The History of a Modern Millennial Movement

The Southcottians

Jane Shaw, Philip Lockley, Jane Shaw, Philip Lockley

• Editorial: I.B. Tauris
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786721907
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: 20th Century History

A feverish expectation of the end of the world seems an unlikely accompaniment to middle-class respectability. But it was precisely her interest in millennial thinking that led Jane Shaw to a group of genteel terraced townhouses in the English county town of Bedford. Inside their unassuming grey-brick exteriors Shaw found something extraordinary. For here, within the 'Ark', lived two members of the Panacea Society, last survivors of the remaining Southcottian prophetic communities in Britain. And these individuals were the heirs to a rich archive charting not just their own apocalyptic sect, but also the histories of the many groups and their leaders who from the early nineteenth century onwards had followed the beliefs of the self-styled prophetess and prospective mother of the Messiah ('Shiloh'), Joanna Southcott, who died in 1814. Placing its subjects in a global context, this is the first book to explore the religious thinking of all the Southcottians. It reveals a transnational movement with striking and innovative ideas: not just about prophecy and the coming apocalypse, but also about politics, gender, class and authority.
The volume will sell to scholars and students of religion and cultural studies as well as social history.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING THE SOUTHCOTTIANS

Jane Shaw and Philip Lockley

Joanna Southcott was born in obscurity on a tenant farm in east Devon in 1750. She died 64 years later in respectable rooms off London’s Baker Street, one of the most well-known women in England. Southcott’s national notoriety in the Regency age stemmed from her unique popularity as a female prophet – a claimant to direct communication with God and the revered leader of a sizeable religious movement. Since 1801, Southcott’s written prophecies of an approaching millennial age had been published and circulated across England, securing her extensive public attention. Committed followers met in houses, meeting rooms and eventually their own chapels, recognising Southcott as an inspired figure, divinely chosen to prepare their nation for the latter days.

In 1814, Southcott’s final year, she issued her most notorious prophecy: despite being a virgin in her sixties, she would soon give birth to a messiah to be called ‘Shiloh’. When several doctors confirmed the signs of pregnancy, Southcott became a media sensation – her story carried in newspapers across Britain. Thousands of followers made detailed preparations for the Shiloh child, who was understood to be an earthly ruler to precede the Second Coming of Christ. In the final months of 1814, the dates of the expected birth slipped by, until Southcott’s place of confinement in London became, instead, her deathbed on 27 December 1814.

This dramatic denouement marked not the end of the Southcottian story, but merely the closing of an early chapter. For, in the following two centuries, a durable and dynamic religious tradition lived on, eventually spreading to much of the English-speaking world. After 1814, surviving Southcottians divided over the degree to which they believed Southcott was a uniquely inspired figure. One tradition stood by Southcott’s spirit-filled theology exactly as she had delivered it, and called themselves ‘Old Southcottians’. An alternative tradition emerged which recognised a series of prophets, of which Southcott was just one. This was the Southcottian ‘Visitation’, and it variously recognised, as Southcott’s successors, George Turner, William Shaw, John Wroe and James Jezreel in the nineteenth century, and Mary and Benjamin Purnell and Mabel Barltrop in the twentieth century. Many of these prophets gathered new adherents and built communities that signified the beginning of the fulfilment of the millennial hopes at the heart of their evolving theologies. Their followers were found across Britain and the United States, in corners of the British settler empire including Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and even parts of Europe. Several gave their followers new names – such as ‘Israelites’, ‘the New and Latter House of Israel’ and ‘The Panacea Society’. And yet all remained ‘Southcottians’. By the early twentieth century, Southcottians, in their various guises and forms, had become a modern millennial movement with global aspirations.

The Oxford Prophecy Project

In September 2001, Jane Shaw visited the Panacea Society for the first time: this was the last of the Southcottian groups to emerge, and had a thriving membership in the 1920s and 1930s. On subsequent visits, she was invited to look at some of the Society’s papers, which were vast, uncatalogued and kept in paper bags, boxes and furniture spread around the Society’s headquarters in Bedford, England.¹ Realising the significance of these materials, Shaw worked with the surviving members and the Society’s Administrator to see how best the papers and material culture of the Society could be catalogued, preserved and made accessible to scholars and other serious enquirers.

