Read in 2006: Book 56
England’s Lost Eden: adventures in a Victorian utopia – Philip Hoare
I am going to admit this, right up here at the top of this entry. I have quite a bit of sympathy for the person who, while reviewing this book on Amazon, said the following:
“What a bizarre result! The text is padded out with multitudinous cul-de-sacs – veritable brain-dumps of boring tripe – that make this book twice as long as it should have been.” (See link below.)
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This comment reeks of genuine and understandable frustration with Philip Hoare and I am aware that this is a terrible way to begin an account of what I actually thought was a very good and interesting book. But I did feel that it suffered from a distinct lack of focus at times, especially in the early chapters, and that this was making me less inclined to persevere. However it would be very sad if you allowed this arguable flaw to put you off reading it altogether.
One of a number of its narratives concerns a sect of primitive Christians believing in such notions as celibacy, common property and the imminent coming of the Apocalypse, who took up residence in the New Forest round about the 1870s. Their leader was a Suffolk woman named Mary Ann Girling and they lived for a time in a fairly well-appointed house but were eventually driven by a combination of unworldliness and ill-will from their neighbours to the expediency of camping in other people’s barns and fields.
The fate of the Girlingites is ostensibly the main theme of the book. But where it gets really interesting is where Hoare ties them in with the Victorian obsession with spiritualism and its effects on the work of people like John Ruskin, members of the Pre-Raphaelite group and the writer Laurence Houseman. Even Oscar Wilde gets a brief look in – but that’s not surprising since the author’s written another book about him. Much of the most illuminating stuff in here documents the reaction of wider Victorian society to utopian cults like the Girlingites. A consumer-driven society where technological advances were coming thick and fast, the Victorians were strongly drawn to both the notion of founding a ‘utopia’ where humanity could return to some kind of mythic Prelapsarian state and to the idea of being able to communicate with spirits from beyond the grave. And of course a large proportion of Americans de nos jours are similarly convinced that the Apocalypse is just around the corner so the parallels become even more interesting…
Some of the book’s byways are just delightful – such as the exploration, close to the end, of the tower-building activities of Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson at Sway in the New Forest, creating a structure that was built of concrete on principles that its constructor had observed in Calcutta. If subject matter like this interests you, or if you have a particular interest in the New Forest region and its history then I would say it’s well worth the effort of an attempt on this book despite its occasional frustrations.
Some links: