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ENGLAND’S LOST EDEN
Adventures in a Victorian Utopia
PHILIP HOARE
For Mark
CONTENTS
Prologue: A place of royal death
PART I: Green and Pleasant Land
Into the forest; Mary Ann’s life & visions in Suffolk; the Girlingites’ debut
2 Turning the World Upside-Down
Bunhill Fields & the Camisards; Ann Lee & the Shakers; American utopias
Elder Evans & James Burns; Human Nature & spirit photography; the mission to Mount Lebanon
Sects, spiritualism, & Swedenborg; Mary Ann at the Elephant & Castle
Hordle, the Girlingites’ heyday; Peterson & his mesmeric experiments
Eviction & despair; Mary Ann examined on the condition of her mind
Broadlands & the Cowpers; Rossetti & Beata Beatrix; Myers & Gurney; the Broadlands Conferences
8 The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century
Ruskin & the Spiritualists, the Guild of St George & Fors Clavigera; Brantwood
Rose La Touche, Broadlands & the spirits
PART IV The Countenance Divine
Isaac Batho’s mission; Auberon Herbert & naked dancing; Julia Wood interned; Girlingites on tour
A.T.T.P. & Wm Lawrence, pet medium; the tower rises
12 The Close of the Dispensation
The Census; the rival ‘Mother’; Mary Ann’s stigmata
Laurence Housman & ‘Jump-to-Glory Jane’; Herbert & Theosophy; Ruskin’s last days; Georgiana & the Wildes; The Sheepfold
The quest for Mary Ann & her followers; Peterson’s transition
Epilogue: The forest once more
Source and Bibliographical Notes
Early in May 1100 – the exact date is uncertain – the king’s bastard nephew was hunting deer in the New Forest when he was killed by an arrow loosed by one of his own party. Thirty years before, his uncle, the king’s brother, had been gored to death by a stag in the same forest. Both deaths were seen as a judgement on the Norman invaders who had imposed their rule on the land, sweeping aside entire villages to create a vast hunting ground, a kind of royal