Southcottians in industrial society

Southcottianism is recognised to have originated in both the broad social circumstances of early nineteenth-century England and the individual experiences of a single woman. Joanna Southcott first claimed to receive communications from the ‘spirit of truth’ in 1792, informing her of an approaching apocalypse where satanic powers would be overthrown and a messiah would return to institute the millennium.Footnote ³⁰ Following this spirit's orders, Southcott spent a decade recording each prophecy received, identifying signs of the end in the contemporary events of war and famine, and predicting her own role in the eschatological drama to come. In 1802 she received national notice when her published writings gained an audience beyond Devon, first in London then in Yorkshire. A popular movement of thousands quickly recognised Southcott as a prophet chosen by God in the latter days, though for many she was not their first such inspired leader. In several regions Southcott's new adherents were longstanding followers of the incarcerated prophet of the 1790s, Richard Brothers;Footnote ³¹ others occupied the prophetic-preaching fringe of Methodism.Footnote ³² Before 1811 all Southcott's movement really constituted was a publishing empire (she had published sixty-five volumes of prophecies by 1814), a correspondence network between small house-groups, and a South London chapel.Footnote ³³ Between 1811 and 1814 a more formal national network of chapels developed in the wake of new licensing laws for religious dissent.Footnote ³⁴ The numbers engaged by Southcott's claims by this time are widely assumed to be in the tens of thousands, though a reliable total of those subscribing fully to Southcott's doctrines by 1814 is about 12,400.Footnote ³⁵

In March 1814 Southcott published her most notorious revelation – that she herself, aged sixty-four and still a virgin, would give birth to a messiah called Shiloh.Footnote ³⁶ Showing numerous signs of pregnancy, Southcott's case caused a media sensation, while her followers made detailed preparations for the literal child of Revelation's ‘woman clothed with the sun’.Footnote ³⁷ By January 1815 Southcott was dead and her movement splintered into sectarian networks divided by their explanations of what went wrong.Footnote ³⁸ Certainly many thousands retained belief in Southcott's prophecies and continued to await Shiloh's coming. A majority accepted successor prophets including George Turner (d.1821), John Wroe (1782–1863) and John ‘Zion’ Ward (1781–1837); a significant proportion refused to accept that Southcott's ‘visitation’ was continued in anyone. Despite their often bitter differences, these various branches made up a recognisable ‘Southcottian tradition’ for decades.

When seeking to define the people that belonged to this distinctive tradition in the nineteenth century, the most common evidence employed by historians is geographical location. Clusters of surviving antiquarian accounts of Southcottians and their meetings led Thompson to infer that the movement's strongest appeal was ‘among working people of the west and north’, most notably in Devon and Bristol, Lancashire and the Yorkshire West Riding.Footnote ³⁹ With this, Thompson linked Southcottian beliefs to the occupational group central to his study – the textile hand-workers. This vast group's embrace of either radical politics or visionary, emotional religion was explained by a collective experience of decline – in wage security, economic independence and social stability.Footnote ⁴⁰ Harrison's subsequent critique of Thompson's argument did not deny the persistent strength of Southcottianism in the North and West Country, but pointed to further strongholds in Birmingham and London. For Harrison, the evidence to confirm that Southcottians were indeed impoverished spinners or desperate weavers was ‘fragmentary and inconclusive’.Footnote ⁴¹ By contrast, a printed document identifying a group of thirty-four Birmingham Southcottians in 1844 indicated that most men were skilled metal-work artisans, and the women were ‘nurses, tailoresses, school teachers and servants’.Footnote ⁴² Hopkins's counter-case for the relative poverty of many Southcottians utilised more background evidence for economic distress at points of Southcott's popularity in Devon and London. In Devon, poor harvests and the on-going decline of the serge cloth industry greeted the appearance of Southcott's first publications. And, as McLeod's criticism highlighted, most recorded members of a London chapel who supplied their addresses lived in boroughs known for their poor neighbourhoods.Footnote ⁴³

The specific source that Hopkins used to identify Southcottian addresses also registered the names of 1,421 believers up to 1814.Footnote ⁴⁴ Two further sources beside it in the University of Texas archives listed over 5,000 more names from many provincial locations.Footnote ⁴⁵ Compiled in 1816 and 1818, and associated with Southcott's successor prophet, George Turner, these latter two sources are the basis of the most accurate maps of the spread of Southcottianism, from Plymouth to Newcastle, Kent to Cumberland.Footnote ⁴⁶ Despite all these names, few individual millenarians were identified by occupation or other data with confidence. The matching of names in contemporary trade directories was unreliable, as too many people in too many locations shared the same name.Footnote ⁴⁷ For this reason, Hopkins relied on background regional conditions to guide his conclusions, and Harrison, in turn, made use of an especially limited Birmingham sample, dated a full thirty years after Southcott's death.

