1 A Divided Movement (2024)

Dr Philip Lockley

On the first day of 1815, Joanna Southcott was buried at St John’s Wood on the northern edge of London. The ceremony was carried out as secretly as possible. The coffin was removed from the rooms in Manchester Street where the prophet had died, late at night, while the mob were dispersed; the grave was booked in an alias.1 Four men attended the burial of the female prophet: three believers and an officiating clergyman. The three mourners were Colonel William Tooke Harwood, a retired cavalry officer, William Sharp, the noted engraver, and William Tozer, a leading preacher at the Southcottian chapel in Duke Street, Southwark.2 Each had been a frequent visitor to Southcott’s bedside during her final days, and ranked among the closest and most committed of her followers. Standing together in public, struggling in themselves to make sense of the apparent failure of Southcott’s prophecy of her giving birth to a messiah, they represented many thousands of other men and women across England, who also, on this and succeeding days, were privately reacting to the denial of their recent millenarian hope. The three left the graveside together, but in the year which followed, the ways Harwood, Sharp, and Tozer came to understand Southcott’s death, her prophetic claims, and the future prospects for the millennium, diverged dramatically. Each of their understandings further represented a mode of response in the wider Southcottian movement.

Harwood’s belief in Southcott was ‘very shaken’ by her death, and within months friends reported his faith to be ‘quite gone’.3 He had little further to do with those with whom he previously shared his millennial convictions, retiring from London to his native East Anglia. William Sharp, by contrast, came to be convinced Southcott’s prophecy had been fulfilled: he resolved that the Shiloh messiah must have been born on Christmas Day, two days before Southcott’s death on 27 December, but in a spiritual sense. Southcott had believed she was ‘the woman clothed with the sun’ described in Revelation 12; now the fate of her child fulfilled the vision of that biblical figure: ‘she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations…and the child was caught up to God, and to his throne’.4 For Sharp, Southcott’s prophecies remained as important as ever to understanding how the millennium would soon arrive. Her handwritten and printed communications from God only required continued study and interpretation, alongside the Bible, to decipher God’s intentions for the world. In the case of William Tozer, Southcott’s death represented only the silencing of one voice of prophecy. There followed a consequent need to find an alternative source of divine inspiration and current insight. By April 1815, Tozer had re-opened his Duke Street Chapel, closed since the previous August, to read and preach on the communications of a new prophet, George Turner, a Leeds merchant and leading Southcottian in the North.5

Archives and interpretations

That a proportion of those who had believed in Joanna Southcott in 1814 withdrew or ‘fell away’ from her millenarian movement in 1815, that a further proportion re-interpreted her written prophecies to enable continued belief in their predictions and fulfilment, and that a remaining proportion looked to the message of new prophets, is broadly recognized in J. F. C. Harrison’s standard history of the sect in the aftermath of Southcott’s death.6 Harrison asserted that ‘a majority of the believers’ continued as Southcottians after 1815, and that these divided between ‘old believers’—those such as William Sharp who remained loyal to Southcott alone—and the followers of ‘false prophets’.7Among the latter, George Turner was the dominant figure for the first five years after Southcott’s death, gaining many adherents, especially in northern counties. Several of Turner’s rivals to prophetic leadership were London-based: Samuel Sibley, a watchman in the City; Alexander Lindsey, who gathered a congregation in south London, and ‘Zebulon’—the assumed name of Joseph Allman—who would have a long-standing following in the capital.8 Other figures identified by Harrison were two successors to Turner—Mary ‘Joanna’ Boon from south Devon and John Wroe from Bradford—in addition to Zion Ward, ‘the last of the false prophets’ detailed in Harrison’s study.9 All of these, Harrison concluded, were only able to convince ‘a minority of Southcottians’; they ‘were false in that they were not acceptable to the majority of Southcottians’.10

Harrison’s assertions regarding majorities and minorities in the Southcottian movement were not substantiated by numbers. Rather, they appeared to be extrapolated from sociological case-studies of other millenarian movements in addition to both the quantity and content of the Southcottian archives available to him. To explain the strength of Southcottianism after 1814, Harrison identified the successful use of ‘failure mechanisms’ to overcome believers’ disappointment.11 His terminology was drawn from When Prophecy Fails, a seminal post-war study of twentieth-century American sects expecting the destruction of the world, and their reactions to prophecy’s ‘disconfirmation’.12 As the Southcottian failure mechanisms ‘operated quite smoothly’—either re-framing previous beliefs about Shiloh or authorizing a new prophet to reveal God’s message—so Southcottians mirrored the exemplar of the modern cases where ‘a majority’ of the previously committed remained believers.13 Harrison’s subsequent assessment of the popularity of post-Southcott prophets noted the ‘sparse’ records available on most. This contrasted significantly with the prodigious volume of manuscript material generated by the ‘old believers’ deposited in the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives.14 Harrison’s study cited these letter collections extensively, and their correspondents’ unswerving suspicions of later prophets were taken to be the predominant views of surviving believers.