Out of this, the Oxford Prophecy Project was born. Co-directed by Christopher Rowland and Jane Shaw, who were both at that time teaching at the University of Oxford, the Project was funded by the Panacea Charitable Trust and oversaw both the cataloguing of the archive and the production of a body of scholarship on all the Southcottian prophets and communities up to (but not including) the Panacea Society. The Oxford Prophecy Project involved graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, and some research assistants. The project’s work also led to the formation of the Panacea Museum; and Philip Lockley was especially involved in the development of that project.

The articles and books produced by the Oxford Prophecy Project are listed at the end of this volume. This book is a distillation of the work produced by the Oxford Prophecy Project and those related to it by virtue of their research interests.

Southcottianism and Millennial Studies

Southcottianism was a form of millennialism – a belief centred on the expectation of an approaching ‘millennium’, or thousand years of peace and harmony on earth. As such, Southcottianism and its academic appraisal may be related to the increasingly well-defined and distinctive discourse of ‘millennial studies’.² Ever since Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) paralleled the social and psychological outcomes of medieval messianic expectations with Nazism and Communism in twentieth-century Europe, the historic and contemporary phenomenon of millennialism has captured spectacularly diverse attention.³ For a postwar generation of Marxist scholars, historic millenarians represented ‘archaic forms of social movement’, engaging examples of ‘pre-political’ popular protest and burgeoning class-consciousness, which supposedly foreshadowed the birth of the modern, ‘scientific’ ideology of socialism.⁴ From the 1970s, scholars of sociology, anthropology, the history of ideas and religion turned their attention to more recent, often more politically conservative, millennial traditions, especially those formed as new religious movements or within fundamentalist evangelicalism.⁵ From this scholarly trend, as well as a series of current political and cultural events (including the catastrophic mishandling of confrontations with contemporary millennial groups such as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993), distinctive foci emerged within the field towards the close of the twentieth century – on millennialism and violence, on millennialism and national or racial purity, on millennialism and the evangelical apocalyptic imagination.⁶ Most recently – since 2011 especially – significant efforts have been made to balance this thematic emphasis with broad and definitive ‘state-of-the-discipline’ studies – most notably Richard Landes’ Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience and Catherine Wessinger’s edited Oxford Handbook of Millennialism.⁷

Southcottianism has rarely featured in works within this recognisable millennial studies milieu. The ‘deluded follower of Joanna Southcott’ was name-checked in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class – a prominent work advancing Marxist interpretations of millennialism.⁸ Southcottians gained some attention in subsequent works on millennialism and the history of ideas.⁹ However, the Southcottian tradition, across its 200-year history, has notably little relation to most of the themes drawing the recent focus of millennialism scholars – in particular, neither violence nor the dispensationalist theology of ‘the rapture’ popular among fundamentalist evangelicals.¹⁰ Southcottian millennial beliefs never produced any form of religious body that advocated or anticipated the use of violence to further their beliefs or aims. Southcottian theology consistently emphasised that the earth will be the location of the millennial state – that the messiah will return to this earth, not that the saints will be ‘raptured’ away beforehand.¹¹

Instead, Southcottians have received their most significant existing scholarly attention from historians, principally of the nineteenth century, and largely from the perspectives of social, cultural and gender history. E. P. Thompson’s 1960s interpretation of the Southcottian movement as a significant outcome of the culture of English working people in the early industrial period was largely revised in the 1970s and 1980s, in prominent works by J. F. C. Harrison, Barbara Taylor and Iain McCalman.¹² Southcott herself, along with her popular following up to 1815, attracted a focused study by the social historian James Hopkins in 1982.¹³ More recent studies of culture and gender in Southcott’s period by Anna Clark and Susan Juster have featured further interpretations of the millennial movement.¹⁴ Before the Oxford Prophecy Project, later manifestations of the Southcottian movement tended not to attract academic attention, but generated more popular historical studies.¹⁵ Exceptions to this attended to Southcottian developments in the United States and Australia.¹⁶ The sole existing study of the entire Southcottian tradition until the present collection was by a retired Anglican clergyman, G. R. Balleine, in the 1950s, and published for a popular market.¹⁷