Two new lists of early nineteenth-century Southcottians exist in the Panacea Society archives which are especially useful for revising this state of confusion over millenarian social identities and their relation to contemporary industrial conditions. The lists are registers of two communities of believers in the Yorkshire textile towns of Bradford and Huddersfield in 1821.Footnote ⁴⁸ A notable amount of information may be recovered about the historical persons named on these lists because they each record family details such as married couples’ names and ‘children's names of the believers’ with ages. The Bradford register further records ‘women's maiden names’, their parents’ names, and mothers’ maiden names. This data enables a more accurate tracing of locations and occupations than trade directories, as marriage and baptism records often detailed a village address and the man's/father's occupation.

In 1821 the Bradford Southcottian community numbered 128 adult believers and 209 children. Of the families with children, the settlement and occupations of thirty-four fathers (61 per cent) are traceable in the previous twenty years’ baptism records of parish churches and dissenting chapels in the area.Footnote ⁴⁹ A few families attended chapels where occupations were not recorded in ceremonial registers, while others did not give a confirmatory mother's name on the parish register.Footnote ⁵⁰

A clear majority of the families traced lived in townships outlying Bradford, including Great and Little Horton, Bowling, Wibsey and Tong. This population spread followed the contemporary pattern of the area.Footnote ⁵¹ The occupations of male Southcottians were also largely representative of the vicinity: the single most common profession was weaver (ten fathers), four were wool-combers, and another three termed themselves a clothier or ‘piecemaker’ – all roles in the region's worsted cloth industry.Footnote ⁵² Samuel Walker made combs used in the preparation of the wool required to produce worsteds.Footnote ⁵³ Seven fathers belonged to other artisan cloth trades: three were tailors, two stay-makers, one a breeches-maker, and one a stocking-maker.Footnote ⁵⁴ Three men were shoemakers.Footnote ⁵⁵ The minority of occupations not involving textiles included various grades of agricultural work: Thomas Ackroyde was a farmer, John Walton and Jonas Verity were husbandmen, and John Mitchell a labourer.Footnote ⁵⁶ Abraham Watmuff of Great Horton was a ‘driver’, a term probably relating to livestock.Footnote ⁵⁷ Two men were miners, most likely of coal as they lived at Bowling – the local source of coal for burgeoning steam processes.Footnote ⁵⁸

The work of the women named on the registers is harder to confirm, as the occupations of married mothers were not given in baptism records. Only one Southcottian woman's occupation is discernable from baptism forms, Milcah Elsworth of Thornton, who bore two sons apparently unmarried.Footnote ⁵⁹ Elsworth is recorded as a ‘spinster’ – a title which might appear to indicate her unmarried status, though has been taken in equivalent records to indicate a woman's occupation as a spinner of worsted yarn.Footnote ⁶⁰ Research on the West Riding suggests strongly that many Bradford women Southcottians married to weavers or clothiers would also have spun yarn. In wool textile production, unlike cotton, the cottage spinning-jenny remained a ‘women's technology’ for much of this early nineteenth-century period.Footnote ⁶¹ Women – and indeed children – were also known to participate in the same or complementary stages of cloth hand-production as the men in their household.Footnote ⁶²

The Huddersfield community of Southcottians in 1821 consisted of 103 adult believers, making up forty families with 149 children.Footnote ⁶³ The occupations of twenty-three of the forty fathers (58 per cent) were traced in contemporary records, though a significantly higher proportion (79 per cent) appear in baptism or naming records, with the difference not featuring their occupation.Footnote ⁶⁴ The families resided over a wide area in the Huddersfield region. In those townships closer to the town, such as Kirkheaton, Dalton and Lepton, there was significant uniformity in fathers’ occupations: every traced father (seventeen) termed himself a clothier in the baptism records of his children.Footnote ⁶⁵ The extent of regional specialisation in cloth manufacture by 1820 suggests that these men produced ‘fancy woollens’ – a high-grade woollen cloth.Footnote ⁶⁶ Here, women were also likely to hand-spin woollen yarn, as mechanised spinning processes came particularly slowly to woollens production.Footnote ⁶⁷ Some Southcottian women may also have been weavers, as an 1806 parliamentary woollen committee was informed that among clothiers in Yorkshire ‘wives and daughters as well as men used the loom in cottage industry’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The remaining traced families (including those for whom no occupation is recorded) lived between five and fifteen miles out from Huddersfield, in Mirfield, Flockton and Bretton, on less densely populated hilltops. Here, the six Southcottian fathers traced were three weavers, two agricultural labourers and a tailor.Footnote ⁶⁹

