seismic preecho of the impending industrial revolution. One Shaker described how ‘a strange power begins to come on, and takes place in the body … which sets the person agaping and stretching; and soon sets him a twitching, as though his nerves were all in convulsion. I can compare it to nothing nearer in its feelings, than the operation of an electerising machine.’ These tremors were symptoms of a new revolution to which the operators of Manchester’s mechanised cotton looms would be shackled, in thrall to the processes of mass production while their children scurried perilously beneath eternally shuttling frames. Shakerism would offer an alternative to such slavery.
‘… Amend your lives,’ demanded Mother Jane Wardley. ‘Repent. For the kingdom of God is at hand. The new heaven and new earth prophesied of old is about to come …’ Her female ministry had its precedent in the French prophetesses, such as the fifteen-year-old Isabeau Vincent, who conducted services while sleeping and maintained, ‘It is not I that speak, but it is the spirit within me’; or the elderly Dorothy Harling, the ‘Permanent Spring’ who whipped her followers and urinated on their limbs. Here in the northern forests of Pendle and Knaresborough a dangerous memory lingered; that of a holocaust in which as many as eleven million, mostly women, had died throughout Europe. The same suspicion would taint all female prophets, whose daughters would inherit what their mothers had endured. It was not until 1736 that the laws against witchcraft were repealed – the year in which Ann Lee was born in Manchester.
Even her street had the name of a witch’s familiar: Toad Lane, an alley in a pre-industrial city still surrounded by wilderness, a devil darkness which Saddleworth Moor does little to dispel today. Like Mary Ann, Ann Lee was the daughter of a labourer – her father was a blacksmith – and she too was subject to divine inspiration, ‘especially concerning the lusts of the flesh’. Ann would admonish her mother against sex and, as her father attempted to whip her, ‘threw herself into her mother’s arms, and clung around her to escape his strokes’, a scene in which we might detect the traces of other abuse. And like Mary Ann, we have little record of how Ann Lee looked, only a strange phrenological portrait, an imaginary impression.
ANN LEE.
After working at a cotton loom and as a velvet-cutter, Ann became a cook in the Manchester Infirmary, while her father joined the Wardleys’ congregation. In September 1758, aged twenty-two, she too became a Shaker and was soon disrupting services in Manchester’s cathedral, questioning the priest’s words. Four years later, she was persuaded to marry John Standerin, another blacksmith. The lateness of their union owed much to Ann’s mistrust of marriage – legacy of seventeenth-century radicalism which saw marital union as another form of slavery. For Ann it was a protest vindicated by a terrible sequence: the death of her four children in infancy. And as with Mary Ann, these losses became the catalyst for her own rebirth.
After the painful and dangerous forceps delivery of her youngest daughter, Ann lay for hours in a kind of coma, as if by giving life her own had been suspended. When she recovered, her fear of her husband’s concupiscence had grown. At night she paced the floor in her stockinged feet so as not to awaken him, moving through a nightmare – one which seemed to evoke her own memory of abuse. ‘When I felt my eyes closing with sleep, I used to pull them open with my fingers, and say within myself, I had better open my eyes here, than open them in hell.’ Where witches had been walked to make them summon their familiars, Ann forestalled her hellish visions by remaining conscious. She starved her body so that her soul ‘might hunger for nothing but God’; tears ‘cleaved off’ her cheeks, blood ‘gushed from under her nails’, and when she lay down at night, the bed shook so that her husband was glad to leave it. Denying herself every gratification, her ‘earthly tabernacle’ was so reduced that she had to rely on others to feed her.
‘My flesh consumed upon my bones, bloody sweat pressed through the pores of my skin, and I became as helpless as an infant.’ As she fasted, ‘a kind of down came upon my skin’ – a symptom of malnutrition, elsewhere responsible for the animal appearance of feral children. In her personal wilderness, Ann ‘labored, in strong cries and groans to God, day and night, till my flesh wasted away, and I became like a skeleton’. It seemed she was about to make of her marriage bed a sepulchre. Reduced to a living memento mori, Ann was now granted an ‘astonishing vision of the Fall, in which Christ appeared to her in all his glory’. She was shown a ‘full and clear view of the mystery of iniquity … and of the very act of transgression committed by the first man and woman in the garden of Eden’. The impact of this sacred, sexual vision was to set Ann on a new and extraordinary course, one which would take her across the world. But others saw it differently, and in 1770 Ann was admitted to the asylum of the same hospital in which she worked.
Thus confined, as if with child, Ann faced her final confrontation. There, in the Lunatick Ward of the Manchester Infirmary, God revealed that she was the woman whose appearance was foretold in Revelations, ‘clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’, crying out ‘in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery’. At this Ann ‘felt unspeakable joy in God, and my flesh came upon me, like the flesh of an infant’. Released from the infirmary and out of madness, she was born again, just as two centuries later psychotics would be reborn through insulin coma or electrical therapies which themselves resembled the Shakers’ trembling rituals. In this rite of her own body, she had become a different being: the Bride of the Lamb, or simply Ann the Word; and as she emerged from her confinement, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, she asserted her power over her mentors, the Wardleys.
It was a religious coup in which Ann installed her own followers, among them her brother William, a former cavalry officer, a tall, powerfully-built young man who would act as Ann’s protector and yet who would also acknowledge her as his mother. As the new figurehead of the Shakers, Ann pursued their principles, taken from the Pentecostal or Primitive church: communal property, celibacy, pacifism, self government and power over disease. As with her familial conflicts, these claims enraged the mob, threatened by the promise that they might be saved if they too rejected sex. One of Ann’s own brothers took a broomstick to his sister: ‘He then beat me over my face and nose, with his staff, till one end of it was much splintered. But I sensibly felt and saw bright rays of the glory of God, pass between my face and his staff, which shielded off the blows, so that he had to stop and call for drink.’ Having refreshed himself, he resumed his assault, and yet a spiritual souffle infused Ann: ‘While he continued striking, I felt my breath, like healing balsam, streaming from my mouth and nose, which healed me, so that I felt no harm from his stroke, but he was out of breath, like one which had been running a race.’ His breath was merely human; Ann’s, divine.
Like the Camisards, the Shakers moved by night to safe houses, chanting as they went, their leader miraculously preserved as though enveloped in some sacred bubble; when being stoned by the mob, Ann was ‘surrounded by the presence of God to such an effect that she felt joy and comfort while her unprotected enemies were utterly confused and distressed’. On another occasion, after ‘wilfully and contemptuously’ haranguing a Manchester congregation, Ann was interrogated by the church authorities who, she claimed, threatened to brand her cheeks and bore her blasphemous tongue with a hot iron – an attack which echoed the punishment meted out to James Nayler and portended Mary Ann’s paralysed lips, as if the word of God were as much an affliction as a blessing. And like Mary Ann, Ann Lee too had her would-be assassin: one Elizabeth Bishop, who declared she wished to shoot Ann with