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

about her like some human crop circle, springing upright when touched again. She also set a date for the Second Coming in July 1786, when her followers, their heads shaved save for tufts by which angels could pluck them up, waited on a wooden platform built on a nearby hill – only instead of the Lord a wind arrived and sent them crashing to the ground.

      But none gathered greater crowds than Joanna Southcott. Born in Gittisham, Devon, in 1750, Southcott was a farmer’s daughter, and a zealous Methodist. At the age of forty, a change came over her: modern doctors might have discerned the menopause, but Joanna said she had been called by God and, like Elspeth Buchan, she assumed the starry mantle of the Woman Clothed with the Sun. By 1801, when she published her booklet, The Strange Effects of Faith, her Christian Israelites were particularly numerous in the North and South-West. From London, Joanna issued ominous warnings – ‘O England! O England! England! the axe is laid to the tree, and it must and will be cut down; ye know not the days of your visitation’ – while in Hampshire, William Cobbett despaired, ‘It is in vain that we boast of our enlightened state, while a sect like this is increasing daily.’

      One day, sweeping out a house after a sale, Southcott ‘was permitted by the Lord to find, as if by accident’, a commonplace seal. In her hands it became the English Seal of Revelation, and her SEALED PEOPLE rapidly approached the mystical number predicted in the book of the Apocalypse: ‘Then I heard the count of those who were sealed, a hundred and forty-four thousand of them’. This was followed by a yet more extraordinary announcement: that the sixty-three-year-old Southcott was pregnant with the messiah who would rule the nations with a rod of iron. This was not a new phenomenon – in the Interregnum, Ranter women had professed to be with Christ’s child – but now all England awaited Shiloh’s birth. Expectation grew, as did Joanna’s belly, but fatally she cast doubt on her state, and when no child appeared, she fell ill and died on 27 December 1814. Her followers waited three days for her resurrection, keeping her body warm with hot water bottles (and thus accelerating its putrefaction). On the fourth day they permitted a postmortem, which revealed that her phantom pregnancy (as if to bear the Holy Spirit) was due to dropsy, the same watery disease which had flooded the unfortunate corpus of Bunhill’s Mary Page.

      Southcott left behind twenty-five boxes filled with her visions, one sealed and to be opened only in time of national crisis. Attempts were made to have it opened during the Crimean War and the First World War – the same points at which a ghostly hart appeared at the Rufus Stone. The Panacea Society – formed in Bedford by the suffragette Mary Bulthrop, who believed herself to be the reincarnation of Shiloh – campaigned for its opening, but when it was finally unlocked in 1927, the box was found to contain some insignificant papers and a lottery ticket. The Panaceans, however, contend that this was not the authentic box, and that even now, Joanna’s secrets lie in a rural repository awaiting ultimate revelation, while her followers prepare for Christ’s arrival at 18 Albany Street, Bedford, the original site, they claim, of the Garden of Eden.

      In New England, Shakerism had settled down to become an institution, with a written constitution and divided ‘orders’ as if in mimesis of the new republic. The Shakers lived like monks and nuns, their daily routines of worship and work strictly regulated, even as to how they should eat: noiselessly and without conversation. The outside world was kept at bay: surgeons were summoned only in the case of broken bones or serious wounds; otherwise, trust was put in God’s healing. Industry became an expression of their faith; as Ann Lee had declared: ‘Put your hands to work and give your hearts to God’. Their clothes were symbols of their unity and their otherness – and, perhaps, of suppressed individuality, a uniqueness in itself homogenous. With long gowns, aprons and caps for the women, and coats, capes, breeches and stocks for the men, they resembled a cross between Puritans and workers in a Lancashire factory. Such subfusc costumes reflected their connexion with nature, in felt and wool and linen and cotton, woven and dyed with the levelling unchemical colours of drab, nutgall, butternut or pursley blue to blend with the land – just as the paint used by the Sabbathday Lake family for their meeting house was composed of crushed blueberry skins, sage leaves, and indigo. The Shakers saw God in the natural kingdom, in the animals they kept, in the food they ate: many were vegetarians or even vegans.

      Their villages aspired to a similar purity. Built of plain white clapboard, they were unadorned places in which to live out lives of innocence. They now rehearsed their steps before dancing, and on Sundays, carriages would arrive at Sabbathday Lake from the spa hotels of Poland Springs, as though the Shakers were another attraction laid on for their amusement. In a complicated world, Shakerism presented an uncluttered appeal. Free from possessions and responsible to no government but God, they were ‘the children of one family, enjoying equal rights and privileges in things spiritual and temporal, because … love is the only bond of their union’.

      Bonded by love: it was that simple.

      The Shakers seemed to reinvent the way the world could work, and they inspired the Welsh-born reformer Robert Owen in his plans for a new society, founded on a series of co-operatives – although Britain remained sceptical about his plans: ‘Can Mr Owen reverse the decrees of Fate, and so regulate the accidents to which human beings are liable, as to remove from them all temptation to sin, and exempt them from all chance of mistery?’ Nonetheless, this wealthy visionary arrived in America in the wake of Ann Lee, with an equally presumptuous ambition. ‘I am come to this country,’ he declared in 1825, ‘to introduce an entire new system of society; to change it from an ignorant, selfish system to an enlightened social system … and remove all causes for contest between individuals.’ And as he explained to President John Adams, who himself opposed slavery, he would achieve his aim by building utopia, for that was the only way Man might change, if his circumstances dignified his ambitions.

      Owen’s vision was a new Jerusalem, about to rise in the New World – in Indiana. He proposed a great hollow square, one thousand feet long, which would contain all his community needed: a school and a university, a library, chapel, ballrooms. Kitchens, dining rooms and laundries would occupy other blocks, while the upper storeys would house the inhabitants like some gigantic hotel. This ‘new empire of peace and goodwill’ foresaw the city of the future; but just as that would for many become a dystopia, Owen and his architect, Stedman Whitwell, also had to accept a different reality. Having taken over a former Rappite community, hundreds flocked to Owen’s New Harmony, drawn by its utopian dream or its founder’s substantial fortune. But the colony did not live up to its name: it lacked the religious principles, the discipline and the cohesion of celibacy, as practised by the Shakers, and there were disputes over the system which should be adopted to run the place. Yet it sowed radical seeds, not least in the work carried on by Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, who would join Fanny Wright (one of the first to arrive at New Harmony and founder of Nashoba, a community to educate liberated slaves) in proposing free education and women’s rights, ideas which would influence the Democratic party, while among other Owenites championing these same radical ideas was an Englishman, Frederick Evans. In a reverse arc to Owen’s inspiration, Evans would convert to Shakerism in 1831 and become its most able proponent. He was also the man who would oversee their venture into another world.

      THE WILLING GIFT

      

      In 1837, Shakerism was suddenly disrupted by a violent eruption. That August at Niskeyuna, a