At first this new evidence appears to corroborate Thompson's original thesis: Pennine textile hand-workers, newly subject to a precarious wage-based system of combing, spinning and weaving in their own cottages, were drawn to Southcottian millenarian beliefs. However, more recent research on industrialisation in this period has both moderated and complicated this depiction of textile workers, contrasting developments in distinct districts.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fundamental differences existed between Bradford and Huddersfield in the processes, power sources and costs of their respective cloth industries, while soil qualities, inheritance patterns and population densities also separated neighbouring workers’ experiences.Footnote ⁷¹ The Huddersfield woollens district retained many independent producers in 1820. These adopted the label ‘clothier’ in contemporary records, yet maintained a mixed and profitable form of domestic economy including farming, beside family control of incomes from premium textile production.Footnote ⁷² Despite the Bradford region's association with an alternative, more competitive and impoverishing system of ‘putting-out’ production, some hand-workers here are now recognised to have retained significant land-holdings, and therefore relative financial security. Occupational labels of ‘weaver’, ‘comber’ and ‘clothier’ could cover a multitude of circumstances. Among Bradford Southcottians, at least one weaver, Zaccheus Robinson, may be traced elsewhere as owning ‘some little property’.Footnote ⁷³ The farmer Thomas Ackroyde rented a house and sixty-nine acres of farmland from the local squire for £62 per annum – a considerable tenancy for the region.Footnote ⁷⁴ Ackroyde also took on local children as apprentices.Footnote ⁷⁵ John Wroe, a future Southcottian prophet, was among the four hand-combers recorded, yet was no wage-labourer: he took on several apprentice-combers, had his own capital in the fleeces he combed, and held a small farm tenancy.Footnote ⁷⁶

Coupling this detailed occupational evidence with insights from other recent studies of local Southcottian groups, most notably in the Lancashire cotton town of Ashton-under-Lyne where several recorded millenarians even owned cotton mills, certainly confirms that many adherents were caught up in the dramatic developments of industrialism in their period.Footnote ⁷⁷ But little should be inferred directly from such occupations as to actual economic experiences: Southcottians sat on either side of the complex capital/wage, profits/subsistence, independence/dependence divides so prevalent in textile production at the time. There was in fact both wealth and poverty among those holding millenarian beliefs, further evidence for which survives in the words of Southcottians themselves.

In October 1820 Samuel Walker, the Bradford comb-maker, and William and Samuel Muff, both weavers, wrote to Southcott's successor, George Turner, to request permission ‘concerning some old friends’ for ‘a collection for their relief in the meetings’.Footnote ⁷⁸ A letter to Turner from Ashton in May 1820 included a moving request from a James Mills and his wife Mary, that the prophet petition God about ‘the different troubles and afflictions that hath come upon them and their family’.Footnote ⁷⁹ And from nearby Stockport a near contemporary letter explained why their collection was ‘so small’:

From amongst a congregation of forty-eight adults at Stockport, a total of £1 13 s. 6d. was raised to send to London for the wider use of the Southcottian movement.Footnote ⁸¹ Even allowing for differences in numbers, the contribution accompanying a contemporary letter from Ashton-under-Lyne's two hundred believers – of £35 14 s. 6d. – underlines the dramatic difference in the financial means of two groups of millenarians, seven miles apart.Footnote ⁸²

It is important that the presence of individuals and families experiencing poverty among Southcottian communities is not denied. Harrison's refuting of the evidence for any Southcottian being found ‘among the very poor’ is, to some degree, invalidated by these suggestive sources from the Panacea Society archive.Footnote ⁸³ And yet Hopkins's – and Thompson's – interpretation of millenarianism as a response to points of deprivation cannot be sustained. For these small but telling insights into Southcottian occupations point far less to the sect's particular appeal amongst the poverty-stricken than to its similarity in social composition to most branches of Methodism. Clive Field's analysis of Methodists before 1830 suggested that skilled craftsmen in textiles, wood, metal and mining ‘formed the backbone of the movement’.Footnote ⁸⁴ The tendency for these occupational groups to dominate the localities of strongest Methodist support ultimately meant that the religious movement did not vary from its host society as widely as once assumed; rather Methodists were drawn from a broad middle section of the economy, with ‘some bias towards skilled craftsmen’.Footnote ⁸⁵ In the Pennine districts, Southcottians may now be proven to have appealed to precisely the same occupational groups as Methodism. This may not be surprising given the often anecdotal, in some cases direct, evidence of adherents of Richard Brothers and Joanna Southcott seceding from Methodism.Footnote ⁸⁶ The proof is valuable none the less. If historians would today hesitate to explain Methodism entirely by the social circumstances of its early nineteenth-century adherents, so should they do the same with Southcottianism.

