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

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,