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

Sunday morning the local constabulary broke in upon the Shakers’ worship and dragged Ann downstairs by her ankles, an act of humiliation in which her skirts rode up about her waist. In Manchester’s House of Correction, she was confined in a cell so small that she was unable to straighten herself. ‘She had nothing to eat or drink, except some wine and milk mixed, put into the bowl of a tobacco-pipe, and conveyed to her by inserting the stem through the key-hole once every 24 hours. This was done by James Whittaker, when a boy, whom Mother Ann brought up.’ It was a modern version of the medieval torture of ‘little ease’, in which, as Linder Sterling observes, the victim became an involuntary anchoress. Or perhaps this was a political imprisonment, an augury of hunger-striking suffragettes who used consumption and its denial as an offensive weapon, only to be punished by force-feeding with mechanical contraptions and rubber tubes.

      Freed once more, Ann declared, ‘It is not I that speak, it is Christ who dwells in me. I converse with Christ.’ She was the Elder Sister to Jesus’s Elder Brother: mortal beings to be followed, not worshipped; yet in her ‘the Christ, NOT Jesus… should make a Second Appearance’. The Shakers would reject physical resurrection as ‘utterly repugnant to both science, reason, and Scripture’. With their foundation, the Day of Judgement had occurred; they were now living ‘in the Resurrection Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’ – a communion in which they looked to the new world for salvation.

      Over the wild Atlantic, America seemed to reflect its absence of history in its very vastness, as if the unending forests, prairies and lakes were waiting for its story to be written by the clouds scudding across its gigantic skies. This terra nullis evoked Eden before the Fall; a place in which to be reborn, as the Puritans believed, out of a state of fallen grace and back into perfection. Unseen and sublime over the horizon, this brave new world was itself a religious experiment, implicit with redemption. Even the passage there was a test of faith, just as The Tempest was inspired by a shipload of Irish rebels, gypsies, dissenters and criminals who had set off for Virginia, ‘Earth’s only Paradise’, only to founder on Bermuda, Prospero’s Island.

      Since their foundation by the Puritans, the colonies had been home to many such refugees. The Quaker William Penn had established Pennsylvania – a place of sylvan woods named after his father – with its biblical capital, Philadelphia. Mennonite and Amish communities would follow, as would a young Rosicrucian, Kelpius, who exchanged ‘millennial convictions’ with Mrs Leade in London, before taking his followers on a voyage during which the storm was calmed as Christ had done on Galilee. Led to their ‘new forest-homes beyond the mighty sea’, they set up their wooden tabernacle near Germantown in Pennsylvania, there to await the Second Coming, living communally and identifying with the woman clothed with the sun from whom they took their name, Das Weib in der Wüste (The Woman in the Wilderness). For seven years they scanned the skies with telescopes for signs, but were rewarded only with ‘a white, obscure, moving body in the air … which, as it approached, assumed the form and mien of an angel’ before receding ‘into the shadows of the forest …’

      Back in Manchester, the woods also beckoned to Ann Lee. One night the Shakers were resting at the roadside when James Whittaker saw ‘a large tree, and every leaf thereof shone with such brightness as made it appear like a burning torch’. Like the burning bush from which Moses was commanded to lead his people out of slavery, this ‘Tree of Life’ was a sign of their new order; and so, in the words of their chroniclers, the Shakers ‘fled to the wilderness of America, from the face of the “fiery flying serpent”’ – the church and state which they saw as the Image of the Beast. During their voyage – financed by a wealthy supporter, John Hocknell – the captain threatened to throw his human cargo overboard when they persisted in their strange rites, but a tempest blew up, and as waves sprang a plank in the hull, Ann saw two bright angels standing by the mast. At this another wave pounded the plank back into place.

      On their arrival in New York, the Shakers strode up Pearl Street and stopped outside the house of Mrs Cunningham, whose name Ann seemed to know. ‘I am commissioned of the Almighty God to preach the everlasting Gospel to America, and an Angel commanded me to come to this house, and to make a home for me and my people,’ she declared, whereupon they were immediately taken inside. There they stayed until the spring of 1776 when they established a new Albion at Niskeyuna, on land bought by Hocknell in upstate New York, a place reached through ‘the immense pines and hemlock trees’ of ‘that dreary forest, which blackens so large a portion of North America’. Around them raged the battle for the new nation, a revolution which, their visions had assured them, would ‘terminate successfully, and that a Civil Government would be founded, protecting all people in their liberty of conscience, person, and press’. Indeed, they had come to save Americans ‘all sunk in their pollutions’.

      It was a mission rooted in the virgin forest. Ann Lee was the woman living unknown in the woods of the Apocalypse, asking the trees to pray for her followers, who ran wild, hooting like owls. Witnesses claimed to have seen them dancing naked, in the belief that ‘they were angels, and invisible, and could go out among men and not be seen’. There was a precedent for such behaviour: the Ranters had preached unclothed, and the Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’. These were symbolic states, just as Blake and his wife would sit naked in their Lambeth garden, reciting from Paradise Lost and greeting a visitor, ‘Come in! it’s only Adam and Eve, you know!’

      The Blakes’ back garden represented the perfection of paradise, ‘to the scandal of wondering neighbours’. Neighbours of the Shakers’ Eden were also suspicious – not least of the sect’s claims to commune with the dead: ‘Sometimes while eating at the table, they say their dead parents and brethren come on the table and set on a pyre and they see them.’ The Shakers had inherited the early Quakers’ belief in ‘a certain efflux or effluvium of animal volatile spirits … that flow from their bodies by the command of their will into the bodies of … new proselytes’, while Ann saw God’s power ‘visible on the faces of the believers and even on their clothing … It looked perfectly white and run in veins’. At other times a ‘strange milky substance … seemed to run over the skin and clothes of converts’. Such phenomena recalled the breath that had protected Ann like balsalm and foreshadowed spiritualistic ectoplasm – the mysterious cloudy matter which possessed its own methods of bodily extrusion as it was brought forth from mediums’ mouths and even their vaginas.

      In fact, in the New World their rituals had become even more extreme. The Shakers struck grotesque shapes – ‘shaking their heads, in a violent manner, turning their heads half round, so that their face looks over each shoulder, their eyes being shut’ – as if God was fighting the Devil for control of their bodies. To some, such contortions were indistinguishable from the possessed victims of witchcraft. As the ritual rose to fever-pitch, worshippers would be ‘groaning most dismally; some trembling extremely; others acting as though all their nerves were convulsed; others swinging their arms, with all vigour, as though they were turning a wheel, etc. Then all break off, and have a spell of smoaking, and some times great fits of laughter … this they call the worship of God’.

      Sometimes the dancing grew so intense that the entire company would jump up and down, making the house tremble ‘