Southcottians and gender

That the Southcottian movement appealed especially to women has become a minor historical commonplace. It is an opinion based on the identity of its founder, the themes of its theology, and the modern analysis of evidence of its nineteenth-century membership. Significantly, it is not based on comments or reports made in its contemporary period. No traceable newspaper article or other record of the time defined the movement explicitly by how many more women were members than men. One newspaper, reporting on a Southcottian meeting in Kent in 1817, even noted the relatively low proportion of women involved: those gathering numbered ‘about 100 persons, 18 of whom were women’.Footnote ⁸⁷ That Southcott herself was a woman at the head of a popular movement certainly dominated contemporary responses to Southcottianism. Yet the ways that this gender identity informed her role and authority within the movement, and acceptance or rejection without it, are issues engaged with only since twentieth-century scholarly appraisal. That Southcott's prophetic writings themselves contained a distinct theological message potentially attractive to women – proclaiming a redemptive role for a woman in God's millennial plans – is a yet more recent reading, and only prominent since the 1980s.

A single statistical study lies behind the modern assumption that Southcott gained many more women followers than men: James Hopkins's 1972 doctoral thesis based on the Southcottian manuscript collections acquired by the University of Texas.Footnote ⁸⁸ From the same three early nineteenth-century lists of names which Hopkins used to measure geographical spread, a gender ratio for members of the movement was also calculated.Footnote ⁸⁹ In addition to the list of 1,421 London Southcottians and their addresses, a second, much larger register named 4,046 adult men and women in eighty different locations across England.Footnote ⁹⁰ A third register listing 1,291 names in fifty-nine locations was collated with these other two, to produce a single sample of nearly 7,000 names.Footnote ⁹¹ After dividing these names by apparent gender, Hopkins concluded that there was a ‘much larger proportion of women over men in the Southcottian movement, 63 per cent to 37 per cent’.Footnote ⁹²

Citing this finding in his own study, Harrison considered this ‘confirmatory’ rather than surprising. ‘The preponderance of women … is characteristic of millennial sects elsewhere’, Harrison noted, and therefore did ‘not … call for special explanation’.Footnote ⁹³ When Hopkins came to publish his research himself, he took a contrasting view: such a proportion was higher than the plain majority of females that might automatically be expected ‘in any religious movement, regardless of its character’. Instead, in a conclusion echoed by Barbara Taylor and Anna Clark, Hopkins considered it proof positive of ‘the extraordinary feminist appeal of the movement’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Such minor differences in interpretation were in fact immaterial: the 63 per cent figure itself was flawed. A re-examination of the manuscript lists in the Texas collection makes clear that one of them – the third register listing 1,291 names in fifty-nine locations – effectively distorted the larger sample and its resultant gender statistics.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was because every person named on this list was a woman.

This was an unfortunate case of distinct and diverse sources being treated as though they recorded the same things. They did not. Research into the context in which each manuscript was drawn up confirms that such lists served varied purposes within the Southcottian movement.Footnote ⁹⁶ While the 1809–14 London list recorded those undergoing a membership ceremony in one chapel, the second, larger list registered the national adherents of Southcott's successor, George Turner.Footnote ⁹⁷ The third list of names was never designed to record membership. Rather, it was intended to record those believers willing to undergo a specific ceremony instituted only after Southcott's death and, crucially, only open to women.

The ceremony, which was eventually carried out in July and August 1820, is mentioned in several existing histories, typically with some comment on its dubious nature.Footnote ⁹⁸ For it involved Turner visiting every community under his direction, and in each place personally conferring on each of his female followers the status of ‘bride of Christ’. The women were to state in Turner's presence their desire ‘to be married to the Lord’, then exchange kisses with the prophet, and have him, in Christ's stead, place his hand on their knee to signify their bowing to the Lord.Footnote ⁹⁹ Such a gendered ritual to prepare for the Shiloh's physical arrival may be understood as expressing an aspect of Southcottians’ belief in the specific preparation of women for the messiah and the millennium, by their being ‘lifted up from the fall of women; to be my brides and inherit my kingdom’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Leaving the judgement of modern sensibilities aside (though there is evidence that Turner's original ‘command’ for the ceremony was widely questioned at the time, until assurances were given that this ‘spiritual’ marriage was one ‘differing from the ways of men’), a compelling link between this women-only liturgical practice and the purpose served by this women-only source is apparent. Manuscripts record Turner requesting that ‘the women … desirous to be married to me the Lord to send their names’, and further refer to a list of ‘names of the women that had si[g]ned their names in February 1818’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Such a particular purpose for this source was not recognised by either Hopkins or Harrison.Footnote ¹⁰² This allowed its contents to be treated as equivalent data to that drawn from other sources which recorded both men and women believers. The inclusion of a sizeable, all-women group within what was otherwise a mixed-gender sample had an obvious effect on the gender proportions of the total. It may be shown to have overestimated the likely proportion of women Southcottians by about 8 per cent, so turning a slim female-male majority into a suggestively large one.

