Review: The Desert Queen by Doris Leslie

 

I was first drawn to The Desert Queen  by Doris Leslie by its shockingly awful cover. Mine is a ‘Book Club’ reprint and it looks like a pencil sketch by a reasonably talented fourteen-year old with the title slapped anywhichway in an almost unreadable ‘fun’ font. Drawn in by the amateur cover, the blurb sounded interesting, telling the life of Hester Stanhope, the niece of Pitt the Younger who then went off and became a powerful figure in Syria and Lebanon. She had a cameo appearance in Ian Kelly’s Beau Brummell and so I thought I’d find out more and read the book.

This is one of those odd kind of platypus histories, describing itself as a ‘biographical study’ and reassuring the reader in the preface that it is all true, the book then dramatises Stanhope’s life, including all sorts of things nobody could know. At the same time, it wasn’t committed enough to the storytelling aspect of the book to be crafted and shaped into a satisfying novel. 

It’s a shame because Hester Stanhope’s life would make a phenomenal biography, and a shaped version of it a phenomenal novel. 

Niece to Prime Minister, Pitt the Younger, she kept house for the bachelor at ten Downing Street where she stunned with her intelligence and quick wit. Despite being a much sought after bride, she shrugged off all proposals and maintained her independence. After the death of Pitt, her brother and the man she was most likely to marry, she decided to travel to put her troubles behind her. The usual Grand Tour was off the cards due to war, so she went further, dragging her maid and a smitten and devoted doctor. She also picked up a toy-boy on the way whom she was openly having sex with but never married. 

Shipwrecked without clothes, she donned male Turkish dress and continued her journeys. She was lavishly welcomed everywhere she went and became something of a legend, as an androgynous figure who wasn’t afraid of anyone or anything, she kept guns and a sword on her belt. She was led by a growing belief in a prophecy that she was to become the Queen of the Jews. The prophecy was by Richard Brothers, who would later be regarded as the first in a line of eight prophets that included Joanna Southcott and ended in Mabel Balthrop, or Octavia of the Panacea Society. 

‘Crowned’ in Palmyra, the first European woman to go there and celebrated in Damascus, she used her contacts to wipe out a tribe who had killed a visiting European before setting up a base in Lebanon. Growing older (and possibly suffering from dementia) her followers left her, often stealing as they went. Her funds run out and she died a withered hermit on a distant hill - it’s a sad ending.

Her successes came from her looks, her charm and her sheer brazen imperiousness. I don’t think any telling of her story could make her seem like an easy person to get along with, she simply considered herself above others and through force of will made other people consider that too. She was an advocate for freedom yet kept slaves; she bankrupted herself feeding the poor and needy yet whipped those slaves brutally; she loved ‘her people’ but definitely considered them hers. 

The Desert Queen spends a lot of time dealing with the relationship between Stanhope and her boy toy Michael Bruce. The two have a passionate sexual relationship and (in this book at least) Hester desires to become his all. She demeans and belittles him, ignores his advice and generally regards him to be all consumed by her. For a while he is but as they go further and further away from the world they know, and as Hester becomes more and more taken in by her own legend, this falls apart. The book deals with this by having dialogue of their arguments for the central hundred pages or so of the two-hundred page book.

It may be easier if the writing was slightly less painful to read. Here is a typical quote;

   “Her eyes narrowed in appraisement of her beauty; although not strictly beautiful, she emanated beauty as did the rose whose perfumed heart he sensuously inhaled.” Also, characters (particularly at the beginning of the book) tell each other big chunks of information that the person they are talking to already knows - it’s like a Chibnall Doctor Who. Then there are all the things that the author can’t possibly know; a character taking crumbs of cake out of his pocket to feed a swan, a scorpion in bath water, a flutter of the eyes as a character remembers some past bit of exposition. The only footnotes are references to other works by the same author. 

As a result, this book has bad scholarship, bad writing, doesn’t flow at all and makes a fascinating story utterly dull. I don’t recommend it very highly.

Review: The Rapture by Claire McGlasson

It’s not often I read a book the same century it was released, let alone a month later but ‘The Rapture’ by Claire McGlasson is about something that is rising up my list of interests, The Panacea Society. Starting with the peculiar ‘Satan’s Mistress’, then my visit to Bedford, then my reading of ‘Octavia: Daughter of God’, the Panaceans went from something on the fringes of my fascination to somewhere on the inside part of the edge (above Dr Forman but below William Harrison Ainsworth). It is also something I would have wanted to write a novel about some day.