Two further aspects of the Southcottian movement, besides the proportions of surviving believers, have been similarly evaluated on the basis of limited archive evidence, and had as a result become standard opinion: the geographical spread of Southcottians and their gender composition. Both of these subjects were explored by James Hopkins in his 1972 doctoral thesis based on the University of Texas’ substantial Southcottian manuscript collection.15 From three particular vellum scrolls in this archive, containing the names and place of residence of nearly 7,000 early nineteenth-century Southcottians, Hopkins mapped the distribution of the Southcottian movement across England, and calculated a ratio of female to male members.16 He identified Southcottian strongholds in London, Yorkshire, Devon, and Somerset, and concluded there was a ‘much larger proportion of women over men in the Southcottian movement, 63 per cent to 37 per cent’.17 These findings were first published in Harrison’s subsequent study, then Hopkins’s own book.18 They have since been cited in numerous works, with the gender proportion in particular used as key evidence in the arguments of Barbara Taylor and Anna Clark for Southcott’s appeal to women, and her followers’ place among those plebeian women contesting the sexual hierarchies and class agendas of their age.19

The opening of the Panacea Society archive in Bedford, and an opportunity to re-read manuscript material used in existing academic studies of Southcottianism, allows this study to revise these current views, in some cases significantly. Through a process perhaps best described as the triangulation of archives, new sources in Bedford have been related to Southcottian material in London (used by Harrison) and in Texas (used by Hopkins), both to identify significant new evidence on the millenarian movement and to reinterpret previously cited sources, to reach alternative conclusions on the proportional size of surviving groups, the spread of Southcottians before and after Southcott’s death, and the ratio of men to women believers. In addition, evidence from each of these archives has enabled the locations of an unprecedented number of Southcottian meeting places, particularly before 1814, to be traced in chapel licensing records for the first time.

The crucial insight provided by this research method, and the historical point made most clear, is that from the first year after Southcott’s death, Southcottianism was a fiercely divided movement. It was divided between those who accepted George Turner as a succeeding prophet to Southcott and those who did not. This divide generated two distinct networks of shared belief, of perhaps similar size, stretching across varied parts of the country, and linked by personal correspondence or personal visits. The divide was crossed on rare but notable occasions, when an individual or group chose to leave one network for the other, after doubts or new convictions. Yet, in most cases, the decision to accept or reject a new prophet after Southcott was a decision for life: the two separate epistolary networks, where believers corresponded with the like-believing, effectively cemented a sectarian split in the Southcottian religious body. Their correspondence and opinions reflected their side of this split, and its physical remains have come to form separate manuscript collections in different parts of the world.

The manuscript collections consulted directly in Harrison’s study belonged exclusively to surviving Southcottians who rejected all post-Southcott prophets.20 Two collections found in the Panacea Society archive were produced by groups on either side of the 1815 divide: one set of several hundred letters dated 1815–1822 were exchanged within a network of Turner followers; an entirely separate body of correspondence, from these years and later, belonged to old believers of the same opinion as Harrison’s subjects.21 Hopkins’s Texas collection has a more complicated provenance: it belonged to the Bennett family of London who initially accepted the prophetic claims of Turner, then left this network before 1820 to join the rival old believers.22 It consequently contains manuscripts relating to Turner Southcottians between 1815 and 1819, but later letters from allies of William Sharp and others.23 Significantly, specific sources from this period of affiliation to Turner have not been adequately understood in the context of the beliefs and practices of this distinct section of Southcottianism.