The two remaining Texas registers represent, in their own right, sizeable samples of Southcottians with which to gauge more accurate gender proportions. Significantly, they also offer the opportunity to establish if any notable change occurred in the proportion of women involved in Southcottianism before and after the death of its female leader (as they date before and after 1814). They also allow comparisons in gender ratios between regions.

Of the 1,421 individuals recorded at the London chapel before 1814, 773 were women (54·4 per cent) and 648 men (46·6 per cent).Footnote ¹⁰³ Of the 4,046 named followers of Turner, located across a wider stretch of the country, remarkably similar proportions were women and men: 2,204 were female (54·5 per cent) and 1,842 male (45·5 per cent).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This consistency shows that relative levels of women's participation in the religious movement did not decline when the prophetic figurehead was no longer a woman. More varied were gender proportions in different geographical areas. Dividing the larger list of Southcottians into separate towns and regions across the country reveals that northern groups often featured almost equal numbers of male and female adherents, and sometimes more men than women, while congregations in the south had noticeably more women. In both Ashton-under-Lyne and Leeds of several hundred listed Southcottians 52 per cent were women and 48 per cent men; yet in Sheffield a group of 255 Southcottians were 46 per cent women and 54 per cent men, and in Bradford the ratio was 44:56 in favour of men also.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The most notable contrast to such figures was in communities in Southcott's home county of Devon. Groups of millenarians in this region consistently contained 60–70 per cent women in 1816. In Exeter, Southcott's home town, the majority was stronger than anywhere: of the 141 names, 103 (73 per cent) were female.

It is well recognised that women commonly comprise a majority of participants in religious movements open to them in the modern era, in Christianity especially.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Within more Evangelical or revivalist forms of religion (including millenarian sects) since the eighteenth century, a proportional scale of female involvement has typically run between fifty-five and sixty-six per cent.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Clive Field's detailed analysis of gender in English ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Dissent has established that over a three-hundred-year period, it was rare for ‘the predominance of women in Nonconformist membership … [to] fall below three-fifths’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The one period when the proportion dipped perceptibly below 60 per cent among Methodists, Congregationalist and Baptist groups was between 1750 and 1830, though even in these years of ‘the relative masculinisation of dissent’ national percentages of women were never less than fifty-five per cent.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In sociological studies Bryan Wilson has defined a ‘preponderance of women’ in religious movements as the two-thirds/one-third mark. In one study, when Wilson measured a 56:44 women to men ratio among the late nineteenth-century Christadelphian sect, he considered this such a ‘relatively close ratio’ that it required explanation. This subsequently became the basis of Wilson's conclusion that ‘Christadelphianism has no distinctive appeal to women’.Footnote ¹¹⁰

The revised calculations for the gender proportion of the Southcottian movement in the early nineteenth century surely encourage a similar conclusion: Southcottianism as a national movement also had no distinctive appeal to women. Women may well have formed a majority in most Southcottian groups, in most parts of the country; yet that majority was no greater – indeed, in places, was smaller – than their fellow women formed in Evangelical groups. Field's further research on gender in Methodist groups contemporary with Southcottians includes regional comparisons which mirror some general trends in the Southcottian data, but with noticeably less fluctuation. Field noted of Methodist groups that ‘south-eastern and south-western counties registered the highest percentages of women in membership’, while northern groups had fewer women.Footnote ¹¹¹ The differences were, however, approximately two percentage points (between 59 per cent and 57 per cent women), not the dramatic disparity evident between Yorkshire groups of Southcottians with near equal men and women, and Devon groups averaging two-thirds women and higher.

Such evidence is clearly counter-intuitive to how Southcottianism has been understood from a gendered perspective. To suggest that a religious movement founded and initially led by a woman, which centred its beliefs on a woman's role in humanity's redemption, attracted no more women to its overall membership than other, parallel groups with no such leader or theology, flies in the face of existing theories of Southcottianism's appeal. Southcott can no longer be considered to have secured the especial sympathy of women. As her female followers were no more a majority, and sometimes less, than in other sects such as Methodism, then there is less justification for distinguishing Southcott's movement by its ‘feminist’ dimension from the wider gender standpoint of contemporary Evangelical religion.Footnote ¹¹²

