Holy Mary

Mary Ann Girling took up her prophetic mission with zeal, and began to preach in the immediate neighbourhood. She was the woman foretold in Revelation, clothed with the sun, crowned with 12 stars, and with the moon beneath her feet. The message she delivered in market squares and at crossroads was one of secular and religious freedom, in which the poor would be made rich and the dispossessed be comforted.

She declared that, as the new Messiah, she could not die; she also sponsored a new form of community in which all were celibate brothers and sisters in the Lord. It became known as Girlingism. But it also had another name. The dances and trances of the faithful — including visions, hysterics and various fits of fainting — gave her adherents the name of Convulsionists and they were almost immediately confused with the American sect of Shakers.

Having left her husband and two children in pursuit of her divine mission, Girling was a somewhat ambiguous figure in the bombazine atmosphere of Victorian England. She could, of course, be seen as a sacred icon, part of an ancient religious tradition, but in the 1870s she was also viewed as a spiritual version of the “new woman” claiming rights for her sex. The animus against her was, in part, hatred of the powerful female. In another age she would have been burnt as a witch. So it is not at all surprising that her strange career released strong and sometimes violent reactions. She was an emblem of primal fears. That is why her public meetings generally became the occasion of violence, apparently orchestrated by the local squires who resented her fervour on behalf of their poorer tenants.

So she decamped from East Anglia to London, where she became involved with a number of religious enthusiasts of various persuasions. At this point Philip Hoare takes his readers on a walk along the wilder shores of sectarianism, from the Shakers to a lonely eminence called Dorothy Harling, known as “the Permanent Spring”, who “whipped her followers and urinated on their limbs”. He uncovers a range of other spiritualised Edens, from the aptly named Fruitland of 19th-century vegans who wore only brown linen to Fournier’s exotic paradise, where “the sea would have turned to lemonade . . . and the Arctic would dispense perfumed dew”. Hoare is, if anything, too capacious in his sympathies and interests; he revels in stories of strangeness as well as the more advanced cases of human superstition and gullibility. The reader is introduced to a great many esoterics, so that the effect is like that of an unusually crowded cocktail party held at the Society for Psychical Research.

Yet he is at pains to connect these spiritual uprisings with the larger movements of the world, and in the process outlines the social pathology of fanaticism. There can be little doubt, for example, that the democratic communitarianism of Girling is related to the simultaneous development of communism. Yet the essential focus remains on the woman herself, racked by fever and excitement, sent spinning into strange convulsive dances, “my flesh consumed upon my bones, bloody sweat pressed through the pores of my skin, and I became as helpless as an infant”. This is an account of spirit possession, which does not seem to change from culture to culture.

She had been invited to London by the Peculiar People, otherwise known as the Plumstead Peculiars, who were one of those fundamentalist sects that flourished in the basement of Victorian piety. They were not a new phenomenon in the capital, which has always been a haven for radical and unorthodox faiths. But the 19th-century city pullulated with sectarians, spiritualists and schismatics of every variety, like the Tabernacle Ranters of Newington and the Southcottians of Elephant and Castle, the Irvingites of Bloomsbury and the Swedenborgians of Kings Cross. Girling was not to remain long with the Peculiars, however. They became disenchanted with her particular version of revelation, when she proclaimed her own divinity. After that, she was on her own.

She pursued her ministry from a railway arch off the Walworth Road, and her group of devotees became known as the Jumpers of Walworth. In her services beneath the arch she proclaimed that she and her followers could never die. They all kissed each other, male and female equally. Then they danced until they fell unconscious. It was a great draw. The spectacle of young men and women openly embracing was, in the latter part of the 19th century, better than striptease. She attracted crowds of 3,000 people and, of course, provoked problems of public order in a district that was not known for its gentility. Her congregation even made the front page of the Illustrated Police News.

So the Girlingites travelled onward. They removed themselves from the vanities of the metropolis and settled in the vicinity of the New Forest, which, as Hoare states, has always been enchanted ground. Here, in a converted farmhouse, the little community of God renewed its work. Girling was absolute ruler. She was known as “the Mother” (a phrase which in the 16th century, curiously enough, meant hysteria) or plain “Mother”. She forbade “sex, capital, and reproduction”, and thus in Hoare’s phrase effectively “subverted the tenets of the age”. She was denounced as a witch, or a mesmerist, or a conjuror. She was more than a public nuisance. She was a danger.