This chapter presents a new interpretation of the numerical state of the divided Southcottian movement after Southcott’s death, and the relative size and autonomy of surviving groups. It identifies the limitations of existing maps of Southcottian reach, and offers a corrective assessment of the geographical scope of the movement before and after December 1814. Finally, it queries the evidential basis for existing opinions on the gender division of Southcottians, putting forward a revised gender ratio for the movement based on more comprehensive and consistent sources. This last point is shown to have particular implications for arguments presenting Southcottianism as a ‘feminist’ movement. The other points also relate to interpretations of radicalism by demonstrating the essential distinction between groups and networks of surviving Southcottians. Later chapters will show how these differences determined, in significant part, the evolution of patterns of religious behaviour influential in James Smith’s developing opinions, as well as the reception that Zion Ward’s messianic and political claims received among Southcottians.

Numbering the remnants

Like many millenarians, Southcottians loved to count themselves. The biblical scenes of Revelation, which they wished so much to witness and partake in, are awash with precisely numbered multitudes. In a practice adopted during Southcott’s public ministry, Southcottians brought themselves consciously closer to the drama of such scenes by being ‘sealed’, so hoping to number among the celebrated 144,000 ‘sealed out of every tribe’ in Revelation 7.24 The process of ‘sealing’ involved an individual signing a petition for ‘Christ’s glorious and peaceable Kingdom to be established…and Satan destroyed’, after which they received one of Southcott’s ‘seals’—a stamped piece of paper with her signature.25 The collating of the petitions, to form long scrolls of names kept in Southcottian chapels, formed a further step towards their becoming ‘those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life’ in Revelation 21.26 In October 1812, George Turner wrote to William Wadman of York: ‘there is a great work begun at Birmingham…they have 2 meeting houses about a mile distant from each other…I was there 2 Sundays and the first Sunday 21 gave in their names. [T]hey keep them upon a Roll’.27 Such practices were sustained or adapted after Southcott’s death: Old believers continued to seal new converts on the same petitions; succeeding prophets often instituted their own counting regimes, attesting to new beliefs but always including the idea of ‘signing’ or giving one’s name.

Only a fraction of the original sealing petitions from Southcott’s lifetime survive; extensive records of post-1814 counting exercises are extant for George Turner’s followers only.28 In previous studies, this complicated efforts to number Southcottians during Southcott’s career accurately; here it complicates the exercise of calculating proportions of different believers after her death.

The most reliable estimate of the number of convinced, committed Southcottians at the moment of their founding prophet’s death is just under 12,400. This statistic is compiled from reports in Southcottian sources of the specific numbers of people undergoing Southcott’s sealing exercise in the later years of her prophetic career (between 1808 and 1814).29 Both Harrison and Hopkins erroneously added to this figure a further number reported to be ‘sealed’ by January 1804—8,144—so claiming a total Southcottian membership in 1814 of over 20,000.30 This notably ignored the evidence for the drastic changes made to the ‘sealing’ process, and the genuine beliefs of those it counted, between its first introduction in 1803 and the later period. Before 1805, Southcott stated that the seals were for both ‘believers or unbelievers’; she was directed to offer them to all, ‘whether they were true believers in thy visitation or not’.31 In the wake of criticism that she was selling the seals for profit, Southcott made several attempts to control their distribution between 1804 and 1807, instructing that the sealing ‘for unbelievers [be] ceased’, then instituting a ‘second sealing’ (started from zero) and insisting each applicant for membership of her millenarian movement produce evidence of their acquaintance with her prophetic writings.32 Given that committed believers sealed under the old system were ‘re-sealed’ in 1807 and counted anew, the figures for the sealed from this point onwards represent a far better guide to the movement’s true membership at the close of 1814.

No equivalent estimate is required of the number of Southcottians who accepted George Turner as Southcott’s successor in the years immediately after her death: a complete register of his national following survives in the University of Texas archive.33 Turner publicized his prophetic claim within days of Southcott’s burial, pointedly insisting that his communications came from the same source as the previous prophet: ‘Give Ear for I am God’, Turner’s first prophecy declared; ‘the visitation of my spirit is from me the Lord…my spirit shall direct my people.’34 Turner, a former Methodist and prominent follower of the 1790s’ prophet Richard Brothers, had reported receiving prophetic insights long before this, and, significantly, had had several of his prophecies approved by Southcott.35 This lent considerable legitimacy to his assurances and instructions to Southcottians from early 1815 that Shiloh’s arrival was only temporarily delayed and they should continue to wait, meet, and worship together, preparing for the messiah and the millennium’s imminent arrival. From May 1816, Turner placed frequent advertisem*nts in London newspapers declaring ‘Earth, earth hear the Voice of the Lord! Prepare for the coming of Shiloh!’; he then predicted the messiah’s arrival on several dates, up to 28 January 1817.36 In preparation for these predicted dates, Turner instituted his first method of registration for groups accepting his prophecies. In a manner echoing Southcott’s sealing petition, followers were instructed to give their names to attest to their belief in ‘the command of the Lord to George Turner’, and their desire to ‘unite to obey the Lord…waiting his appearing and his son Shiloh to reign over us on earth’.37 A single vellum scroll collating the names subscribed in this ritual reveals that 4,046 adult men and women, in 80 different locations across England, counted themselves Turner followers.38

