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Who Was ‘The Deluded Follower of Joanna Southcott’? Millenarianism in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2013

PHILIP LOCKLEY
PHILIP LOCKLEY*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Theology, University of Oxford, 34 St Giles, Oxford OX1 3LD; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This article re-examines a controversial group in English religious history: the millenarian followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott. The identities of many of Southcott's supporters have remained unclear, despite notable academic attention. Their relative social dislocation is most disputed; greater consensus characterises debates over women's attraction to Southcottianism. This article uses a recently-opened archive of Southcottian material, and reinterprets previously-known sources, to revise all existing pictures of who Southcottians were. Southcottian occupations in industrial regions indicate a similar social makeup to contemporary Methodism; Southcottianism had no distinct appeal to women. New evidence of the personal experiences of Southcottians further suggests that they may be best understood as a branch of the ‘heart religion’ of the period, one taking a distinctive view of the ways and means of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 64 , Issue 1 , January 2013 , pp. 70 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013

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References

1 William Blake, ‘On the virginity of the Virgin Mary & Johanna Southcott’, in David Erdman (ed.), The complete poetry and prose of William Blake, rev. edn, Berkeley 1982, 501; Beaty, Frederick L., ‘Byron on Joanna Southcott and undeserved salvation’, Keats-Shelley Journal xxvi (1977), 34–8Google Scholar; Southey, Robert, ‘Account of Joanna Southcott’, in Letters from England, London 1808, ii. 236–69Google Scholar.

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4 Midgley, William, Anti-Beardymanism or the pretended Israelites unmasked, Bishopwearmouth 1829Google Scholar. On the entertaining confusion of Southcottian beards and communist prophets see Bax, E. Belfort, Reminiscences and reflections, New York 1920, 50Google Scholar, and Wheen, Francis, Karl Marx, London 1999, 3–4Google Scholar.

5 Modern Southcottians continued to attract attention in the twentieth century. The Panacea Society of Bedford maintained a well-known campaign for the bishops of the Church of England to open ‘Joanna Southcott's box’; other groups recognising the prophetic inspiration of Southcott persist in Australia and North America to this day. See Shaw, Jane, Octavia, daughter of God: the story of a female messiah and her followers, London 2011Google Scholar.

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7 Ibid. 420–8, 878–80.

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12 Ibid. 424–7. The correlation between millenarian beliefs and deprivation was much debated in the wake of Norman Cohn's seminal The pursuit of the millennium, London 1957. See Garrett, Clarke, Respectable folly: millenarians and the French Revolution in France and England, Baltimore 1975, 1–15Google Scholar.

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23 Taylor, Eve, 166; Clark, ‘Sexual politics’, 60–1.

24 Harrison, Second Coming, 246–7; Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 275; Green, Prophet John Wroe, 219–20.

25 These studies are products of the Oxford University Prophecy Project, and include Madden, Deborah, ‘The religious politics of prophecy: or, Richard Brothers's Revealed knowledge confuted’, History of European Ideas xxxiv (2008), 270–84Google Scholar, and The Paddington prophet: Richard Brothers's journey to Jerusalem, Manchester 2010; and Lockley, Philip, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines, 1800–1830: building and believing Jerusalem’, Northern History xlvii (2010), 297–317Google Scholar. See also Sklar, Susanne, Blake's ‘Jerusalem’ as visionary theatre, Oxford 2011Google Scholar.

26 The archive was discovered by Dr Jane Shaw whose Octavia, daughter of God, is based upon it.

27 For recent studies of more elite British millenarianism see Brown, Ralph, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism: the radical legacy of Edward Irving’, this Journal lvii (2007), 675–704Google Scholar, and Martin Spence, ‘The “Restitution of all things” in Evangelical premillennialism’, in Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (eds), The Church, the afterlife and the fate of the soul (Studies in Church History xlv, 2009), 349–59. Millennial beliefs held across a broader social range tend to be considered in collections which include a focus on Ireland: Crawford Gribben and Andrew Holmes (eds), Protestant millennialism, Evangelicalism and Irish society, 1790–2005, Basingstoke 2006; Crawford Gribben and Timothy C. F. Stunt (eds), Prisoners of hope? Aspects of Evangelical millennialism in Britain and Ireland, 1800–1880, Milton Keynes 2004.

