait for our brothers and almost kill them’, Davies was told. South London was a wild place, as the clergyman found for himself on leaving the rented railway arch. ‘It took two policemen to get us quietly out … lest some honest Walworthian should mistake me for a “brother”.’ With that somewhat edgy exit, the reverend concluded his account, for the time being.

London was undergoing a transformation. Vast new buildings were rising at its centre like new geological formations, from the gothic cliffs of Kensington’s Natural History Museum – built by the Quaker, Alfred Waterhouse – to Charles Barry’s Italianate canyons of Portland stone along Whitehall, and the jagged stalagmites of Westminster. It was a city skyline newly framed by medieval crenellations; Gilbert Scott’s St Pancras, seen romantically against a fiery sunset like some gigantic monastery out of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, was in fact a modern hotel undercoursed by grinding locomotives and commuters hurrying through its tiled caverns. The entire metropolis was in a state of reinvention; one giant construction site for secular cathedrals dedicated to the imperial saints of science, technology, governance and capital. So too Mary Ann’s arrival had seen an extension in her mission, as if London’s burgeoning architecture encouraged her to produce yet more extraordinary effects. But hers was a spiritual phalanx populated by her Children of God, and unlike the leviathan monuments which her fellow Victorians were erecting, it did not need a grand temple to state its certainties. The Girlingites’ rites were conducted underneath those constructions, in the dead space which progress had left behind – a vacuum filled by their immortal faith.

Mary Ann lodged with a family in Chelsea (possibly apostates of the Peculiar People), whose twenty-four-year-old daughter Violet was chosen, like Eliza Folkard, to receive the ‘gift of the Spirit’. Having accompanied her parents to Walworth to hear Mary Ann speak, Violet fell unconscious to the floor where she remained for two hours, then suddenly she began to speak under inspiration, prophesying ‘great and terrible judgements from God’ on anyone who refused to accept Mrs Girling’s message. Violet declared that she too would leave her family and follow Mary Ann wherever she went. Her conversion – which went one step further than the Peculiar People’s gospel of salvation, and resembled the trance-like fervour of the young Shakeress instruments – was a cornerstone in the Girlingites’ mission. It became a talisman for Mary Ann’s followers, raising their sense of identity and encouraging new converts.

That winter at Walworth, Violet’s visions had a galvanising effect. Many exhibited similar manifestations in the services, which attracted up to three hundred people – as well as the attention of the press. Crowds milling around the arch had swollen tenfold to two or three thousand, and the South London Press in particular followed the ‘extraordinary proceedings … among the “Shakers” at Walworth’ – reports all the more notable for their comparison of the Girlingites with the American sect. Next to an article on ‘Mr Spurgeon’s Return to South London’ (from Rome, where ‘the Papal system [was] as full of idolatry as ever Hindooism was’), the journalist ‘C.E.P.’ posed the question, ‘What is a Shaker?’ It was one which would ‘naturally be asked by those who have not read Mr Hepworth Dixon’s “New America”’ – or perhaps by those who had attended one of Frederick Evans’ lectures that summer – and it might be difficult to answer ‘were it not for the fact that in South London, scarcely a hundred yards from the Walworth-road station, is the meeting-house of a Shaker community, where the inquirer may see with his own eyes …’

Arriving at Sutherland Street for a Sunday morning service, C.E.P. found Mary Ann seated behind her green baize table, a cup of tea at her side ‘with which she occasionally refreshed herself’. The atmosphere was electric. Despite the winter weather it was hot and stuffy inside, and the correspondent watched as a group bent over a heavy-looking youth who lay in his companion’s arms. Two young women had their arms around the boy’s neck and were mumbling in excited, incoherent tongues. They then jumped up to dance, twirling and twisting ‘as if they were bitten 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, tore up the palings round the house’, shouting ‘Down with the Shakers!’ and ‘No more dead-alive husbands!’ It was, in its way, an augury of the prostitutes who would demonstrate outside the Old Bailey during Oscar Wilde’s trial.