This remarkable source was utilized by both Harrison and Hopkins. It is undated, yet its title—‘The Roll of names by the command of the Lord to George Turner’—led both scholars to date it loosely ‘between December 1814 and January 1817’.39 The scroll may now be dated with more confidence: it was compiled following an explicit prophetic direction from Turner to ‘make up the roll of names’ in January 1816, removing the names of sealed Southcottians who did not accept Turner, then ordering ‘the rolls…to be sent’ to Turner in London.40 Two followers were then instructed, ‘to write them all in one roll; preserving the smaller rolls’, as, Turner’s prophetic voice declared, ‘thou must have all my children about thee in their names—to prove they are waiting my appearing to join my Son Shiloh, as my family on earth’.41 The single, total roll was completed within the year.42

Though the title of the scroll itself strongly implied its exclusive relation to post-1814 Turner Southcottians (and it therefore not recording any other kind of surviving Southcottian of its time), neither previous study recognized its significance as an apparently comprehensive record of a strain of post-Southcott belief. Hopkins, especially, treated the source as commensurate with any other from when Southcott was alive, so underestimating the partiality of its picture of the millenarian movement.43 This single scroll of over four thousand names enables close to one third of the total number of Southcottians at the end of 1814 to be identified with the new prophet Turner within two years.

For all other Southcottian remnants in 1815 and after—all those who could not accept Turner’s claims in 1816—the numerical evidence is, once again, largely a case of estimates. Several sources suggest groups of old believer Southcottians felt little enthusiasm for revising their total numbers of ‘the sealed’ downwards after secessions or withdrawals prompted by doubt: they were only interested in sealing new members as a continuation of Southcott’s mission, and the sources they left reflect this.44 However, some indicators are available which point to this second sort of Southcottian, and its alternative correspondence network, approaching perhaps an equivalent size to Turner’s millenarian body, but not exceeding it. Their numbers may be put at between a quarter and a third of the total Southcottians in late 1814; they were not a majority.

One indicator of the minimum numbers involved in groups who refused to accept Turner’s prophetic claim is an extrapolation from figures of those later attracted to the claims of Zion Ward. This is because Ward’s Southcottian following from the late 1820s came in large part from among believers who had not accepted a preceding prophet since Southcott. Ward gained stronger support in parts of the Midlands than Turner ever did, in Birmingham especially, but also in parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.45 In Nottingham, for instance, Turner had 36 followers in 1816; in the early 1830s, Ward had ‘upwards of 200 believers’ in the town.46 That these were Southcottians surviving from 1814 is evident from letters exchanged between them and groups elsewhere not cited in previous studies. During 1829, the Nottingham group wrote to London Southcottians specifically assuring them that they had not followed any prophet since Southcott: ‘we have…been steady Believers in the sacred Mission of our dear spiritual Mother with yourselves for many years; neither have we turned to the right or left to follow any other visitation’.47

Ward is known to have instituted his own ceremony for Southcottians ‘signing’ for belief in him in 1831, and this attracted nearly 2,000 names.48 Only a small section of this support came from Southcottians once associated with Turner, in south-west Yorkshire, south Lancashire, and Kent.49 The overwhelming majority of those who flocked to acknowledge Ward as Shiloh at this later point had been old believers and correspondents in the alternative network of Southcottian groups. Letters exchanged in this network which survive in both the British Library and Panacea Society collections attest to the threat seen to be posed by Ward—the ‘perfidious and deluded false prophet that has of late rose up’.50 Considerable bitterness was shown to those who opted to follow him. Yet the old believer network evidently endured, surviving the withdrawal of many of its Midlands groups, and some in London.51 From this, as well as less direct evidence including the tenor of discussion and debate in letters, it may be inferred that the near 2,000 figure did not constitute an entirely ruinous secession from this body, though still a significant one. Beyond this, it is difficult to project with any real accuracy. That Ward drew away about a half is probable: traceable correspondents rarely give the impression that their letters were written on behalf of a local group anything larger than a hundred, and their addresses indicate their presence in between ten and twenty other locations.52