A mistake in existing theories of Southcottianism's feminist appeal is their reliance on a concept of gendered experience as the principal explanation for involvement in a religious movement. Taylor's particular mode of interpretation of Southcott's writings – drawing out their themes of male betrayal and women's defiance, as well as their references to Southcott's own life as an unmarried working woman – was an approach common within gender scholarship in the late 1970s and early 1980s period in which her ground-breaking study, Eve and the new Jerusalem, was written. This relied on a close reading of women's writings to recover not only something of the historical experience of the author, but of her readers also. A writer's experience was considered to speak to the experience of her readers; women read and related themselves to the words and expression of a fellow woman.Footnote ¹¹³ Clark's argument that Southcott's followers included ‘women who felt sexually victimised’, such as ‘plebeian wives estranged or at least independent from their husbands’, was also based, in notable part, on the conjecture that because Southcott's writings ‘articulated sexual antagonism and advocated marriage to the “Divine Husband”’, then a proportion of her readership were likely to have been unhappy in their experience of earthly marriage.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Such explanations rely heavily on simplistic divisions between the concerns of men and women in the past. They are founded upon rigid distinctions between male and female mentalities, between people's priorities or sympathies according to their sex, which many historians as well as theorists would now reject.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Women in history had no common ‘womanly nature’ or essential identity determined by their gender making them sympathetic to the experience, case or claim of other women; neither were men by any ‘nature’ bound to prioritise the interests of fellow men. Instead, individual sympathies and concerns were more constructed, as post-structuralist theorists would claim is the case for all aspects of identity, within contexts of language and culture. Then as now they were contingent, variable and malleable, unfixed to any gender.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It is not necessary to follow such ideas to the relativist extremes of some theorists to allow their insights to inform interpretations of the re-calculated levels of female and male participation in the Southcottian movement.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The mere undermining of links assumed to lie between women in the past, and the questioning of pre-determined distinctions in gender interests, leaves space clear for alternative hypotheses for why individuals became Southcottians.Footnote ¹¹⁸

As Harrison observed, most Southcottians ‘were sincere, earnest Christians, dependent for guidance on a literal interpretation of the Bible’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He thus emphasised the place of Southcottians within an extensive Christian culture of their time. This also serves as a reminder of the continuities that Southcottianism shared with wider contemporary religion, not least in its relation to the Christian Scriptures and the appeal of belief to both men and women.

Surviving accounts of how male Southcottians came to believe in Southcott and her prophecies indicate that her claims and message were capable of striking men with the force of a conversion experience, often speaking to their prior convictions about the Bible. The Revd Thomas Foley, a Worcestershire rector, read Southcott's first published works in June 1801, and believed ‘these writings’ to be a ‘greater Body of Spiritual Light given to the World … than was ever given since the Bible was completed’.Footnote ¹²⁰ In 1812 ‘a Mr Barnes … a sincere Methodist’ reported reading Southcott's 1804 prophetic work, Sound an alarm, when ‘the Lord broke in upon him with light and love and heaven in his soul, … the Lord by his spirit has powerfully convinced him the work was of God’.Footnote ¹²¹ John Ward, a South London shoemaker, came to believe in Southcott in 1814 after her Fifth book of wonders, ‘fell into my hands’.Footnote ¹²² This, Ward read ‘with peculiar pleasure and delight; for I saw it was a work of God, and not of man, and as the word of God I received it’.Footnote ¹²³ The Revd Robert Hoadley Ashe of Crewkerne, Somerset, a man of very different education and position, similarly described how, ‘after 17 days close reading and studying of Joanna Southcott's writings he received more real light into the mysteries of the Bible than ever he had received before’.Footnote ¹²⁴

These cases underline the role of personal religious experience in Southcottians’ reasons for joining their movement. Diverse men embraced belief in Southcott's prophecies – and the interpretation that they presented of both God's and the Bible's eschatological message – after an incident of reading and reflection. In such moments, the import of the wider circumstances and conditions that historians have so long searched for to explain millenarian convictions appears lessened. The value of other evidence of the lived experiences of ordinary Southcottian men and women none the less remains. For this makes clear that Southcottians were, after all, thinking, feeling individuals attempting to square events in their lives with the deep conviction – increasingly emphasised in varieties of British Christianity in the period – that the Christian God could and would intervene directly in contemporary life.

Southcottians' experience

Among Southcottians the most important intervention in the world attributed to God was the spirit believed to be speaking through each successive prophet. For Robert Hoadley Ashe, a compelling reason to believe that God was indeed at work in Southcott was the consistency of this revelation with the first coming of Christ ‘to the meek and lowly’. Now God was speaking again, Hoadley Ashe cheerily wrote to Southcott herself, ‘through a weak, low, simple and illiterate woman’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Following Southcott's death, this mode of intervention was believed silenced by some; but for many others it continued in new ‘vessels’ such as George Turner.Footnote ¹²⁶ Like Southcott (and Richard Brothers before her), Turner issued printed volumes of prophecies.Footnote ¹²⁷ Yet he maintained a closer interaction with groups of followers across the country, exchanging correspondence, accepting and answering specific ‘inquiries’ from individual believers to be ‘put before the Lord’. Many such questions and their answers (perceived to be from God) survive in their manuscript form in the Panacea Society archive, revealing the intimate concerns of identifiable millenarians.Footnote ¹²⁸