I was a little wary with the book’s title. Not only did the Panaceans not believe in the concept of the Rapture, they believed in the opposite - they believed that their members would live forever and would be part of bringing Jesus down, rather than going up to meet him. (When members did start dying, they thought those members souls would go to Uranus, waiting to come down with the big J). But it became clear that ‘rapture’ did not mean the belief of being snatched away by God, but the emotion of it and its straddling between joy and insanity.

 The story is about Dilys Barltrop, Octavia’s daughter who found herself surrounded and buried by her mother’s religious organisation. Like Octavia, Dilys was prone to melancholic episodes and was sent away from Bedford a number of times, once to a cousin’s house and once to the south of France. She returned and lived back in the society. When her mother died, it was Dilys who organised all of the estate, selling Octavia’s house to the society for a nominal sum and receiving an annuity with which she lived quietly in a society owned house a little away from The Campus. Her main pleasure was to go down to the River Ouse and have an ice cream. 

The novel takes Dilys, her anxieties and the pressure cooker of living with, and being the daughter of, ‘The Daughter of God’ and dramatises it. While it uses many genuine Panacea members, makes extensive us of Panacea archives and includes a number of key moments of the society, it is definitely a work of fiction. The timeline of the society is moved around and squished up, the relationship between Octavia, Dilys and her brother Adrian is changed, there is a whole new character called Grace who is the plot’s catalyst…oh, and there’s an accusation of murder.

This meant that I read the whole book in two minds, one as a person interested in the society and the second as a reader of a novel. As a result, I both love this book and dislike it.

It’s clear that most readers are supposed to come to the novel first and then perhaps find out more about the society, to do it the other way round is a little disconcerting. There are a couple of blatant mistakes, Joanna Southcott is labelled the seventh prophet of ‘The Visitation’ and not the second. There is (what I feel) a negative slant on the notion of Overcoming. As I understood it, the process was more one of confession and self-accusation, whereas in the novel it becomes something of a mini police state. Nor does the book create the feeling of community and belonging that many of the members seemed to get from the society. Another big change is that the novel has scenes with Adrian trying to break into The Campus to visit Dilys when he actually visited with his children. Dilys’s fate at the end of the novel has her taken somewhere which is not the south of France.

And there’s Grace. A character invented for the book, she becomes the housemaid at Number 12, where Octavia and Dilys live. She and Dilys share their doubts, develop a friendship, a love and possibly a relationship, mostly through glances. Dilys herself narrates the novel (in the present tense) and is not the most reliable of narrators, being heavily weighed down and disturbed by her strange life. It may be that the relationship was consummated, it may be that it was consenting or not, the way the book is told leaves it uncertain. She exists in the book as a chance for grace, a chance for escape and a chance for love - as a novelistic conceit, she’s brilliant. Having a character break through Dilys’s shell, tease her out of herself, give her things to hope for and a secret to keep the book motoring along with great tension.

This is a really great novel.

When the novel and historical aspects lined up, I could enjoy it without reserve. The scenes where the members go down to London for the unveiling of Price’s Southcott Box is nail-biting; the bits where the members sneak around Bedford, burying linen squares of protection next to important buildings, are delightful and the dramatisation of Emily Godwin ‘casting out Controls’ by playacting fighting demons with a penknife are far more horrifying and shocking then they should be.

Even the parts that must be made up, like Dilys peeking through a keyhole to see her mother bare-chested, simulating breast-feeding with her closest followers, are deftly and engagingly written. The ending (spoiler) with Dilys going to an asylum, as her mother had been, but believing it was a ship to freedom with her brother, was harrowing and deeply moving - even if it has never happened. For those unencumbered by knowledge of the Panacea Society, this is a gripping and wonderful novel. For those with an interest in such things, it’s a gripping and wonderful novel with some massive liberties taken with the events.

Oh, and the accusation of murder? In the book, Dilys claimed that Emily Godwin poisoned Edgar Peissart, who had been kicked out for seducing a young man, in order to make her prophecy of his death come true. I very much doubt this happened but it did make for a great story, and that sums up this book well.

