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

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.