Numerous Southcottians took the opportunity to question God through their prophet for knowledge of family members. Frances Elsworth of Bradford, the mother of unmarried mother Milcah, wished to enquire after ‘her son who set off to America’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Mary Cockshott of Ashton-under-Lyne asked after ‘a son who is inlisted for a soldier fifteen years ago, but she hath not seen him this fourteen years’.Footnote ¹³⁰ Nancy Hartley, also of Ashton, sought direction about ‘a daughter under age which hath left home and causes her much distress of mind for fear any unpleasant thing should happen [to] her’.Footnote ¹³¹ Ruth Woods of Leeds begged ‘the Lord to direct [and] to do his blessed will’ concerning ‘the sorrows and difficulties with her husband … and whether my daughter will ever come from America’.Footnote ¹³² George Bateman of Warrington was one of a number to ask an expected yet touching question: ‘his wife died in the year 1816 [and] he is desirous to know if she is with the Lord in Glory’.Footnote ¹³³

Several questions to Turner concerned domestic circumstances. Mary Swarbrick of Warrington wanted advice on handling her husband, being ‘desirous to know if the Lord will permit her to come to our meeting without her husband … [and] without him knowing so as to save any disturbance’.Footnote ¹³⁴ Frequently a form of divine endorsement was sought for the contingent nature of plebeian relationships. Joseph Thornhill and Ann Windle of Sheffield wrote to Turner ‘stating their case of living together as man and wife, though he had not been acquainted that she had a former husband when they came together’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Windle's first husband had been traced and ‘gave… his free consent to have her, and they are willing to get married or willing to obey the Lord, praying that the Lord will in mercy forgive’.Footnote ¹³⁶ The strength of Turner's denunciation of this arrangement provoked many related queries from other communities: in Stockport three men were ‘accused of living with women who have former husbands’, while Hannah Duredin's ‘husband hath left her two years ago, she has not heard anything from him since, and she hath removed from the place she then resided at, in order to be nearer to the children of the Lord’.Footnote ¹³⁷ Robert Shorey of London also desperately sought to explain his position: ‘haveing [sic] been married more than nine years ago to a former wife, she left me without any just cause or provocation, and not knowing whether she is dead or alive I do humbly implore mercy, trembling at thy late word and commands for I have been married again upwards of two years’.Footnote ¹³⁸

Further questions ranged from illness to work conditions: Thomas Williams of London petitioned for ‘his son who has had a bad arm this two years and been so long that the bone is affected’ asking that ‘the Lord … will be pleased to restore it’; while Jane Bradtfield, also of London, made ‘inquiries concerning being ill used by the Mrs of the house she has lived in and what she must do and she is going to leave the house and pay their demand’.Footnote ¹³⁹ A Mr Huddard of Netherwasdale, Cumberland, sought guidance on whether he was permitted ‘reading different authers [sic] in the way of improving in learning, he being a schoolmaster’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ The divine reply on this occasion was precise if somewhat puritanical: ‘Huddard may read those books which concerns his employment, but vain authors let him refrain from reading, as they will not be of use, neither to master nor scholar, in my kingdom, the evil will be done away.’Footnote ¹⁴¹

Such unprecedented social insights are complemented by the varied contents of Southcottians’ dream accounts, written down, sent to Turner for interpretation, and surviving elsewhere in the Panacea Society archives.Footnote ¹⁴² Samuel Gompertz of London dreamed of seeing ‘a curious sight in the heaven’, flames which Turner's spirit explained as ‘the fiery sparks of my wrath’.Footnote ¹⁴³ Mary Hunt of Crewkerne fell asleep and ‘thought she was on a high hill, where there was beautiful trees, and a great number of people were assembled together, and they were all crying out, that Christ was coming’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ A woman called Mill, one of eight female Southcottians across the country of that name, ‘dreamt that she heard a heavy rushing in the air, and from the sound – “I said there is our LORD coming!” and I ran out to see him’.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Having ‘lifted up her eyes to look for our Lord’, she found herself instead at the Southcottian meeting place; ‘the friends were assembled, and about to conclude … Entering the room they desired me to close the door; but a black dog attempted to get in’, for whose meaning she now sought Turner's direction.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Visions of the returning messiah, and not merely dreams awaiting the event, were also numerous. A woman called Franks, from either Sheffield or Newark, ‘dreamt the sky was full of small clouds, some crimson colour, [an]other, white… and in which cloud Christ appeared all in beauty, the greatest beauty that ever was seen. Christ appeared with a large branch of candlesticks before him, and a cup in his left hand’.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ The dream provoked in her, ‘such ecstasy of joy, that it continued the whole day after’. Susannah Lindie of London, like several fellow believers, reported dreaming of a figure recognisable as a Jew, ‘a part of the nation which hath been trodden under the feet of man’; a figure wearing ‘diamonds so brilliant on the upper front of the head and uncovered’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Such visions may be readily linked to the fascination with Jews and the nation of Israel common among millenarians, especially Evangelicals, in this period.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ They further point to developments among particular branches of Southcottianism which date from this moment, and led to the emergence of ‘Christian Israelites’.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