The Southcottian movement has thus been approached much more frequently as a variety of English popular religion in the first decades of modernity rather than as a distinctive and persistent tradition of millennialism, with its own evolving theology and successful missionary spread across much of the English-speaking world. Southcottianism has notably received minimal consideration from academic theology. Where Southcottian beliefs have been summarised in historical works, interpretations of both primary prophetic texts and broader concepts common to millennial groups have largely relied on sociological, anthropological or even psychological theory.¹⁸ Until the Oxford Prophecy Project, Southcottianism had never been subjected to critical, detailed study from a theological perspective, despite its relevance to the reception history of the Bible, to the development of doctrinal heterodoxy and to Church history in the English-speaking world. Arguably, this neglect of theology has hindered the scholarly understanding of Southcottianism and its adherents significantly. After all, theology – or how God is talked about, conceptualised and understood to relate to humanity and the world – lay at the very centre of this movement, and was invariably the subject of greatest concern to Southcottians themselves.

Most Southcottians were indeed, as J. F. C. Harrison once acknowledged, ‘sincere, earnest Christians, dependent for guidance on a literal interpretation of the Bible’.¹⁹ And yet this definition only goes so far in explaining dimensions of the Southcottian lived experience and worldview. Southcottians also believed in what may be termed the direct interaction between the divine and human worlds – in present, specific communication from the Christian God to inspired individuals, the modern prophets of the Visitation. The Christian Bible was unquestionably central to Southcottian beliefs, and yet it was also taken up, leafed, recited and ingested in creative and unorthodox ways which recognised the paradoxes in its mystery and message.²⁰ As an articulate Southcottian, Edward Lees, wrote in 1827: ‘We take the Scriptures as the foundation of the articles of our faith, and believe its divine authority in common with all Christians.’²¹ And yet, Lees went on to point out:

the great difference betwixt us consists in the apprehension and application of those truths contained in the Scriptures […] and this information we profess to have, not from men, but from the same source, and by the same means, as the truths in question were first communicated to man.²²

All Southcottians, whether they believed in one prophet or a series of prophets, each believed that the God who had first inspired the Bible – ‘the same source’ – had now inspired a chosen individual or individuals in the modern age – ‘by the same means’ – so that the Bible’s true message might be finally known. ‘And we believe God is doing this in mercy to his creatures’, Edward Lees concluded, ‘preparatory to the establishment of universal good, and the removal of evil.’²³ The inspiration of modern prophets, the divine interaction with humanity, and the imminence of the millennial moment, were therefore bound up together in a single, multivalent comprehension of the world.

Such a heterodox Christian worldview requires the conceptual tools of Christian theology – or, at the very least, sufficient theological literacy – if it is to be explained and understood today in anything more than superficial or reductive terms. This is the approach that the Prophecy Project and this book have sought to take. By taking the theology of Southcottians in a sense ‘seriously’ – by subjecting the surviving writings and other material productions of the movement to close reading and interpretation – dimensions of the thought and intentions of this once dynamic religious movement have been uncovered and explicated in academic terms for the first time.

A further methodological priority of the Prophecy Project, held in tension with the theological approach, has been the rigorous historical and cultural analysis of the religious tradition on the basis of archival evidence – principally, indeed, the manuscript and print archives generated by Southcottians themselves. Among the many, many millennial groups in Christian history, Southcottianism is unusual for the quality, quantity and availability of its surviving archive sources. The opening of the Panacea Society archive for the benefit of Prophecy Project scholars was one, very significant, addition to a global collection of material, scattered across a range of institutions.²⁴ Members of the Prophecy Project utilised and cross-compared many of these collections in the course of their research. The result is a series of studies examining branches and periods of a millennial tradition in rare detail.

This focused, ‘historical–theological’ method for approaching a form of Christian millennialism is surprisingly at odds with a predominant trend in the wider millennial studies discourse within which Southcottians have so infrequently featured. This trend identifies millennialism, as Crawford Gribben has put it, ‘in structural rather than theological terms’.²⁵ Catherine Wessinger’s massive Oxford Handbook collection and Richard Landes’ Heaven on Earth each embody this approach to its fullest extent: they explicitly view millennialism as a phenomenon of cross-cultural and pan-religious significance – a tendency autonomous from the internal dynamics of, for instance, Christian theology.²⁶ In these major works, examples of millennialis...