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

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