Not since Thomas More’s Island of Utopia had paradise been so specifically charted. And such were these promises, so precise and so wonderful, that in an industrial century longing for its own lost Eden, Fourierism was taken up with a wild popularity. Brook Farm itself became a phalanx, but in the process lost its intellectual sheen: the transcendentalists stopped coming, and the farm burnt down. Meanwhile, part of New York State was declared a Burnt Over Region through which revivalism had raged, leaving behind the stubble of faith. From this eschatological geography – from the Great Awakening to the New Light Stir and now this incindered zone – a gothic New England was created, evoked in Hawthorne’s Shaker Bridal, The Blithedale Romance and The House of the Seven Gables. The latter was set in his hometown of Salem, with its ‘Daguerreotypist’ as a latter-day witch, a photographer-radical suspected of practising animal magnetism and who had ‘the strangest companions imaginable; – men with long beards, and dressed in linen blouses, and other such new-fangled and ill-fitting garments; –… who acknowledged no law and ate no solid food, but lived on the scent of other people’s cookery, and turned up their noses at the fare’; while in Moby-Dick, Melville depicted the young ‘archangel Gabriel’ as a maniacal figure in a ‘cabalistically-cut coat of a faded walnut tinge’ who was ‘nurtured among the crazy society of Neskyuna Shakers’, and who declared the White Whale itself to be ‘the Shaker God incarnate’.
One New England sect truly prospered, however: John Humphrey Noyes’ Perfectionists or ‘Bible Communists’. In 1834 Noyes had announced that Christ had absolved him of sin, and that the Second Coming had actually occurred thirty years after the Saviour’s crucifixion. The Perfectionists were now living in a state of regenerated innocence – ‘In a holy community, there is no more reason why sexual intercourse should be restrained by law, than why eating and drinking should be’ – and where the Shakers sublimated desire in the dance, Noyes liberated women via coitus reservatus. He even envisaged a kind of early eugenicism by preaching against ‘random procreation’. Members lived in a centrally-heated Mansion House at Oneida in New York State, with a visitor’s parlour and a library which contained the latest works by Huxley and Darwin. Next door there was a school, photographic and chemistry laboratories, and a printing press producing the weekly Circular, with mock ‘classifieds’ advertising ‘Shares of Second-Coming Stock’. Entertainment was provided by an orchestra, with a stereopticon for the children. Inhabitants rose when they liked, their workload lightened by hired labour. From its graceful lawns, Oneida presented a civilised image, with men in suits and women in liberated short skirts and bloomers; only the notion of radical sexual practices lent an edge to such genteel scenes.
… Considering the poverty of Pekin, the beggary in Constantinople, the infanticide in Paris, the political corruption in New York, and the fifty thousand thieves, one hundred thousand prostitutes, and one hundred and sixty-five thousand paupers of London, is it strange that noble souls in all lands yearn for social reconstruction? … Are not present political and social systems falling to pieces? What mean their panics, strikes, internationales, trades’ unions, and co-operative fraternities? Does not Whittier, writing of recurrent cycles, say ‘The new is old, the old is new?’
‘J. M. Peebles on Robert Owen’, Human Nature, June 1874
At the end of the twentieth century, I visited a monastery on the Isle of Wight. Quarr Abbey, close to Victoria’s retreat at Osborne, was constructed in 1911 to a modern design by one of its own brothers, Dom Paul Bellot, employing Belgian bricks and three hundred builders. Reached by a tree-lined avenue and surrounded by walled orchards, it lies on the shores of an island remaindered in time; a perpetually sunlit place where at any moment I might see a 1960s car, laden with my own family, en route for our holiday in a converted railway carriage around which the bats flew at night while the incandescent, moth-wing gas mantles glowed inside.
At Quarr, the monks rise in the dark to sing their divine office, and work until it is time to eat their high-ceilinged refectory at bare wooden tables, facing across a space from which the outside world is proscribed. As they serve themselves soup and pale cider from their orchards, an ancient silence seems to reside in the building itself. Their black habits seem to be from some remote past, too, but underneath they wear trainers on their feet.
For our rational age, faith is problematic. We find fervour suspicious; but perhaps you need faith to see. From Plato’s Atlantis to Thomas More’s u-topos and Fourier’s phalanxes, Utopia was ever a human ideal: its hope is one of the appeals of religion, for that is where paradise lies. But paradises are lost, too, and by its very perfection, Utopia’s history is a virtual one, to be created out of a metaphorical wilderness. Crowded nineteenth-century England, its primal forests felled long ago, was constricted and controlled; conversely, the vast reaches of America allowed for adventure. But it too was being privatised and industrialised, and the attraction of such sects began to pall in inverse proportion to the inexorable pull of capital. The new republic’s economic expansion reined in its religious experiments by the simple expedient of the equally expanding price of land. Utopia was priced out of the market, and among those to suffer in the exchange were the Shakers, their decline an ironic result of the progress which they had embraced as inventors of the washing machine and the clothes pin. At their peak in 1840 there were six thousand Shakers in America; by the end of the century that number would be reduced to just one thousand. The United Society of Believers had been superseded by the United States of America, and as the secular replaced the sacred, a new revival was required: one which would withstand the test of an industrial age, yet which could draw on the passion of Mother Ann’s Work. And if anyone could save Shakerism from decay, it was Frederick Evans.
Born in Worcester, England, in 1810, Evans, the former Owenite, would become the intellectual face of Shakerism, drawing radical strength from the virtues of his plain-clad sisters and brothers: ‘To the mind of the simple, unsophisticated Shaker, it seems marvellously inconsistent … that more than one half the citizens should be disfranchised because they happen to be females … while still millions of other fellow-citizens are treated as property, because they chance to possess a darker-coloured skin than their cruel brethren.’ That these