Review: 'Octavia; Daughter of God' by Ruth Hill

There are two main rules to follow when setting up a religion; first, never make a claim for the end of the world and second, never claim immortality for your leader. While the Panacea Society did not make the first mistake, they fell full prey to the second. Not only did they claim immortality of their leader, Octavia but also for each of them. Now the religion is no more but they had a good run of it, over ninety years of faith carried out in the Holy Town of Bedford.

Last year I visited the Holy Town, to The Campus, home of the Panacea Society. I even had tea and lemon drizzle cake in the garden, believed by the Society to be the Garden of Eden itself. It was a beautiful July day and as I sat there with my refreshment, watching a blackbird singing on a bush, I could see how the Panaceans felt as they did.

It was in Bedford that I bought a copy of ‘Octavia: Daughter of God’ by Ruth Hall at a price I began to think may have been an accident. The book was written in 2011, when there were still a couple of Panaceans left alive. She was given full access to the archives and free rein with all the secrets and hidden doctrines. This is partly due to the fact that the book and the project that the book was part of was funded by the Panacean Society after urging from the charity commission to liquidate their wealth and do more with it. This may mean that the book is too kind to the Octavia and the society but I don’t think this became an issue.

First we learnt about Octavia herself. What sort of person becomes ‘the daughter of God’? What sort of people confirm her in this notion? How does a religious community spontaneously come together in the first place? These were all fascinating questions and were well explored.

Octavia, originally Mabel Andrews, was a London-born member of a family with literary connections. She was intelligent and a voracious reader but did not receive an education more extensive then any other girl in her time or place. She married Arthur Barltrop, a curate whose career was hampered by ill-health. A keen reader of his theological library and a vigorous worker for charities, she took an interest in the church and religious matters. When he died, she lived in a respectable house in Bedford with her children. 

Always prone to nerves, she was (at least once) committed to a mental hospital, where she was dismayed to be treated like a crazy person. There she discussed religion as well as the many other new spiritual categories like spiritualism and theosophy. Having read works on Joanna Southcott, she wrote letters to bishops to get her mystical box of prophecy opened.

Coming back home, she carried on her interest in Southcott, taking part in letters and later meetings with other Southcottians. She was linked into a whole network of people who felt that the Anglican church was in some ways dead, cutting itself off from new ideas that could inject new life into it. Many of these people were women, cut off from careers in the church, they began to cohere into a religious community of their own where women did all the main jobs. Although many of these early members were suffragists and even suffragettes (one had gone on hunger strike in Holloway Prison), Mabel Barltrop herself felt that women were essentially different from men and it was this difference that made them vital to reviving true religion.

Many of these people were involved in currently popular practices like automatic writing and Mabel became one of them. The community began to regard themselves as the real church, connecting themselves with Joanna Southcott and the prophets that came after her, a line called ‘The Visitation’. A recently deceased member, Helen Shepstone, was declared the sixth prophet of this lineage, then the idea grew that Mabel was the eighth. As a result she took the name Octavia. Soon after, it was revealed to a member that Octavia was not only the eighth prophet but Schiloh, the spiritual child of Joanna Southcott and the direct daughter of God. In the letter where Octavia recognised the call and took the responsibility, she also thanked a friend for knitting her a lovely pair of bed socks - so the spiritual and the mundane mixed for this group.

With the belief that God’s daughter was among them, the new ‘Community of the Holy Ghost’ formed the notion of a four-square trinity with Father, Son, Holy Ghost and Daughter, this developed into the notion that the Holy Ghost was also the voice of the Divine Mother, creating something of a nuclear family. Octavia’s own mental sufferings became a subject for belief, so Jesus had suffered bodily for the soul of humanity, so Octavia had to suffer mentally to save the humanity’s bodies - for if a follower managed to live the tenants of the new faith, they would be bodily immortal. When 144,000 people had achieved this, then there was a foothold on Earth for Jesus to return and establish the New Jerusalem in Bedford. The town was initially favoured for it’s good shops and new Selfridge’s department store, but as beliefs grew, the notion that Bedford was a holy place and the garden of ‘The Campus’, the houses around Albany Road the members bought up, was the Garden of Eden. Octavia believed that if she walked 77 paces away from the centre of it then the Devil would kill her, so was essentially imprisoned into her base of operations.