Mary Ann now assumed the title of Mother, as had Ann Lee, an action which symbolically coincided with the conversion of her own son, William Walter, now seventeen, to the cause. The comparison with the Shakers was also underlined by two more new recruits: James Haase and Julia Wood, newly returned from Mount Lebanon. They were important additions. Haase brought his business sense to this English eruption of religious communism – perhaps with the prospect of gathering the Children of God for Elder Evans – while Miss Wood’s money would finance their establishment as a community. When told of the poverty of the followers back in Suffolk – where Mary Ann’s mission had continued in her absence, a kind of holding bay of the faithful as converts awaited her confirmation – Wood acquired a home for the Girlingites at 107 Battersea Bridge Road. Here, by the banks of the river Thames, was a London Mount Lebanon, founded by ‘the first twelve’, the dozen Suffolk elders who sought to follow the lives of the apostles. For their neighbours, however – who included the congregation of a Wesleyan chapel and William D. Sumner, a professor of music – the arrival of this commune, preceded by reports of riots and court cases, was probably as welcome as that of a bail hostel in a modern suburb.

In April 1872, Mrs Dawe, the wife of a mechanic living at 4 Agate Street, Walworth, told Lambeth court that her husband ‘had for some weeks belonged to the “Shakers”. He had not entirely left her, but had ceased cohabitation, and she believed he would shortly proceed with the party to America.’ The case was heard by Mr Chance, who was becoming all too familiar with south London’s sects (two months later he would direct one of the Peculiar People ‘to have his son vaccinated on pain of a fine of 2/6’). The magistrate told Mrs Dawe that he could hardly interfere between man and wife, despite her protests: ‘What she had witnessed on Sunday week, when she went with her husband, was quite shocking, and enough to outrage any decent woman. She saw men and women embracing one another for a quarter of an hour at a time …’ When her husband came home, he ‘looked vacant, and seemed lost, and took no notice of anything. He had what the “Shakers” called “died”, and had passed from death to “newness of life”,’ and she feared he was about to leave for America.

The recruitment of Evans’ erstwhile acolytes seemed to encourage such ideas: the lure of the New World as a religious refuge held as good in the 1870s as it had in the 1770s, and perhaps – with Julia Wood’s patronage – Mary Ann even considered a Girlingite exodus across the Atlantic, just as John Hocknell had financed the Shakers’ move. In the event, however, theirs was only a trek up the Old Kent Road. The equally familiar figure of Inspector Fife told the court that the sect had ‘received notice to leave Sunderland Street, and on Thursday would open Milton Hall, near a railway station’.

Although he would remain with Mary Ann for the next ten years at least, James Haase was ambivalent about Girlingism, as if he could not quite bring himself to embrace its more extreme tenets. That May, a labourer named John Tyseen was charged with using abusive language to Haase. In court Haase claimed that he was not a member of the group, and ‘did not altogether agree with the worship of dancing’. It was a disclaimer which, with its overtones of Peter’s denial of Christ, seemed to echo Mary Ann’s generally equivocal relationship to the Shakers. What did she know of the American sect with which she was associated? Did she draw on their beliefs in the same way as she had parasitised the Peculiar People? Her new recruits must have discussed their experiences at Mount Lebanon with Mary Ann; it is even possible that she had attended one of Evans’ lectures, although there is no trace of any encounter. The connexion, as indisputable as it is in one respect, is at the same time comprehensively denied. It is one reason why Mary Ann remains such an elusive figure.

Even now, the influence of the Shakers on Girlingism is impossible to pin down. The English sect left almost no records of its own, and those accounts which survive in the press are often wanton in their reporting, compounding the errors of others. In the search for sensation, the complicated lines of millenarian genealogy were obscured, not least through Mary Ann’s own publicity-worthy assertions. For editors, it was easy to associate the two sects, especially as Mary Ann’s arrival in London had coincided with the advent of Elder Evans; just as Girlingism was associated with spiritualism, for the same reasons. In the wake of Hepworth Dixon’s New America and the comic sketches of Artemus Ward – a popular cartoonist who had also visited the Shakers – it was assumed Mary Ann was a Shaker and perhaps even American herself. The confusion was encouraged by the way in which the Girlingites were seen through the filter of popular culture, and remarks about Mary Ann’s apparently American accent and dress and the transatlantic mannerisms of her followers were rooted in this media confusion.