A man called Hayes, for whom there are six candidates in contemporary registers, reported finding himself away from home ‘and laid down in a bed alone, and deeply meditating on the communications’ – Southcott's or Turner's prophecies:Footnote ¹⁵¹

The recovery of these accounts can seem a final vindication of every commentary employing the epithet ‘deluded’ with regard to Southcottians. They appear to endorse Southey's barbed dismissal of the time when ‘one madman printed his dreams, another his day-visions; one had seen an angel come out of the sun with a drawn sword in his hand, another had seen … hosts of angels in battle array’.Footnote ¹⁵³ However, such dreams and accounts of personal experience should, in fact, remind historians of religion of how much these millenarians held in common with the more familiar cultures of Methodism and Evangelicalism. Phyllis Mack's recent study of the place of dreams and visions, emotion and experience, friendship and community, in early Methodism underlines how far scholarly understandings of such religion have come since E. P. Thompson's iconic appraisal.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Southcottianism may itself be most profitably understood as a branch of belief growing – even flourishing for a period – from these forms of ‘heart religion’ emergent in the eighteenth century among men and women of diverse social standing.

This re-examination of Southcottian millenarianism may point the way to a broader reconsideration of popular religion in the early nineteenth century. For the exercise of recovering the individual details and experiences of those who followed a figure prophesying the millennium blurs the assumed distinctions between such members of a ‘popular movement’ and those with similar anticipations whose hopes were founded and expressed in the methods and language of scriptural interpretation of more mainstream religious traditions. This blurring should challenge approaches to historical causality still acceptable in discussions of ‘popular’ religious movements yet now rarely acknowledged in debates over more ‘educated’ beliefs. To consider ‘popular’ manifestations of distinct Christian doctrines as predominantly conditioned by the social position or gender of an adherent, and more elite expressions as the result of intellectual/cultural developments, is inconsistent. Indeed, adopting such an approach can now appear a fall-back option in the face of absent or inadequate archive resources rather than a reliable, cogent methodology for understanding a religion.

When appropriate sources in disparate surviving archives are traced and sifted sufficiently, it is possible for historians to approach adherents of distinctive religious positions as the individuals that they were, to gain a sense of the personal and the particular in their lives, and to recognise the element of choice and decision frequently present in the adopting of their faith understanding of the world. Following this approach, further forms of millenarianism, revivalism and other popular beliefs in the early nineteenth century may be seen to be, like Southcottianism, religious positions of their time, reached by conviction and the squaring of personal experience with contemporary conceptions of the possibility of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

Almost any early nineteenth-century conception of such communication may be related to ideas of ‘Romantic’ culture. Indeed, millenarian expectations and prophecy in Britain between the 1790s and 1830s now commonly secure attention in reference works on ‘Romanticism’, reflecting literary and cultural scholars’ broadening understanding of the term.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Among historians of the period's ‘heart religion’, however, Evangelicalism's ‘adaptation … into the Romantic idiom’ remains principally associated with the 1820s and 1830s, when an emerging middle- and upper-class ‘adventism’ has been considered ‘a symptom of Romanticism’.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In this period, a wider cultural sensibility among the educated classes, expressed in their poetic, literary and artistic interests, is seen to have re-directed an Evangelical religious culture previously influenced by the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ No such precise ‘inflow’ from ‘high culture’ into ‘religious culture’ necessarily informed the theological understanding of interactions between the natural and supernatural worlds articulated in the vicinity of earlier plebeian revivals, prophetic figures and millenarian hopes, nor in their many counterparts persisting across the nineteenth century. Instead, this related yet distinctive eschatology – an understanding of the divine capacity to ‘break in’ to the human world, through dreams, visions and prophetic experience, not just the Second Coming – transcended ‘romanticism’. It may be located in a longer-lasting and more expansive religious culture reaching back into the Pietism of the preceding century, and toward the Pentecostalism of the next.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ In this sense, Macaulay and others have read their religious history wrongly: early nineteenth-century millenarianism was less a medieval superstition and more a variety of the immanent theologies of the modern world.