The key to bodily immortality was a process known as ‘Overcoming’. The idea was to become ‘comfortable to live with’, to overcome all the irritations and annoyances of normal life and become something better. One of the ways to do this was to write a large, permanent confession, not only because confession was regarded as good for the soul but because the Panaceans believed that each confession was an accusation with which to imprison Satan. On the more mundane level, there were strictures to not eat toast noisily, to put plenty of cherries in a cherry cake and a two page instruction manual of how to make tea. It was important to do these small activities perfectly to promote all around perfection.

As the society ‘regarded as true, anything that was interesting and meaningful,’ coincidences often helped form their beliefs. One day Octavia’s medication jumped out of her hand so she prayed on water and drank it. Drinking this blessed water was spread over the community until they developed a system where Octavia breathed over rolls and rolls of cloth which were cut up and put in water. This turned into a worldwide healing ministry, with thousands of people writing in for the cloth (and reporting their progress) up until the 1990s. This water was the ‘panacea’ that the society later took its name from and was one of its main activities other than putting up posters in London demanding Bishops open Southcott’s Box.

Where the early society was a community of believers centred around a charismatic leader, the functions in the community became stricter. When an American seeker of knowledge entered the community and started preaching that gay sex was spiritually neutral in a way straight sex wasn’t, he was ‘tried’ and expelled under the ordinances of the ‘Voice of the Divine Mother’. Emily Goodwin has originally been the nurse to Octavia’s Aunt Fanny but quickly became the enforcement arm of the Panaceans. Although Octavia was regarded as the Holy Daughter herself and Emily was only the conduit of the voice of the Divine Mother, anything said in that voice was regarded as absolute.

In its prime, the community had been a thriving place with garden parties that were regarded as rehearsals for Heaven on Earth but as everyone grew older and many died it became a place for ‘old people, cripples and the feeble-minded.’ If the book is accurate, the joy of the thing withered as it became tighter. 

You can imagine the surprise when Octavia died in 1934. The members stuffed her bed with hot-water bottles and waited, just as Southcott’s followers had done, and much with the same effect. Octavia started to rot and leak fluid from her nose. She was buried under a quiet and unassuming gravestone.

The Society kept going though, buying a house for Jesus’ return, expanding the healing squares and taking adverts in papers about the Box. Even as this book was written, there were still two believers who kept things ticking over. They were in the process of doing up the building kitted out for the Bishops and creating a museum. By the time the museum was opened, the followers had died at the society turned into a museum trust. It’s a museum well worth visiting and this is a book well worth reading - there was loads of interesting stuff I missed out.

Incidentally, as I chatted with the man at the front desk, he told me that although the Panacea Society did not exist, there were still dedicated Southcottians and some of them in Bedford.

A Visit to Bedford (and the Museum of the Panacea Society)

In the recent BBC English Identity discussion, they asked people in various towns and cities to describe themselves. Where Brighton describes themselves as ‘seaside’ ‘liberal’ and ‘fun’ - the people of Bedford identified themselves using the terms, ‘the river’ and ‘unassuming’. 

They forgot to mention the fact that it’s a hotbed of religious discussion and the location of the Garden of Eden.

Many moons ago, on the precursor to Grubstlodger, I reviewed a book called Satan’s Mistress by Val Lewis. Having transferred it to here, it became one of the most (genuinely) commented posts on the site. The book was an odd one, for the most part it was a perfectly standard historical biography of a late eighteenth century prophetess called Joanna Southcott. She claimed she was pregnant with the second coming of Christ despite being a virgin in her 60s. Most peculiarly, the author of the biography was convinced that her prophecies were a result of a relationship with the devil…

Smash Cut To:

Bedford in the 1910s and a woman called Mabel Balthrop has learnt about Joanna Southcott and her prophecies, which had been sealed in a large box and hidden by her followers. Despite family resistance, (including locking her in a mental home for a while) Balthrop created a community around her. Then she started to have her own visions and prophecies. By 1919, followers congregated around her house in Albany Road in Bedford, calling themselves ‘The Community of the Holy Ghost’. 

This community bought houses around the area, knocking the gardens through to form ‘The Campus’. There they lived a quiet life, dedicated to the teachings of Mabel Balthrop who had been renamed Octavia. The reason for this is that Balthrop was regarded as the final part of ‘the Visitation', a succession of seven previous prophets (of which Joanna Southcott was regarded the second). Followers began to believe Octavia was the coming of the Daughter of God, the child Schiloh who had been Joanna Southcott’s original pregnancy.