Even to informed observers, it seemed plain that Girlingism drew on the same kind of itinerant preachers and radical sectaries who had sought refuge in the New World. Ann Lee’s struggle had been one of Manichean polarities, a narrative of pioneering faith. Mary Ann’s fate, as related in the press, would follow a similar trajectory. But hers was a distorted drama enacted, not in a colonial wilderness, but under the sophisticated surveillance of the imperial metropolis. Her mission was compromised by the burgeoning press and accelerating means of communication, as if the century itself sped her story to its inevitable dénouement.

Back at Shaker headquarters, word of Mary Ann’s ambitions had reached the Society, which moved swiftly to deny the impostors, as The Times announced: ‘We have received from Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon … a communication disclaiming on the part of his community all connexion with a sect known as “the Walworth Shakers”, but whose proper cognomen, according to Elder Evans, “would appear to be Jumpers or Bible Christians”.’ Evans may have been concerned at the effect on his own recruitment drive, but his protest underlined other paradoxes. Where the Americans had become regularised in their rituals, the Girlingites were wilder, more passionate, like the early Shakers, or the Quakers. It was as if they were re-enacting Mother Ann’s Work – and gaining the kind of support which Evans had hoped for. Indeed, had Girlingism been a little more practical, its satellite communities, which would spring up in the Isle of Wight and Bristol, might have seen a national network to rival the Shaker families of America. ‘Had she been supported by men of similar calibre to those who followed Ann Lee, and Joanna Southcott, there can be no doubt but that her work would have continued like the Shakers, and the Christian Israelites,’ observed one contemporary.

But the times were already moving too fast. From the outset there was a sense of a lost cause to Mary Ann’s mission, undermined, ironically, by her distinct lack of insight and administrative ability: ‘she … would not permit any interference with her absolute rule of affairs, or allow any practical person to organise the Family on sound economic principles’. The chaos in the Walworth arch had been emblematic of the essential anarchy of the Children of God. They looked forward to the millennium, but not to the immediate future. Instead, Mary Ann insisted on her immortality – an ultimately fatal mechanism – and at the same time rejected identification with the Shakers: to do otherwise would be to acknowledge another messiah. It was a crucial component in the creation of Mary Ann’s myth: she sought to obscure parallels and influences in order to make her own appearance that much more remarkable (while on a personal level, she may have been envious of Evans and antipathetic towards his masculine erudition). Although Mary Ann seemed at times to be a reincarnation of Ann Lee – and all the other prophetesses before her – for her onceorphaned, now reborn Children, there was only one Mother. And so it would remain, until they were made orphans once more.

It was left to Julia Wood, who had first-hand knowledge of both creeds, to make the distinctions. ‘The American Shakers believe in Christ only as a prophet and a great man,’ she told The Times, ‘the followers of Girling believe in Him as God-man.’ ‘On the other hand,’ observed the newspaper, ‘dancing, celibacy, and community of goods are common to both sects’, and, indulging in its own little pun, it predicted that it would not be easy ‘to shake off the name’. Mary Ann’s comments were rather more disingenuous: ‘She believed there was a sect of the name in America, but she had never been there and she knew nothing about them … She and her friends were more like the Quakers, but they preferred to be called the children of God …’