From this, Harrison’s original assertion that ‘a majority’ of Southcottians continued to adhere to the movement in 1815 is both borne out by figures, and exceeded by circ*mstantial evidence. His proportions, however, were inaccurate. Close to half of the 12,400 sealed by 1814 may be accounted for in the registered followers of just post-Southcott claimants—Turner and Ward. These put the numbers of surviving Southcottians in the six thousands themselves, and, with those who remained old believers, most likely into the 7,000–8,000 range. The proportional fate of Southcottians in 1815 may in fact have reflected the fate of the three public mourners at Southcott’s funeral: one in three appears to have followed a new prophet; one in three remained adherents of solely Southcott’s prophecies (until a sub-section of this group accepted those prophecies were fulfilled in Zion Ward); and the remaining third of pre-1814 Southcottians, like Col. William Tooke Harwood, cannot be traced believing any more.

At this juncture, it is worth noting where such figures put the Southcottian movement in relative scales of English religious dissent in this period. In numerical terms, Southcottianism between 1815 and 1820 sat somewhere above the non-Calvinist General Baptists and various small Methodist offshoots such as the Bible Christians, and just below the still regionally specific Methodist New Connexion.53 All other official forms of Protestant dissent in this period were substantially larger: Particular Baptists and Congregationalists numbers stood around the 30,000 and 40,000 marks respectively, as probably did the combined total of Presbyterians and Unitarians.54 Wesleyan Methodism—by far the most successful form of English dissent in the age—had numbers approaching 150,000.55 Figures for Primitive Methodism are only available in the 1820s, though its extremely rapid growth will have taken its numbers above those for Southcottians comparatively quickly.56 Indeed, this example underlines the extent Southcottian millenarianism was unusual as a form of Protestant dissent in this age, in its declining after 1814, and not enjoying incremental growth. The Quakers were the only other national dissenting body to experience actual numerical decline in this period.57

Geographical spread

Joanna Southcott lived the last months of her life in the glare of nationwide press attention. Within a month of her death, the news was carried by newspapers in almost every English region.58 Such notice in part reflected the extraordinary nature of Southcott’s story. Yet the wide extent of interest in the expected birth and the fulfilment of her prophecies also mirrored the spread of the prophet’s organized community of followers by this date. Organized, public religious meetings of Southcottians, rare before 1811, proliferated widely following the changes in the religious toleration laws in 1812, so that by 1814, a national network of Southcottian chapels was established from Devon to the south-east, the West Midlands to the Yorkshire coast.59

Existing histories have known little about these Southcottian chapels outside London, barely even their locations. Better evidence has been available on early meeting spaces in south London—in Bermondsey, the Elephant and Castle, and Southwark.60 The Texas archive includes a second scroll of Southcottian names (dated this time) from one London chapel, recording 1,421 people applying to be sealed between March 1809 and December 1814.61 To gauge the provincial spread of the movement in Southcott’s lifetime, scholars have turned to alternative non-chapel sources, and notably relied on post-1814 evidence. In his original doctoral research, Hopkins collated the data from the London sealing scroll, with that from the scroll of 4,000-odd Turner followers in 1816, and from a third scroll—a list of 1,291 names in 59 different English locations dateable after 1816—to produce a single statistical sample of nearly 7,000 names and addresses.62 From this, Hopkins drew his analysis of Southcottian strongholds and the national reach of the movement, which, as indicated above, is reiterated in every subsequent study of Southcottianism.63

This approach—collating data from sources dated before and after December 1814, and relying heavily on registers counting only a section of surviving Southcottians (those linked to George Turner)—is problematic. The extent of the sectarian division within Southcottianism from 1815 onwards means that this approach could only ever produce a partial, and to some extent distorted, picture of Southcottian geography. The third Texas scroll, though titled only ‘The Roll of Believers’, is recognizably a source only on Turner’s following and features many duplications of names from the larger scroll.64 As a result, Hopkins’s measure of the spread of Southcottians beyond the capital was based entirely on areas of the country where Turner was accepted; it did not record where any other form of post-Southcott belief survived, nor where Southcottians were known before 1814 and not after.