Beliefs in this community also included the fact that the back garden of The Campus was actually the original Garden of Eden. One of their main focuses was to gather 24 Bishops together to open the box of Joanna Southcott’s prophecies. They believed the box would initiate the end times and contained teachings to navigate them. To make this easier, they outfitted a house with a special box-opening room, bedrooms for all the Bishops, bathrooms and a dining room. They also stockpiled soap and practiced cooking for them all so they were ready when the moment came - which it never did.

They also believed in healing squares of linen which Octavia had breathed on. These squares were drunk with water and regarded as a panacea (an item of universal healing). Changing their name to The Panacea Society, they sent these squares for free to thousands of people around the world, many of whom reported healing. They also buried the linen at the cardinal points in a twelve mile radius of The Campus, protecting Bedford from spiritual harm.

Unfortunately, this extraordinary society died out in 2013 and The Campus was turned into The Panacea Society Museum. Which I visited.

I spent four hours wandering The Campus and looking at the museum. The first floor of the Castleside building (the one fitted for Bishops) dealt with the history of the society itself. 

The Box opening room was set up ready for the Box to be opened (though wonderfully, the actual Box itself is still hidden for tradition’s sake and the box there is merely a replica). Upstairs are the Bishop’s common room, bathrooms and an example of a bedroom are still available to see. 

The top floor of the building puts Octavia in context of The Visitation, which is a fascinating story of odd prophets that involves diverse topics as baseball, huge towers and the invention of the automatic ten-pin bowling machine. The items in the Southcott room include baby clothes and a cot created for Southcott’s second-coming baby Schiloh, and examples of Southcott’s ‘passports to heaven’ which people took to the Napoleonic wars for luck.

Other parts to visit were the cute custom-built chapel, the rec-room where members listened to the wireless, and Mabel Balthrop's house. It's presented just as she left it, a creepy place with her glasses case left by her bed and her knitting in the parlour. The displays detail the complicated relationships of Balthrop and also the shock of her death in 1934 - very unexpected due to the fact that she was the Messiah.

The museum is a fascinating one (and free). There’s something wonderful and engaging about a society that combine end-time millennial religion with Edwardian tweeness.

I also bought a very interesting book about Octavia the Society.

But that’s not all Bedford has to offer.

Also for free is a museum dedicated to Bunyan. Run by the chapel descended from Bunyan’s own, it is a small upstairs room crammed with Bunyan relics and memorabilia. Presented in our favourite 90s style of rigid, ‘speaking’ mannequins, it tells the life of rebel-turned-religious-proselytiser, John Bunyan. 

For fans of Bunyan, and Pilgrim’s Progress in particular, the collection is unique. It includes the wicket-gate that inspired the one in the book, some of Bunyan’s work as a tinker, a pulpit he preached in and the door to the jail cell he was locked in for twelve years. What is strange, is that although he was locked up for preaching, he was occasionally allowed to be let out - to preach.

It’s a nice little museum - and stands almost exactly opposite the Panacea Society Museum. 

Also, just across from that stands the Higgins, a weird mashup museum dedicated to the history of Bedford (interesting) and Cecil Higgins’ collection of ugly furniture and porcelain (less so).

So Beford… unassuming but full of hidden pleasure and a great day out.

The Grub Street Journal - Review

(I think this review is cursed, my computer has ‘pazowwed’ twice when writing this.)

A Copy of the Journal, doesn't look like much...but not a bad read.

I was originally disappointed when I received my copy of ‘The Grub Street Journal’. I was expecting a collection of eighteenth century magazines written by members of the much maligned assortment of hack writers located in and around Grub Street. Instead I received a book about a magazine, which had written as if by hack writers in and around Grub Street, but actually written, partly at the instigation of Alexander Pope as a continuation of The Dunciad.

James Hillhouse explains that he was originally intending to publish the Journal itself, but seven years of popular and consistent publication, there is too much to publish. His second thought was edited highlights of the Journal but this highlighted a problem that would have also affected a full collection. The business of the Grub Street Journal, was to pick entertaining squabbles with other newspapers and get squabbling away. For this reason, it’s hard to simply publish it, as it is principally understood in its relation with other publications of the time. This is what this book’s about, and as such, it is very entertaining.

The first chapter is the driest, but essential to understand the rest. It details how the Journal was developed to pick literary fights on behalf of Pope and other Scribelarians and how it grew it’s own legs under it’s editor ‘Bavius’, a mask worn by a few people but most often a sharp-witted, non-juring vicar called, Richard Russell. It then provided popular entertainment, by picking fights, some literary, others medical and some religious.