28 Hempton, David, ‘Evangelicalism and eschatology’, this Journal xxxi (1980), 182Google Scholar.

29 Joel ii. 28–31. This text was especially popular among contemporary revivalist groups with distinct beliefs about both inspiration and the millennium: Valenze, Deborah, Prophetic sons and daughters: female preaching and popular religion in industrial England, Princeton 1985, 97, 196Google Scholar.

30 Until Matthew Niblett's forthcoming study of Southcott, The woman and the dragon appears, the best existing (if brief) guide to Southcott's theology is Gordon Allan, ‘Southcottian sects from 1790 to the present day’, in Kenneth Newport and Crawford Gribben (eds), Expecting the end: millennialism in social and historical context, Waco 2006, 217–19.

31 On Brothers see Madden, Paddington prophet.

32 Lockley, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines’, 305–6. On millennial thinking in Yorkshire Methodism see Baxter, John, ‘The great Yorkshire revival, 1792–6: a study of mass revival among the Methodists’, Sociological Yearbook of Religion in Britain vii (1974), 76Google Scholar.

33 On Southcott's published writings and the chapbook tradition see Valenze, Deborah, ‘Prophecy and popular literature in eighteenth-century England’, this Journal xxix (1978), 90Google Scholar.

34 Philip Lockley, ‘Millenarian religion and radical politics in Britain, 1815–1835: a study of Southcottians after Southcott’, unpubl. DPhil. diss. Oxford 2009, 53–6.

35 Ibid. 43–51.

36 On ‘Shiloh’ in Genesis xlix.10 and messianic beliefs see Allan, ‘Southcottian sects’, 219.

37 Revelation xii; Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 201–10.

38 Lockley, ‘Millenarian religion’, 41–2.

39 Thompson, Making of the English working class, 425–6.

40 Ibid. 207–32, 297–346.

41 Harrison, Second Coming, 150.

42 Ibid. 110.

43 Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 80–2.

44 JSC, 370. This features the names of people applying to become ‘sealed’ members of a London Southcottian chapel between March 1809 and December 1814. The figure does not include 27 names added between 1825 and 1839.

45 JSC, 371, 372.

46 Lockley, ‘Millenarian religion’, 59; Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 78.

47 Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 77, 81–2.

48 PS, PN 240/20, 1 Jan. 1821; PN 243/81, 23 Feb. 1821.

49 PN 240/20. A matching name, year and two parents’ names was the normal criteria for a confident identification. Until the 1820s Southcottians had no naming ceremony of their own. Those who had their children named in dissenting chapels were not necessarily adherents of the denomination: Michael Watts, The Dissenters, II: The expansion of Evangelical nonconformity, Oxford 1995, 676–81.

50 Population historians define the period between the 1790s and 1820s as the worst for ‘under-registration’ of birth and deaths in modern English history; up to one-third of births and deaths in some years were unregistered as baptisms and burials: Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., The population history of England, 1541–1871, London 1981, 1–154Google Scholar.

51 Koditscheck, Theodore, Class formation and urban-industrial society: Bradford, 1750–1850, Cambridge 1990, 81–2Google Scholar.

52 WYAS, BDP14/1/1/9 (1801–3, 1810); BDP14/1/1/10 (1806); BDP14/1/2/1 (1808–15); BDP14/1/2/2 (1817); BDP14/1/2/3 (1819); RDP58 2/7 (1810); BDP94 1/2/1 (1817). See also TNA, RG–4/1711.

