Born before Victoria ascended the throne, Mary Ann came into a very different world to the one she would leave six decades later. ‘It was only yesterday, but what a gulf between now and then’, wrote William Makepeace Thackeray in 1860, looking back on his childhood. ‘Then was the old world. Stage-coaches … highwaymen, Druids, Ancient Britons … all these belong to the old period … We who lived before railways and survive out of the ancient world, are like Father Noah and his family out of the Ark.’ This often flooded corner of England was a remote, self-sufficient community in which lives were lived within themselves, as the reiteration of Suffolk surnames entered in the census and carved on village tombstones – Benham and Folkard, Todd and Barham, Girling and Clouting – suggest.
The Cloutings’ was certainly a crowded household. The first modern census, taken in 1841 when Mary Ann was fourteen, records that her father, William, and mother Emma (née Gibbs, and born in nearby Benhall), were then both thirty-five. Mary Ann had five younger brothers: John, aged twelve, Robert, ten, William, eight, Henry, six, and Charles, one; her only sister, Emma, was four. Later two more girls, Jane and Susan, would be born, along with another boy, Mark. They lived in a village of some sixty houses with a population of about three hundred, most of whose men were farm labourers like William Clouting, or blacksmiths, coachmen or wheelwrights. Like many such settlements, it had grown up in a haphazard fashion along the road, and its life centred around the parish church and its vicar, John Crabbe, the Red Lion Inn and its patrons, and the Norths of Glemham Hall; a semi-feudal existence which depended on a good harvest and the ability to pay the rent.
Yet even this rural backwater was moving into the modern world. In the ‘Hungry Forties’ of bad harvests and poverty, the People’s Charter for universal sufferage became an emblem of the stirring power of the working class. In 1845 the Chartists’ champion, Feargus O’Connor, set up small-holdings in which Shelley’s ‘helots of luxury’ could escape industrial tyranny and unemployment in a bid for self-sufficiency; at the same time, railways and new roads spread across the country and provided another network for social change. Meanwhile the Anglican church, despite a similar boom in construction, was threatened by an equivalent growth in nonconformism and a decline in belief. In March 1851, the first religious census held in Britain found that of a population of 17,927,609, fewer than half, 7,261,032, attended at Divine Service in chapels and churches; it was estimated that 5,288,294 people who could have gone to worship did not. While evangelism had touched the entire country in the 1830s, science would weaken orthodox religion. ‘It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,’ wrote W. H. Mallock in 1877. ‘One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying’.
Suffolk’s own Woodbridge Reporter noted, on the occasion of the laying of a foundation stone for a new Wesleyan chapel, that the town hardly lacked the ‘means for spiritual instruction. More than a century ago there dwelt in it Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and Sabbattarians, but whether these sects had any public accommodation for performing their religious duties … does not appear.’ Other eclectic beliefs had sprung up in East Anglia, such as the New Lights and the Old Lights, still there in the twentieth century, their black-bonneted adherents walking miles from outlying villages to spend the entire Sabbath day worshipping in their chapels. There were secular sects, too, such as the vegetarian colony which flourished in Stratford St Mary, near Ipswich, from 1848 to 1851, where cultivation of the land was combined with cultural pursuits and an interest in shorthand writing. But family memory indicates that the Cloutings were being drawn to Primitive Methodism, whose itinerant ministers were particularly active here; Mary Ann’s own younger brother Mark, a wheelwright, would become a preacher.
His sister, however – now a striking young woman, ‘impetuous, strong-willing and passionate, somewhat tall, and in figure well made’ – had had little education, and was said never to have read the Bible. She spent her early adolescence in domestic service to local families, and at a house on Woodbridge Road in Ipswich; later she learned the skills of a milliner and dressmaker, working for farmers’ wives and more well-to-do inhabitants of the district. Then, sometime in the 1850s, Mary Ann met – but apparently did not yet marry – George Stanton Girling.
Three years older than Mary Ann, George Girling was born in nearby Theberton, another small village, closer to the coast at Dunwich. His parents were menial, but if a photograph of his own son is any indication, he was a handsome man, and like others in the district, probably a ‘half and halfer’ – that is, he spent part of his time working on land, and part of it as a sailor. Perhaps that is one reason why they did not wed; or perhaps their union was recognised in some other, nonconformist fashion. While George was away at sea, Mary Ann continued to earn a living by dressmaking, but she seemed restless with her half-neglected married life, and ‘went forth in search of fresh and more congenial scenes’. Some reports claim that she made a living selling brandy and other spirits, ‘which she conveyed about surreptitiously, and of which she disposed as opportunity favoured’. Perhaps because of such less reputable interludes, there are great gaps in Mary Ann’s story – not least as self-told, or relayed second- or third-hand. What happened to her in the years between her meeting George and the beginning of her mission? Did she go to sea with him – perhaps even visit America, as some have suggested? Whatever course her life took until then, it was soon to alter in the most dramatic manner possible.
By now George Girling had become a fitter in an iron foundry in Ipswich, where the family name was and is well known: a 1920s edition of the Michelin Guide to Great Britain recommends the services of Girling & Dolan’s garage, and notes that the town was renowned for its agricultural implements. The company which employed George made ploughs, while traces of local history reveal other Girlings with occupations as disparate as farm labourers, police detectives and mariners. George and Mary Ann lived close to the docks in a terraced house on Arthur Street, with other iron fitters and mariners as neighbours; their daughter Mary Jane was born there on 6 September 1853. Two years later, at nearby Fore Street – one of Ipswich’s oldest thoroughfares, still partly lined with Tudor houses and then home to dressmakers, carpenters, pawnbrokers and makers of straw bonnets – Mary Ann had a son, William, on 27 December 1855. It was only on 2 May 1863 that the couple would be married, according to the rites of the Church of England, in Lowestoft – significantly not in their home town.
But these bare facts hide another story. It was claimed that Mary Ann had lost or miscarried several other children – one account puts the figure at as many as eight. Even in an age of high infant mortality this was unusual; and for some reason Mary Ann felt she was to blame. The bitter toll of dead infants turned her against religion, and for years she avoided any place of worship as melancholy overcame her. Then one day she went to a church – evidence suggests the great docklands parish church of St Clement’s, which towered over Fore Street and the river Orwell – and there heard words which comforted her soul. Convinced that her violent temper had brought judgement upon her, she joined the congregation and became a ‘female missionary’ – although she still yielded to her sin of rage. ‘It was after one of these outbursts that the climax came.’ For Mary Ann the dressmaker, the real and the imagined were about to be sewn together in a fantastic way, and in the process her body itself would be changed.
Years later Mary Ann would describe the precise moment at which the vision came to her, at the age of thirty-two (although some accounts put her age at twenty-one, others at thirty-seven). That night she lay restless in bed – perhaps in guilt for her ‘unsubdued temper’ – and after hours of misery, rose feeling wretched and began to