Alternative maps of the traceable geographical spread of Southcottianism by 1814, and the comparative extent of the two networks of surviving believers after this date, may be drawn using both a more diverse range of sources and known evidence with greater circ*mspection. It is now possible to piece together previously unknown elements of the original Southcottian chapel network from contemporary licence applications and references in Southcottian correspondence. A significant number of other Southcottian locations are revealed in alternative pre-1815 sources. Two years later, the relative strength of support for George Turner in each region and individual settlement, at the single point of his registration of followers, may be mapped using the largest of the Texas manuscript scrolls. Finally, the addresses of correspondents in the old believers’ national network after 1815 enable something of the reach of this alternative body of surviving belief to be recorded, albeit without the confidence of comprehensiveness available in the sources on Turner Southcottians.

Mapping Southcottians in 1814

The first public meetings of Southcottians took place in London in early 1803, and accounts of their locations and ceremonies, including the distribution of ‘wine and cakes’, the reading of Southcott’s prophecies, hymn-singing, and ‘the uplifting of hands for Christ’s Kingdom to come’ are well-described in existing histories.65 Beyond London, Southcottians also gathered together from this period, more often in private houses.66 In Yorkshire, due to rigorous record-keeping by the ecclesiastical authorities, the proliferation of such Southcottian meetings is traceable in the licence registers for Protestant dissenters’ meetings. Cross-referencing the names and addresses of known Southcottians (from their surviving correspondence) with licence applications reveals that by 1806, Southcottian meetings had multiplied in the West Riding, with licences granted to houses in central Leeds and nearby Holbeck, in Bradford, and numerous villages and townships to the south and west of Halifax.67

When the national network of Southcottian chapels was established after 1811, the best records were again kept in Yorkshire. Leeds Southcottians licensed a ‘Chapel in George Court’ and Halifax Southcottians a ‘Zion Chapel’.68 Further chapels were opened at York and Doncaster, and numerous rooms were licensed across the North and West Ridings.69 In Lancashire, Southcottians conformed to a practice first adopted by London chapels, calling their meeting space ‘the Millennium Chapel’ (though with less conformity in its spelling).70 In 1812–14, a ‘Mellennium Chapel’ was opened in Manchester in June 1813, two ‘Mellenium Chapels’ in Blackburn, and a ‘Millenium Chapel’ in Salford.71 In 1813, a substantial meeting space was acquired for the many Southcottians recorded in Ashton-under-Lyne, and further rooms were licensed around Colne in the Pennines.72 Beyond the two Pennine counties, designated chapels were known in Devon, Somerset, and Bristol, while in Birmingham there were ‘two meeting houses about a mile distant from each other’.73 At Chesterfield in Derbyshire, believers rented ‘a meeting house lately occupied by the Kilhamites Methodists’; while chapels were opened at the same time in neighbouring Nottinghamshire.74 By 1812, Southcottians ‘at Deptford’ were reported to ‘have a large meeting place and crowded and in other places within 10 or 14 miles of London…they are continually beginning new meetings’.75 One of these chapels, at Teddington in Middlesex, notably left detailed records of its 125-strong membership by this date.76

If the locations of designated chapels and meeting spaces are taken to indicate places of particular numerical strength for Southcottians, the addresses of more isolated individuals or small groups of believers enable the broader national reach of Southcott’s movement to be demonstrated. Such provincial addresses survive in both the correspondence exchanged with London Southcottians and sources from London chapels, including the surviving sealing register from 1809 to 1814.77 Believers living in counties with no urban chapel could apply to be sealed at a London chapel, and close to 150 named Southcottians, in disparate locations in the Home Counties and further afield, are recorded in this way. Figure 1 maps their distribution together with the Southcottian chapel network by 1814.

Mapping Turner Southcottians

Every Southcottian chapel was closed from the end of August 1814, following a prophetic decree from Southcott that ‘no more preachings or meetings of the Friends are to be holden…till after the Birth of Shiloh’.78 This left the future of the chapels and any other form of public meeting of believers in 1815 unclear, given that Shiloh had not, after all, been born. For followers of George Turner, his claims to divine insight allowed new prophecies to supersede prior commands; old directions from Southcott could be replaced by new instructions from Turner. Through Turner, the divine instruction in early 1815 was: ‘let my children meet in a body before me the Lord that are in one place…that I may bless them’.79 For this reason, by Spring 1815 Turner’s prophecies were read in ‘many private houses opened once a week’ across the country, in addition to Tozer’s Southwark Chapel.80 In time, the former chapels in many other areas were re-opened, and numerous new venues were licensed.81

The most complete record of the extent of surviving Southcottianism adhering to Turner’s prophecies remains the single Texas collection scroll of 4,046 names, now dated 1816.82 An invaluable feature of this source is its distribution of names under their nearest meeting. This enables a map of post-Southcott adherents of Turner to be drawn, denoting not only geographical position but the relative numerical size of each surviving congregation. Figure 2 confirms Turner’s success in Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the West Country, while also illustrating a significant following in London and the Thames estuary, yet only smaller, scattered groups elsewhere.