53 BDP14 1/2/3 (1820).

54 BDP14/1/1/9 (1802–3); BDP14/1/2/3 (1816–18). Joshua Jennings's occupation is given in PN 238/132, 10 Nov. 1822.

55 BDP14/1/1/9 (1803); BDP14/1/2/1 (1815); BDP14/1/2/2 (1816).

56 BDP14/1/1/9 (1801, 1803); RDP58/3a/3 (1818); BDP94/1/2/1 (1818).

57 WYAS, BPC BDP14/1/1/9 (1803); Willmott, Elvira, ‘Occupations in eighteenth-century Bradford.’, Bradford Antiquary iv (1989), 67–77Google Scholar.

58 BPC BDP14/1/1/9 (1800); BDP14/1/2/2 (1818).

59 WYAS, D92/1/2/1 (1815).

60 Pat Hudson, ‘Landholding and the organisation of textile manufacture in Yorkshire rural townships, c. 1660–1810’, in Maxine Berg (ed.), Markets and manufacture in early industrial Europe, London 1991, 269, 289.

61 Maxine Berg, ‘Women's work, mechanisation and the early phases of industrialisation in England’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The historical meanings of work, Cambridge 1987, 78–9.

62 Ibid. 81.

63 PN 243/81, 23 Feb. 1821.

64 As with Bradford, a strong majority of the Southcottians traced appear in the baptism records of the established Church. In the Huddersfield region, paternal occupation recording was especially rare in dissenting chapel registers before 1812.

65 WYAS, WDP160/1/1/4 (1800–12); WDP160/1/2/1 (1813–22); WDP12/13 (1813–22); WDP1/3.

66 Hudson, Pat, The genesis of industrial capital: a study of the West Riding wool textile industry, c. 1750–1850, Cambridge 1986, 26–8Google Scholar.

67 Berg, ‘Women's work,’ 78–9.

68 Select Committee on the Woollen Manufacture, Parliamentary Papers 1806, quoted ibid. 81.

69 WDP118/2–4; WDP2/4; WDP62/1/3; WDP137/1/2/1; E. B. Armitage, The parish register of Hartshead in the county of York, 1612–1812, Leeds 1903, 276.

70 Hudson, ‘Landholding’, 261–91.

71 Idem, Genesis, 25–9, 61–70.

72 Ibid. 64–7.

73 TNA, HO 40/61/253; Lockley, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines’, 305.

74 Deeds of land lease, 1 Jan. 1807, WYAS, Tong/3/728; Hudson, ‘Landholding’, 273–9.

75 Apprentice indenture, 5 May 1809, Tong/12a/212.

76 Details of Wroe's family background and financial affairs are given in John Wroe, Divine communications and prophecies, Wakefield 1834, 3–7.

77 On Ashton-under-Lyne see Green, Prophet John Wroe, and Lockley, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines’.

78 PN 239/30, 31 Oct. 1820.

79 PN 243/41, 1 May 1820.

80 PN 240/6, 8 July 1822.

81 Ibid.

82 PN 238/92, 21 Apr. 1821.

83 Harrison, Second Coming, 221.

84 Field, Clive, ‘The social composition of English Methodism to 1830: a membership analysis’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library lxxvi (1994), 165Google Scholar.

85 Ibid. 166–9.

86 Lockley, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines’, 305–8.

87 Morning Chronicle, 28 Oct. 1817.

88 James Hopkins, ‘Joanna Southcott: a study of popular religion and radical politics, 1789–1814’, unpubl. PhD diss. Austin, 1972.

89 JSC 370–2. In his subsequent book, Hopkins added data from several manuscript lists in the London Metropolitan Archives. The names on these lists totalled only a few hundred, taking Hopkins's total sample to 7,249 names.

90 JSC 372. All numbers given here are the actual totals of names appearing on these sources, not the last number recorded next to the final names (as quoted by Harrison and Hopkins). Errors were made in the original entry of names, with duplication of some numbers, or numbers with no name next to them.

91 JSC 371.

92 Hopkins, ‘Joanna Southcott’, 168–72, 418–26, and Woman to deliver, 85.

93 Harrison, Second Coming, 110–11.

94 Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 216.