The book then takes us through different categories of argument and dispute the journal involved itself in and gives examples of each. The disputes take rather similar forms, even the most abstract arguments descend into ad-hominem attacks and the Journal often finds itself using parody and fake letters from the other side, making it look stupid. They have a particular fondness of attacking other papers, I like the constant refrain of rival paper, The Register as, ‘an obscure little paper’, it seems such a modern way of niggling other publications.

Another running joke I enjoyed were the constant digs at Colley Cibber. I have a real fondness for Mr Cibber (last mentioned in my review of ‘Midnight Mirage’, but also got a mention in ‘Joseph Andrews’). The actor-manager, so popular in comic roles, unexpectedly made poet laureate to be ridiculed at least twice a year when publishing his New Year and Royal odes. The Journal had followed the contest throughout, ridiculing the possible candidates but mostly ignoring Cibber, he being such an outside possibility. When he got the role, they were ready with an epigram or two. For example;

But guessing who would have the luck

To be the birthday fibber

I thought of Dennis, Theobold, Duck

But never dreamt of Cibber

(Incidentally, during the contest, Bavius banned waterfoul puns for Mr Duck as they were being inundated with them).

Or this comment;

Court fools and poets once illustrious lived:

With different titles graced distinct they shone:

But both are now so scarce; ‘tis well contrived

To join a poet and a fool in one.

Every time one of his execrable odes was released, the Journal would look at it in it’s most mock-serious manner and tear it apart. There were frequent niggles at his plays as at his poetry. 

Colley also seems to have provided the age with a phrase used in lots of contexts, much as we would use a famous quote from a film... such as, when chopping too much veg for a curry and putting it in a pan, I remarked that we ‘needed a bigger boat’). The phrase, which I have now incorporated into my own idiolect is something Colley was reported to have said to an actress who had particularly slayed an audience one night that she had, ‘outdone your usual outdoings’. In works throughout the ‘30s, people were described as ‘outdoing their outdoings’ for many different spheres of activity. Of course, Cibber himself often outdid his outdoings as a poet.

Another regular feature was the news roundup. This was more than a mere digest of news, but also a comment on the poor newsgathering techniques of the other papers. It took conflicting reports of the same event, compared them and often a comment by Bavius/Russell. These comments are often of an acid and sardonic nature that pushes (and occasionally crosses into) cruel. Occasionally the reports were written in a rhyme form, something that seems shockingly flippant and rather amusing, for example the fairly famous;

“Yesterday, a poor woman, who I suppose got up to ride,

Fell out of a dust-cart, and immediately died.”

There are many arguments, but the one that most gripped me was the tale of their longest running feud with the quack, Joshua Ward. Ward peddled some pills and drops, supposed to be a panacea for all ills and ended up killing many people, especially the weak. The Journal opened up its pages to anyone wishing to report deaths and crippling from the pills. The pills were based on genuine 18th century medical practice of purging the body of sickness, but they worked too well, purging the body for days and days until the victim purged themselves to death. The campaign was pretty successful, and Ward had to tour the North and keep out of London. 

In all, I enjoyed this book and I feel I know, or have access to knowledge about every aspect of The Grub Street Journal that I could ever want. And that’s something to be pleased about. 


Yours

Review of Satan's Mistress by Val Lewis

The title was the first thing that stood out about this book; ‘Satan’s Mistress’ sat in the nautical theme shop amongst the books of naval history and behind the case of barometers. Odd title to have in a nautical gift shop; odder too that on closer inspection it was published by the shop itself, odder still, the portrait on the front cover has holes where the eyes are so bright red backing behind can shine through, giving her evil eyes, and oddest of all, the blurb contains a prediction for the end of the world... to have taken place seven years ago.

The eyes! The eyes!

Satan’s Mistress is, in theory, a historical biography of a religious fanatic named Joanna Southcott active at the end of the eighteenth century. I knew a little about her - that she believed that she had borne that son of God, that she had predicted his future return, that there were still believers who owned a house somewhere in the English countryside awaiting his return. This book is not written by one of her believers, this book is written by someone who believes that Joanna was seduced by the devil and her acts and her prophecies, though real, were gained by diabolic means. Not a completely ordinary historical biography then, but one so fitting to it’s subject and so provoking when it comes to the idea of biography itself.

