Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England

Abstract

, 2012, 0199663874, 9780199663873, 284 pages. The political potential of millenarian religion has long exercised the interests of scholars of western history and religion. The religious vision of an imminent messianic age in modernity was once commonly contrasted with secular movements for revolutionary change such as socialism. Recent shifts in historiography and the study of religion have downplayed such comparisons, and yet early industrial England witnessed significant interactions between millenarianism and traditions of radical popular politics, including the first English socialisms. This book offers a new explanation of such interactions, revealing their basis in rich traditions of popular theology and religious practice, and not the collective disillusion and secular conversions once thought. Through a detailed archive-based study of the popular millenarian movement of Southcottianism-the followers of Joanna Southcottfrom 1815 to 1840, this work challenges social and gender views of plebeian religion in the period. Adopting innovative approaches in the history of religion, including a view of theology from the perspective of millenarians themselves, this book further overturns existing assumptions about millenarian attitudes to agency, including those of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. This history of Southcottianism provides a compelling case-study of the political possibilities of visionary religion, revealing how theology framed popular conceptions of human and divine agency in the making of the millennium, and was intimately involved in an early collaboration between the competing Christian and secular visions of transformation which have shaped the modern world..

Southcottians and Shiloh: Genesis 49:10 and the Morphology of a Messianic Hope

“…45 The Southcottians after Southcott, as Lockley has shown, were a divided movement, with schisms forming along political as well as theological lines. 46 George Turner, a follower first of Brothers and then of Southcott, formed the first major post-Southcott prophetic following after holding his own meetings and distributing his own prophetic proclamations in London from 1816-1821. 47 Turner, in claiming his own prophetic role, offers an exposition of the Shiloh promise for a new generation of Southcottians, which focuses especially on the idea of Shiloh as a "gatherer" of people.…”

E.P. Thompson, Shirley , and the Antinomian Tradition in West Riding Luddism and Popular Protest

“…Prophets were an accepted part of popular culture, and they were an integral part of the radical underworld, a world which existed well beyond London and the West Country. 87 It is, then, perhaps no coincidence that Brontë registers this millenarianism, which occupied a similar place as antinomianism. It could be argued that the emphasis Brontë 35 places on these forms of religious heterodoxy is evidence of what some critics have seen as the anachronism of Shirley -as far as its exploration of working-class protest in the 1840s goes.…”