95 JSC 371.

96 For a detailed explanation see Lockley, ‘Millenarian religion’, 65–7.

97 JSC 370, 372.

98 Harrison, Second Coming, 121; Green, Prophet John Wroe, 32. See also Balleine, G. R., Past finding out: the tragic story of Joanna Southcott and her successors, London 1956, 80Google Scholar.

99 Turner, George, Wonderful prophecies by George Turner, the servant of God, London 1818, ii. 70Google Scholar.

100 Ibid. ii. 70–7.

101 PN 243/52, 16 May 1820; PN 238/54, 27 May 1820.

102 Both historians dated it only ‘after 1816’, due to its watermark: Harrison, Second Coming, 248; Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 243.

103 JSC 370.

104 JSC 372. For the dating of this source to 1816 see Lockley, ‘Millenarian religion’, 46–7.

105 JSC 372. None of these figures may reasonably be explained by ratios in the wider population: female migration for factory or other urban employment was common to all these regions.

106 Linda Woodhead, Christianity: a very short introduction, Oxford 2005, 128–45. On men's and women's religiosity in the nineteenth century see McLeod, Hugh, Piety and poverty: working-class religion in Berlin, London, and New York, 1870–1914, New York 1996, 149–73Google Scholar.

107 Bebbington, David, Evangelicalism in modern Britain: a history from the 1730s to the 1980s, London 1989, 25–6, 128–9Google Scholar; Wilson, Bryan, Sects and society: a sociological study of three religious groups in Britain, London 1961, 101–2, 198–200, 297–8Google Scholar.

108 Field, Clive, ‘Adam and Eve: gender in the English Free Church constituency’, this Journal xliv (1993), 65Google Scholar, and ‘Social composition of Methodism’, 155–9.

109 Idem, ‘Adam and Eve,’ 65–6. Field suggested that women may have preferred not to sign church covenants or foundation rolls of members during 1751–1800, a period of rapid expansion in dissent, so leaving less evidence of their majority involvement. This explanation is less valid for Southcottian documents, as lists of names were imbued with almost salvific significance by millenarians, and therefore had to include all believers. To be named and numbered brought Southcottians consciously closer to the scenes of Revelation, and their becoming ‘those who are written in the Lamb's book of life’: Rev. xxi. 23–7.

110 Wilson, Sects and society, 102, 298.

111 Field, ‘Social composition of Methodism’, 157–9.

112 See the essays in Morgan, Sue (ed.), Women, religion, and feminism in Britain, 1750–1900, Basingstoke 2002Google Scholar.

113 An influential critique of this trend in women's history was provided by Vickery, Amanda, ‘Golden ages to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history’, HJ xxxii (1993), 383–414Google Scholar.

114 Clark, ‘Sexual crisis’, 61. The one facet of the revised proportions of Southcottian men and women arguably still able to sustain the supposition that Southcott's claims and articulation as a woman drew an especial reaction from fellow women is the gender breakdown of her Devon following. How far a response to commonalities in lived experience was measurably different from something recognisable as local pride in ‘one of their own’ finding national fame, is, however, difficult to establish.

115 For Barbara Taylor's own reflections on these issues of gender and identity see her ‘Religion, radicalism, and fantasy’, History Workshop Journal xxxix (1995), 102–12.

116 Denise Riley, ‘Am I that name?’: feminism and the category of ‘women’ in history, Basingstoke 1988; Morgan, Sue, ‘Women, religion and feminism: past, present and future perspectives’, in Women, religion and feminism, 1–19Google Scholar.

117 Scott, Joan Wallach, ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry xvii (1991), 773–97Google Scholar.

118 Hugh McLeod has noted that the three English denominations in the early 1900s with leadership roles most open to women were also those where the sexes were most evenly balanced in attendance figures. ‘Less rigid segregation of sex roles within the Primitive Methodist, Quaker and Salvationist communities led to less sharp divisions between male and female patterns of behaviour ’: Piety and poverty, 161. The question of whether men may be more inclined to religious participation in arenas of female leadership remains fascinatingly open.

