Mary Ann now assumed the title of Mother, as had Ann Lee, an action which symbolically coincided with the conversion of her own son, William Walter, now seventeen, to the cause. The comparison with the Shakers was also underlined by two more new recruits: James Haase and Julia Wood, newly returned from Mount Lebanon. They were important additions. Haase brought his business sense to this English eruption of religious communism – perhaps with the prospect of gathering the Children of God for Elder Evans – while Miss Wood’s money would finance their establishment as a community. When told of the poverty of the followers back in Suffolk – where Mary Ann’s mission had continued in her absence, a kind of holding bay of the faithful as converts awaited her confirmation – Wood acquired a home for the Girlingites at 107 Battersea Bridge Road. Here, by the banks of the river Thames, was a London Mount Lebanon, founded by ‘the first twelve’, the dozen Suffolk elders who sought to follow the lives of the apostles. For their neighbours, however – who included the congregation of a Wesleyan chapel and William D. Sumner, a professor of music – the arrival of this commune, preceded by reports of riots and court cases, was probably as welcome as that of a bail hostel in a modern suburb.
In April 1872, Mrs Dawe, the wife of a mechanic living at 4 Agate Street, Walworth, told Lambeth court that her husband ‘had for some weeks belonged to the “Shakers”. He had not entirely left her, but had ceased cohabitation, and she believed he would shortly proceed with the party to America.’ The case was heard by Mr Chance, who was becoming all too familiar with south London’s sects (two months later he would direct one of the Peculiar People ‘to have his son vaccinated on pain of a fine of 2/6’). The magistrate told Mrs Dawe that he could hardly interfere between man and wife, despite her protests: ‘What she had witnessed on Sunday week, when she went with her husband, was quite shocking, and enough to outrage any decent woman. She saw men and women embracing one another for a quarter of an hour at a time …’ When her husband came home, he ‘looked vacant, and seemed lost, and took no notice of anything. He had what the “Shakers” called “died”, and had passed from death to “newness of life”,’ and she feared he was about to leave for America.
The recruitment of Evans’ erstwhile acolytes seemed to encourage such ideas: the lure of the New World as a religious refuge held as good in the 1870s as it had in the 1770s, and perhaps – with Julia Wood’s patronage – Mary Ann even considered a Girlingite exodus across the Atlantic, just as John Hocknell had financed the Shakers’ move. In the event, however, theirs was only a trek up the Old Kent Road. The equally familiar figure of Inspector Fife told the court that the sect had ‘received notice to leave Sunderland Street, and on Thursday would open Milton Hall, near a railway station’.
Although he would remain with Mary Ann for the next ten years at least, James Haase was ambivalent about Girlingism, as if he could not quite bring himself to embrace its more extreme tenets. That May, a labourer named John Tyseen was charged with using abusive language to Haase. In court Haase claimed that he was not a member of the group, and ‘did not altogether agree with the worship of dancing’. It was a disclaimer which, with its overtones of Peter’s denial of Christ, seemed to echo Mary Ann’s generally equivocal relationship to the Shakers. What did she know of the American sect with which she was associated? Did she draw on their beliefs in the same way as she had parasitised the Peculiar People? Her new recruits must have discussed their experiences at Mount Lebanon with Mary Ann; it is even possible that she had attended one of Evans’ lectures, although there is no trace of any encounter. The connexion, as indisputable as it is in one respect, is at the same time comprehensively denied. It is one reason why Mary Ann remains such an elusive figure.
Even now, the influence of the Shakers on Girlingism is impossible to pin down. The English sect left almost no records of its own, and those accounts which survive in the press are often wanton in their reporting, compounding the errors of others. In the search for sensation, the complicated lines of millenarian genealogy were obscured, not least through Mary Ann’s own publicity-worthy assertions. For editors, it was easy to associate the two sects, especially as Mary Ann’s arrival in London had coincided with the advent of Elder Evans; just as Girlingism was associated with spiritualism, for the same reasons. In the wake of Hepworth Dixon’s New America and the comic sketches of Artemus Ward – a popular cartoonist who had also visited the Shakers – it was assumed Mary Ann was a Shaker and perhaps even American herself. The confusion was encouraged by the way in which the Girlingites were seen through the filter of popular culture, and remarks about Mary Ann’s apparently American accent and dress and the transatlantic mannerisms of her followers were rooted in this media confusion.
Even to informed observers, it seemed plain that Girlingism drew on the same kind of itinerant preachers and radical sectaries who had sought refuge in the New World. Ann Lee’s struggle had been one of Manichean polarities, a narrative of pioneering faith. Mary Ann’s fate, as related in the press, would follow a similar trajectory. But hers was a distorted drama enacted, not in a colonial wilderness, but under the sophisticated surveillance of the imperial metropolis. Her mission was compromised by the burgeoning press and accelerating means of communication, as if the century itself sped her story to its inevitable dénouement.
Back at Shaker headquarters, word of Mary Ann’s ambitions had reached the Society, which moved swiftly to deny the impostors, as The Times announced: ‘We have received from Elder Frederick W. Evans, of Mount Lebanon … a communication disclaiming on the part of his community all connexion with a sect known as “the Walworth Shakers”, but whose proper cognomen, according to Elder Evans, “would appear to be Jumpers or Bible Christians”.’ Evans may have been concerned at the effect on his own recruitment drive, but his protest underlined other paradoxes. Where the Americans had become regularised in their rituals, the Girlingites were wilder, more passionate, like the early Shakers, or the Quakers. It was as if they were re-enacting Mother Ann’s Work – and gaining the kind of support which Evans had hoped for. Indeed, had Girlingism been a little more practical, its satellite communities, which would spring up in the Isle of Wight and Bristol, might have seen a national network to rival the Shaker families of America. ‘Had she been supported by men of similar calibre to those who followed Ann Lee, and Joanna Southcott, there can be no doubt but that her work would have continued like the Shakers, and the Christian Israelites,’ observed one contemporary.
But the times were already moving too fast. From the outset there was a sense of a lost cause to Mary Ann’s mission, undermined, ironically, by her distinct lack of insight and administrative ability: ‘she … would not permit any interference with her absolute rule of affairs, or allow any practical person to organise the Family on sound economic principles’. The chaos in the Walworth arch had been emblematic of the essential anarchy of the Children of God. They looked forward to the millennium, but not to the immediate future. Instead, Mary Ann insisted on her immortality – an ultimately fatal mechanism – and at the same time rejected identification with the Shakers: to do otherwise would be to acknowledge another messiah. It was a crucial component in the creation of Mary Ann’s myth: she sought to obscure parallels and influences in order to make her own appearance that much more remarkable (while on a personal level, she may have been envious of Evans and antipathetic towards his masculine erudition). Although Mary Ann seemed at times to be a reincarnation of Ann Lee – and all the other prophetesses before her – for her onceorphaned, now reborn Children, there was only one Mother. And so it would remain, until they were made orphans once more.
It was left to Julia Wood, who had first-hand knowledge of both creeds, to make the distinctions. ‘The American Shakers believe in Christ only as a prophet and a great man,’ she told The Times, ‘the followers of Girling believe in Him as God-man.’ ‘On the other hand,’ observed the newspaper, ‘dancing, celibacy, and community of goods are common to both