Nonetheless, the Girlingites and the Shakers continued to be connected, often in a manner which reflected well on neither. One commentator on the Walworth Jumpers quoted from Charles Dickens’ 1842 visit to Mount Lebanon which, like Brown and Hawthorne’s accounts, contradicted the rosy pastoral portraits of that New England paradise. The novelist particularly disliked Shaker chairs, which ‘partook so strongly of the general grimness, that one would have much rather sat on the floor than incurred the smallest obligation to them’. His greater complaint was philosophic, however. Like Hawthorne, Dickens saw Shakerism as forever living in the shadow of an apocalyptic future rather than rejoicing in the pragmatic present; and where Evans’ Autobiography of a Shaker, and Revelation of The Apocalypse (with an Appendix) had the epigram, ‘The spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God’, Dickens declared, ‘I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit … which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave …’

That struggle for spiritual integrity had its casualties back in Walworth, where the Girling whirlwind had left the Peculiar People and John Sirgood in disarray. Sirgood had initially been won over by Mary Ann, and that August had written, ‘I do not think any of them knows what the power in the soul is but the woman that is their chief …’ Like some vampire, Mary Ann fed on the Peculiar People, seducing them with her promise of immortality; the glamour of Girlingism put Bridges’ beliefs in the shade, and ‘those who believed the new docrine are of course getting the joy’, observed Harriet Sirgood. She attended a meeting ‘under the Arch’, where Mary Ann pressed the urgency of gathering the 144,000: ‘You better make haste, don’t wait for others or the number will be made and the Saviour come.’ Harriet watched as one member ‘died’ at the meeting and was still unconscious at ten o’clock. Her husband now felt that he had been ‘led astray’ by Mary Ann, and saw her as an equivalent of the vision of Satan as an angel of light which had once appeared to him. It was as if he feared for his own attraction to Mary Ann: ‘the more I gave place to her the less I felt towards others, which caused me to see that it was a deception of the devil come closer to me than ever before’. William Bridges went so far as to claim: ‘They had even brought the tar to tar the woman over; to set fire to her but was prevented.’ It was a potent vision of violence: Mary Ann in flames, a tarred but not feathered witch, a blackened angel, her gown afire, too late for any Human Nature campaign to save this Joan of Arc of the Walworth Road.

After three weeks at Milton Hall – which appears to have been a generic name for a railway arch, this time a dark and damp void close to Waterloo station – the Girlingites were driven out by ‘a volley of stones, a general melee, and a grand “skedaddle” of the saints’. After a brief stay in Finsbury, by June they were in West London where, under the management of James Haase and financed by Julia Wood, they rented Victoria Hall, in Little College Place, ‘a back slum in Chelsea … situated about midway between the South Kensington and Sloane Square Stations on the Metropolitan District Railway’, as Maurice Davies reported.

Davies duly arrived by tube to find the sect newly installed in a whitewashed and well-lit chapel, a contrast to their chimney-sweep neighbour. It seemed that in their move to Chelsea, the Girlingites were ‘gravitating towards common sense’: the meeting was conducted ‘in a more decorous fashion’, with a ‘most excellent choir’. But this raised a new problem: with sensation came income, especially in a city with so many rival sideshows, and as the meeting ended without any manifestations, some of the congregation demanded their money back. Having stayed behind to engage Mary Ann in conversation – she was perfectly amenable to questions on Scriptural theory, but her answers were less satisfactory – Davies left thinking he had heard the last of the Jumpers. He could not know that of all the sects he had visited on his capitalwide trawl of the eerie, the faithful and the fraudulent, the Children of God would soon return to the pages of the newspapers, and in a manner more sensational than anyone could have predicted.

Their services may have calmed down in Chelsea, but the Girlingites still found themselves assailed by the mobs they thought they had left behind in Walworth. Paying threepence to view their antics, sightseers came expecting marvels or freaks, just as visitors to the East End’s Commercial Road would gawp at John Merrick, the Elephant Man. Some were disappointed with what they found; others took exception to the ‘Shakers’ Tea Meeting’ and its orgiastic scenes: ‘The men kissed each other, the women kissed each other, then the men ran about kissing the women, and the girls then ran and kissed the men. Their kisses were not single kisses or mere salutes of love and peace: they were regular running fires of kisses and love chirps, which lasted for several minutes. Their arms were first round each other’s waists, then round each other’s necks: then they were looking into each other’s eyes, then laying their heads on one another’s shoulders, and then kissing again, as though entirely lost to all around in feelings of the most exquisite ecstasy.’