119 Harrison, Second Coming, 132.

120 This is quoted in Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 89.

121 BL, ms Add. 57860, fo. 181, 7 July 1812.

122 Zion Ward, The judgment seat of Christ, London 1831, 69.

123 Ibid. 70.

124 PN 252/22, 3 Dec. 1807.

125 Hoadley Ashe to Joanna Southcott, 28 Sept. 1807, quoted in Hopkins, Woman to deliver, 123.

126 Turner's biographical details remain sketchy despite his belonging to a prominent Leeds merchant family: Lockley, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines,’ 306.

127 On Turner's earlier prophetic writings see Madden, Paddington prophet.

128 Most manuscripts provide only a surname with ‘inquiries’, but cross-referencing these with contemporary Southcottian registers allows many to be matched to a named individual.

129 PN 243/29, 3 Apr. 1820.

130 PN 243/41, 1 May 1820.

131 PN 243/38, 21 Apr. 1820.

132 PN 243/63, 3 Oct. 1820.

133 PN 238/81, 25 Nov. 1820. The preponderance of women's questions to God through Turner is notably consonant with the stronger association of women with personal prayer in the nineteenth century: McLeod, Piety and poverty, 157, 192–4.

134 PN 238/81, 25 Nov. 1820.

135 PN 243/36, 18 Apr. 1820.

136 Ibid.

137 PN 243/37, 18 Apr. 1820.

138 PN 243/43, 5 May 1820.

139 PN 243/35, 16 Apr. 1820; PN 243/24, 1 Apr. 1820.

140 PN 243/34, 26 Apr. 1820.

141 Ibid.

142 Most original dream enquiries are lost, but survive in edited form in a rare edition of Turner's Wonderful prophecies (PN 541/1). Dreams were attributed to persons by surname, but may occasionally be matched to exact individuals in manuscript records.

143 Turner, Wonderful prophecies, ii. 21.

144 Ibid. 23.

145 Ibid. 24.

146 Ibid. 25.

147 Ibid. 28.

148 Ibid. 19.

149 Hempton, ‘Evangelicalism and eschatology’, 185; Crawford Gribben, Evangelical millennialism in the trans-Atlantic world, 1500–2000, Basingstoke, 2011, 86–8.

150 Lockley, ‘Millenarians in the Pennines’, 303–10.

151 Turner, Wonderful prophecies, 30.

152 Ibid. 30.

153 Southey, Letters from England, quoted in Thompson, Making of the English working class, 421.

154 Phyllis Mack, Heart religion in the British enlightenment, Cambridge 2008.

155 McCalman, Iain (ed.), An Oxford companion to the Romantic age: British culture, 1776–1832, Oxford 1999, 214–23, 603–4Google Scholar. Southcott is included in a broader canon of Romantic writers in Fiona Robertson (ed.), Women's writing, 1778–1838: an anthology, Oxford 2001.

156 Bebbington, Evangelicalism, 80, 83–5.

157 Brown, ‘Victorian Anglican Evangelicalism’, 675–9.

158 An historical survey of this religious culture would notably serve as a counterpart to Crawford Gribben's recent history of ‘evangelical millennialism’ – the trans-Atlantic tradition of millennial beliefs and expectation based entirely on biblical interpretation – which excludes groups claiming spiritual or prophetic inspiration. Gribben acknowledges the similar interests frequently shared by Biblicist traditions and modern prophetic movements such as Southcottianism. Yet the sources for doctrinal innovation claimed by prophets or others appealing to spiritual insight have led Gribben to position them ‘outside the boundaries’ of a recognisable Evangelical movement. An alternative exploration of these fascinating edges of Evangelical culture, charting the emotions and experiences provoked by the imagined future of the millennium, would very likely reveal other continuities in traditions of ‘heart religion’ capable of demonstrating millenarianism's potential to complicate existing narratives of the place of ‘the Spirit’ and not just ‘the Word’ in histories of modern Protestantism: Gribben, Evangelical millennialism, 8–9.