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

Hoare, Philip

3.81

27 ratings by Goodreads

9780007159109: England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0007159102 ISBN 13: 9780007159109

Publisher: Fourth Estate, 2005

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A kaleidoscopic story of myth, Spiritualism, and the Victorian search for Utopia from one of the brightest and most original non-fiction writers at work today.

In 1872 there was a bizarre eruption of religious mania in Hampshire’s New Forest. Its leader was Mary Ann Girling, a Suffolk farmer's daughter who claimed to be the female Christ and whose sect, the Children of God, lived in imminent anticipation of the Millennium. It was rumoured that Mrs Girling mesmerised her supporters, literally hypnotising them to keep them in her power, other reports claimed that the sect danced naked, and murdered their illegitimate offspring in their Utopian home at 'New Forest Lodge.'

Through Mary Ann's story and the spiritual vortex around her, Philip Hoare takes us deeper into the pagan heart of the New Forest.

In the neighbouring village of Sway, an eccentric barrister, Andrew Peterson, conducted s�ances in which the spirit of Christopher Wren instructed Peterson to build a 300 foot concrete tower to alleviate local unemployment. Wren, although dead for two centuries, even issued Peterson with the exact plans for the foundations and the formula for the concrete. It rose like some spiritualist lighthouse towering over the trees, and looming over the Shaker encampment and Mrs Girling's Children of God.

At the same time, on the other side of the forest, in the grand country house of the Cowper-Temples, further experiments into the realms of the Victorian uncanny were under way. William Cowper-Temple, a supporter of Mary Ann Girling, vegetarian, anti-blood sport activist and member of Parliament, had joined his wife Georgiana in her Spiritualist quest. A third pair of hands came to table, those of John Ruskin – the great Victorian artist, scientist, poet and philosopher – who sought the dead spirit of his beloved Rose La Touche. His explorations into the after-life would eventually send him insane.

Through this unique biography of the New Forest Philip Hoare paints a strange, and little-known, portrait of Victorian England – a fascinating story of disorder in an avowed age of reason.

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Review:

'This is a terrific idiosyncratic piece of popular history.’ Sunday Times

‘Philip Hoare has written of Mary Ann Girling with awe and respect' Craig Brown.’ Mail on Sunday

'A rich and rewarding account of Victorian religious cults.' Independent on Sunday

‘The book reveals an unglimpsed Victorian England – one pre-figured, perhaps, in late Dickens – a queasily halluncinatory, twilight place' Guardian

‘A compelling history.’ Scotland on Sunday

‘Philip Hoare’s writing is quite untrammelled by convention and opens up astonishing views at every turn.’ W.G. Sebald

About the Author:

Philip Hoare was born and brought up in Southampton. He is the author of four previous books: Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990), Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), Wilde's Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy & the First World War (1997), and Spike Island: Memories of a Military Hospital (2001). Philip is a regular contributor to television, radio and print media, reviewing for the Independent, Observer and the TLS. His film on Hampshire for BBC 2's 'Travels with Pevsner' was acclaimed as 'masterful' by the Daily Telegraph. Philip has also curated an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and has spoken at literary festivals in Birmingham, Cheltenham and Charleston, at the National Portrait and Tate galleries, and the Royal Festival Hall.

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