England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia - Philip Hoare

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the subjects of religious persecution.’ Leggatt and Brooks were each fined 1s and 12s 8d costs.

      But a curious sidelight is revealed by the census: Leggatt was the nineteen-year-old stepson of a David Spall. Not only was he related to the Spalls, who had converted to Girlingism, but in the same village, Charsfield, his forty-six-year-old uncle, also a shoemaker, was a minister at the Baptist chapel. Meanwhile, Henry Osborne would marry Eliza Barham, his second wife, whose kinsman had harried Leonard Benham. This was a close-knit, internecine society whose families had been divided by faith, and it is not hard to see, in this light, why the reaction was so extreme in rural Suffolk: Girlingism pitted brother against brother, sister against sister, and Mary Ann had exhausted the temper of the county. She would claim that a new vision prompted her departure, but the threat of violence was a forceful factor, while an invitation from an elder of the Bible Christians, who had asked her to preach in London, provided a good excuse to leave. Or perhaps, as the sea ate away at the Suffolk coast, she too was in retreat from its depredations, seeking a new life and a new communion in the ever-growing metropolis. Whatever her reasons, that summer of 1871 – which would prove to be a heady season for Victorian utopians – Mary Ann, her flaxen-haired chorister Eliza and her pugilistic cobbler Harry, left Suffolk to take on the capital itself.

       TWO

       Turning the World Upside-Down

      These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also …

      Acts of the Apostles, 17:6

      

      Each day in London, I walk over a path of broken gravestones, slippery with moss and imprinted with the sooty shadows of long-decayed leaves. Most of the inscriptions have been eroded over the years, but one word remains –

       Memory

      – and every time I walk over it, the letters are slowly reduced by an infinite degree.

      Bunhill Fields is a residual city square of lawn and plane trees, enclosed by tall buildings, as though part of the forest had been left behind as a museum of extinct specimens. But the reason for the survival of this ancient site is evident from its original, uncorrupted name: Bone Hill. Since 1315, layer upon layer of London’s dead have been laid here, a compost of 123,000 bodies. During the pestilence of 1665, Bunhill was registered as a plague pit; instead it became a burial place for religious dissenters, who chose this unconsecrated ground beyond the city walls. Its tight-packed headstones, obelisks and urns mark the resting place of John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe and Isaac Watts. William Blake is also interred here, although his bones do not lie under his memorial, but in an unmarked part of the cemetery nine feet down in a common grave, as if even now, the mystic who saw angels in the trees of Peckham Rye and who lived in the poverty of Jesus remains as elusive as his visions.

      This is a shadowy place, even at noon. Over one grave grows an oddly suburban privet hedge, trimmed in the shape of a table-top tomb; some stones assume the shape of coffins themselves, while others mimic Egyptian temples. They bear laconic elegies – Affection Weeps – Heaven Rejoices – or more morbid epitaphs:

Here lyes Dame Mary Page on In 67 months she was tapd 66 times
Relict of Sir Gregory Page Bart one side Had taken away 240 gallons of water
She departed this life March 4 1728 and on Without ever reping at her case
In the 50th Year of her age the other Or fearing the operation.

      the unfortunate Dame being a victim of dropsy. But perhaps the most famous presence here is buried on the other side of the City Road, where Wesley lies next to his house and chapel. From there pilgrim tourists spill out into the narrow alley that runs through Bunhill, mingling with the office workers taking a shortcut through the necropolis, all of them unaware that these fields once witnessed sensational events.

      

      On 15 September 1784, the first hot-air balloon to ascend from English soil rose from the Artillery Ground abutting Bunhill Fields. It was piloted by Vincent Lunardi and watched by the Prince of Wales and 150,000 others. Monsieur Lunardi ate chicken and drank wine as he surveyed the scene from his gondola, the first to broach the space above London and look down on its warrens of streets and churches. It was an experience for which history had not prepared him, seeing a city

      

      so reduced on the great scale before me, that I can find no simile to convey an idea of it. I could distinguish Saint Paul’s and other churches, from the houses. I saw streets as lines, all animated with beings, whom I knew to be men and women, but which I should otherwise have had a difficulty in describing. It was an enormous bee-hive, but the industry of it was suspended. All the moving mass seemed to have no object but myself, and the transition from the suspicion, and perhaps contempt of the preceding hour, to the affectionate transport, admiration and glory of the present moment, was not without its effect on my mind.

      Lunardi’s view was that of the eye of God; in his ascent, he seemed to have broken some natural law and assumed the divine, looking down on this vast still life, its numinosity directed by himself. This was eighteenth-century science fiction, a triumph of technology over nature; confirmation of an age in which Man took central stage and perhaps even superseded the Creator Himself. It was also a public spectacle: Lunardi’s vehicle was exhibited in the Pantheon, Oxford Street’s hall of brash attraction, and drew great crowds, some sporting the latest fashion in balloon hats; even Blake was inspired by Lunardi to write his verse ‘An Island in the Moon’. The new invention caught the imagination of the young Shelley, too, who saw it as a means of discovery, both physical and philosophical –

      

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      The balloon has not yet received the perfection of which it is surely capable … Why are we still so ignorant of the interior of Africa? – why do we not despatch intrepid aeronauts to cross it in every direction, and to survey the whole peninsula in a few weeks? The shadow of the first balloon, which a vertical sun would project precisely underneath it, as it glided silently over that hitherto unhappy country, would virtually emancipate every slave, and would annihilate slavery for ever.

      – but his optimism was counterpointed by Horace Walpole, who hoped that

      

      …these new mechanical meteors will prove only playthings for the learned and idle, and not be converted into new engines of destruction to the human race, as is so often the case of refinements or discoveries in science. The wicked wit of man always studies to apply the result of talents to enslaving, destroying, or cheating his fellow creatures. Could we reach the moon, we should think of reducing it to a province of some European kingdom.

      Walpole’s vision presaged Zeppelin raids and firestorms; Shelley’s, a socialist utopia. Later, stranded in Devon yet keen to pursue his radical campaigns, the poet made miniature silk balloons and sent them over the moors laden with his Declaration of Rights, little airborne devices of sedition suspended by spirit

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