O CLOUDS UNFOLD!

Audiences stood on their benches to get a better look: ‘Oh crikey, look here at that girl: ain’t her having it nice: I should like to be kissing her’, while an offended observer said, ‘You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves, you ought: it’s disgraceful.’ Then, as Eliza – assumed to be Mary Ann’s daughter – sang a hymn, the crowd struck up a rival tune, sung to the air of ‘Old Brown’s Daughter’ –

There lives an ancient party

At the end of Ipswich town,

Who keeps a little preaching shop

In Chelsea college town.

She has only got one daughter,

Such a party I never saw;

By jingo I would like to be

That woman’s son-in-law

– with the ironic refrain, ‘Mother Girling’s daughter is a proper sort of girl’. The parody was itself an indication of Mary Ann’s celebrity, as was a satirical A Shaker’s ‘Service’ pamphlet, cashing in on the sensational Girlingites. Accordingly, the crowd at Chelsea were rewarded with yet more extraordinary manifestations, as if in reaction to that fame. ‘Numbers of people were thrown into trances, from which they were not aroused, and apparently could not be aroused, at the time of leaving. In their apparently mesmeric state they related visions and prophesied most startling events. While in their unconscious state they danced and violently jumped to a height of several feet. They also spoke and sang in unknown tongues. There were several professed spiritualists present …’

Littered with comatose bodies and supercharged with emotion, it is little wonder that the chapel attracted spiritualists, for its jabbering tongues and ecstatic rites rivalled mediumistic trances for sensation, and seemed to tap into the same strange energies. Another newspaper witnessed an uproarious atmosphere akin to ‘the gallery of the “Vic” on Boxing Night’. The noise was ‘absolutely deafening; cat-calls, whistling cries for “the old woman … to come on”, groans and shouts of mocking laughter … No one took the trouble to take off his hat, and stale cutties and penny smokes filled the place with sickening odours’. Mary Ann finally descended from the loft, dressed ‘in the orthodox black silk dress, whose glories had long since departed, leaving a rusty brown predominant in its shades’ – as if London’s acid pollution had begun to eat away at the prophetess. ‘A tight-fitting jacket of the same material, and a black and white bonnet of puritanical simplicity completed her attire … Ascending the platform she surveyed her audience for a few seconds in silence, then in accents which almost set one’s teeth on edge, shouted, “Get hoff them seats, or I’ll close the meeting. If you are gentlemen show yourselves sich”.’

As the hubbub rose, Mary Ann folded her arms like a long-suffering school mistress and stared at the rafters until the noise subsided. Some took this to mean that she had ‘seen something’ (‘“Cobwebs”, suggested a shock-headed youth’), while a greenogrocer offered, ‘’Ave a drop of short, missus.’ ‘Turning sharp round, the goddess thundered forth, “You are a disgrace to the name of Englishmen; if you were in the lowest place of worship in the land you would not behave so”.’ After the dancing, during which Eliza’s flaxen hair flew ‘as wildly as the snakes that … supply the Furies with chignons’, Mary Ann declared, ‘I’m not afraid of death’, to an ‘Oh, Oh’ from the audience. ‘You are, but I am not,’ she replied. ‘I shall never die. I was dead once’ – at which a voice interrupted, ‘What a shake you must have given to have got out of yer coffin’ – ‘but I have been born again.’ As the meeting disintegrated, Mary Ann ‘abused the press’ and ‘maintained that she and her followers were not such fools as they looked. She repudiated the assertion that their religion was an American importation, but gave no explanation of its origin.’ The session ended with the police clearing the room. Afterwards, the reporter spoke to one of the elders: ‘“Is your religion an American invention?” we inquired. “Certainly not.” “Let us look at your hymn-book.” The saint looked confused, but seeing we would take no refusal, he let us open it. It was headed “The American