Yet she still gathered many converts, among them 36 children, who wore homespun clothes and refused the help of conventional medicine. It is, in part, a familiar story, concerning the subjection of certain credulous people to the will of one authoritarian and charismatic figure. The results are generally disastrous. Her adherents, apparently suffering from the hysteria attendant on malnutrition, embraced their misfortunes willingly. They had already given their minds to their leader, and their bodies gladly followed. They whirled around for hours in their spasmodic dances designed to praise Mother. They were intense, fervent, and perhaps a little stupid.

They fell into debt, and were evicted from their premises. But her cause was then taken up by a local grandee, William Cowper, who dabbled in spiritualist phenomena. In this, he was by no means unique. The Victorian age was as irrational as any other, with devotees of every kind of extraordinary faith or unorthodox practice. If it was a materialistic age, as often suggested, it also had room for a great many immaterialist philosophies. It was an age of mesmerism, of electric fluids, and of magnetic healers. There were as many incipient hippies, and devotees of the counter-culture in the 1870s as in the 1970s. Only the names have changed.

Radical faith, in fact, represents one of the great continuities of English life. In terms of belief and inspiration, even in terms of the language used, the Girlingites of the 19th century did not differ radically from the Wycliffites of the 15th century or the Diggers of the 17th century. They preached egalitarianism in the name of the Lord, and the possibility of redemption beyond the confines of the established Church. The language is that of radical levelling. “He has given us the power to become Sons & daughters of God,” one Girlingite wrote, “and through Him and Him alone are we kept”. It is the everlasting gospel, as it is known, and Girling picked it up by some form of spiritual osmosis. It is a stubborn and individualistic faith, rooted in the culture of the nation. It has not faded yet.

The fact that the Girlingites had retired to the New Forest, where they might worship in secrecy, added another frisson to the already overcharged atmosphere of rumour and suspicion. The significance of their new location is not lost on Hoare, either, who knows the occult history of the forest well. Female religiosity has its roots far back in the collective psyche, and may indeed be related to the prehistoric worship of the Great Mother. In the ceremonies of the Girlingites themselves there was more than an echo of primitive ritual. In the public prints there were suggestions of obscene dancing and of illicit sex, all part of the same horrified if rapt response. It seems that some of them took off their clothes and, as one journalist of the time put it: “One would fancy himself at a Jack-in-the Green meeting rather than at one to praise God.” It was appropriate for him to compare the Mother’s followers to the participants of a fertility ritual.

Spurred on by these reports, charabanc parties would make for the forest to witness the proceedings. Sometimes the tourists and day- trippers outnumbered the faithful. And then Girling decided to take her disciples on tour. She established a travelling religious show, proceeding from town to town in the West Country and advertised by press releases in which “the audience are earnestly entreated not to mock or jest at what they may hear or see, for it is the Spirit of the Living God”. Like all her ventures, however, it ended in farce and failure. There were cries from the audience of “Let’s have some shaking”, to which Girling replied that they could not shake when they liked.

And what of the Mother herself? She exerts all the fascination of those who consider themselves to be divinely blessed. The usual question — was she a fraud or a genuine believer in her divinity — misses the point. She was both fraudulent and genuine, shaman and shammer, since she worked in that area of highly charged human expression where religiosity and showmanship are part of the same phenomenon.

There was sporadic persecution of the Girlingites in the New Forest, complete with the sensational “rescue” of adherents in a process known as “cutting out”. But her fervour was undiminished. When a well-meaning inquirer asked her if the Girlingites should emigrate to New Zealand, where they would have all the space they needed, she replied: “Sir, I thank you sincerely, but God has placed me here, and nothing shall induce me to leave this place. My destiny is here, and even if an angel from heaven told me to go, I would not.” Even in extremity she did not lose her authority or her dignity.

Towards the end of her life she decided to renew her claims to divinity. For the first time she began to show her stigmata to the world, with the evident sign of nail-marks in her feet and palms. Her last message was her most extreme. She proclaimed herself to be “the terrestrial habitation for the celestial God-mother love-life to dwell in” and declared that “the beginning of creation was a male; the end is a female, not to be crucified but to be glorified”.

Her glory did not last for ever, as she had hoped. In 1886, at the age of 59, she died after suffering from cancer of the womb for ten months. There was to be no resurrection, although one or two followers believed that they saw a bright light issuing from her grave. But in her lifetime she had become, in Hoare’s words, “a demi-god, worshipped here, on the forest’s edge, by her starving followers”. It is an extraordinary story, touched by intimations of a larger mystery. It is, in part, an account of the half-pagan culture of England. The history of Mary Ann Girling is also the history of an old island, which keeps its archaic rituals despite every attempt to suppress them.

England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia by Philip Hoare (Fourth Estate, £25; offer £20 plus £2.25 p&p)