But before all that, diabolic pacts aside, what do we learn about Joanna Southcott? She was a country girl born in 1750 of reasonable but not stupendous means and a basic education. She was attractive and devout, with a fervent desire to be of use to God, but a certain vanity also. Her vanity is evidenced in a number of well documented examples of courtship, where she played a number of men around on a string until they became fed up of her or married someone more pliable. It was at a young age, the author suggests, that Joanna was first contacted by demons, who prayed on her vanity and her true and ardent desire to play a part in God’s kingdom. She grew into a typical spinster, good with traditional lotions and cures, and she wrote doggerel poetry when she got stressed. 

One of her publications.

She became convinced that this doggerel was from God, and managed to convince other people. When the prophecies in the poetry started to come true, she started to grow in fame and recognition but what she craved most was recognition from the established church. She approached many ministers, cursing the Bishop of Exeter when he refused to take her seriously as God’s prophet etc..etc.. he died less than a year later - her followers nodded and said ‘I told you so’. (If you can name the book referred to in the wording of that sentence, I will love you forever and we will be best friends).

She fixed her main sights on a handsome cleric called Joseph Pomeroy - who she decided would be her John the Baptist. He humoured her at first but eventually became disgusted by her, and she hounded him for the rest of his life, tarring him with her brush. Luckily for her not everyone was against her and she succeeded as the leader of a fanatical group formally run by a Richard Brothers. Her new followers took her to London and treated her as the prophetess she believed herself to be. She gathered a box of prophecies that she added to throughout her life and would continue her name after her death. 

She also amused herself by eating, creating church services that added her works to the praise, creating 14,000 official followers by giving them a seal that was regarded as a passport to heaven and sewing a quilt meant to curse King George III for not listening to her. She claimed the quilt was the thing that drove him mad.

But time went on and inevitably, her fame faded. By queer coincidence, this is when she revealed that she was pregnant with the son of God despite being a virgin. She did grow bigger, her belly did kick, she certainly had weird cravings. Medical professions examined her (in the bounds of propriety) and most of them agreed, probably, possibly, she was pregnant and a virgin. As the time approached, interest in her and her baby - to be named Shiloh, increased but obviously not enough - because there was no baby. It was later claimed that he was born, but as a spiritual being. Shortly after that, Joanna, who was going to live forever, died and that was it.

But not for long, because her box of prophecy, sealed until the official opening (done in the presence of the right number of clergy) was being passed around and the rumours of the coming of Shiloh still current, and so it remains till today. Rumours of the box, rumours of Shiloh and rumours of the end of the world continue up to this day and there are still believers.

Shiloh's crib, a picture.

An undeniably fascinating story - and presented in wonderful detail by the writer of the book - but there is also the belief of the writer that Joanna was actually tricked by the devil and not a charlatan or deluded. It is this that makes the book rise from an interesting story well told to a fascinating look at faith and biography. The author is presenting (as she sees it) a true biography of  a woman but includes beliefs many find hard to believe - it brings alive the whole issue of relationship between reader and book. When reading a biography it is usual to think that the realtionship is between the reader and the subject of the book, and we forget the author of the book, the ideas that they have about the subject, their own interpretation of the person we are reading about.

I am considering writing a biography of Oliver Goldsmith, the last major biography of him was most recently revised in 1969. Now, I fell in love with Goldsmith in his clumsy and endearing appearances in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (and there is a fascinating essay to write one day comparing Johnson biographies) but the biography of him I am now reading contextualises Goldsmith’s behaviour in whole new ways. My relationship with the man is wholly reliant on the interpretations of others, even his own work is changed by suggestions of others in biography and it is not until you read a biography where the author has a completely different view of the world to you that you start to properly question what you read.

This raises a very interesting book to a fascinating one, and I recommend it to any discerning reader who can find a copy. Also, anyone interested in Joanna’s own writings (containing prophecy and poetry) a modern day Southcottian has uploaded many of them to the web here.

Yours

(Very incidentally,  I wrote the review of this book during the last year that the modern Southcottians, the Panacea Society, existed. Their last member died the year after I wrote this and the house that they bought for Jesus, and the £14,000,000 of investment they bought in Bedford, which they believed to be the Garden of Eden, is now a charity. The charity has a museum with Shiloh's cot and the box of prophecy in it.)