Other surviving Southcottians

To those Southcottians for whom Southcott’s prophetic communications remained central to their understanding of the coming of the millennium post-1814, disobeying a directive given by the prophet, or acting in ways which negated it, were unacceptable. Because of this, old believers were firmly opposed to the re-opening of any chapel in 1815. Such Southcottians, including William Sharp, the clergymen Thomas Foley and Samuel Eyre, and Southcott’s aristocratic amanuensis, Jane Townley, all firmly believed the conditions for no public meetings still applied; such meetings would only be allowed once the messiah had come physically.83 For several years, these Southcottians and others like them continued to meet nonetheless in private, in meetings hosted in believers’ homes. In 1817, Townley advised a York Southcottian that ‘if you meet in harmony’ and went no further than ‘a few friends meeting together at each other’s houses, not at any regular house or to have any speaker but to converse friendly together and point out the fulfilments [of prophecies]’, then this still obeyed the direction.84

Significant numbers of old believers persisted in regions also populated by Turner followers. The distinction between Southcottians prepared only to meet in private, and those permitted to gather in public in Turner’s chapels, could divide near neighbours as well as adjacent villages and towns. In Halifax, the substantial Zion Chapel was closed in 1814, and never re-opened. Many surviving Southcottians in and around the Yorkshire textile town remained old believers, yet evidently severed all links with those groups in the neighbouring valleys of Huddersfield and Bradford that largely accepted Turner.85 In or near several major towns where Turner followers were numerous, including London, Leeds, Sheffield, and Exeter, prominent correspondents in the alternative letter network of old believers are also traceable.86 In other northern towns like Manchester and York, where the numbers of Turner Southcottians registered in 1816 appear comparatively low when set beside the pre-1815 strength implied by the presence of Southcottian chapels, further old believer correspondents are apparent.87

It was in the Midlands, and especially the Birmingham region, where Turner most notably failed to gain adherents, despite the prior popularity of Southcottianism during Southcott’s lifetime. The West Midlands was, by contrast, a significant hub for correspondence in the old believers’ network: the Revd Thomas Foley, the Rector of Old Swinford in Worcestershire, kept up a frequent correspondence with like-minded believers across the country. Individuals and small groups wrote directly to Foley, to discuss news and interpretations of prophecies, or exchange copies of handwritten Southcott communications.88 In the same period, Foley worked to sustain the beliefs of locals, ‘considerably more than 100’ of whom had previously gathered under his leadership, yet were now directed to meet in smaller, low-key groups.89 Foley’s authority among Southcottians in his region, bolstered by his religious and social position and close acquaintance with Southcott while she was alive, is the most likely reason that claimants to Southcott’s prophetic mantle such as Turner were rejected by many in the Midlands. The several Nottinghamshire groups who would come to accept the claims of Zion Ward in 1829 were among many to have looked to Foley’s guidance in the previous fifteen years. It was their breaking of this convention which caused significant ruptures in the region.90 In Birmingham, Charles Bradley, the tobacco merchant who contemplated suicide at Southcott’s death, and later Ward follower, was another ally of Foley in the years after 1814.91 Figure 3 records the locations of surviving Southcottians traceable by their frequent, familiar correspondence with figures such as Foley, Jane Townley in London, and several others well represented in Southcottian archives.

Southcottianism and gender

That the Southcottian millenarian 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 public record, among all that were written on Southcott and her followers, either during her lifetime or immediately after, defined the movement explicitly by its female membership. Neither did any comment on how many more women were involved in the movement than men. One newspaper story, 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’.92 That Southcott herself was a woman at the head of a popular religious movement certainly dominated contemporary responses to Southcottianism. Yet the ways this gender identity informed her role and authority within the movement, and acceptance or rejection without it, are issues engaged with only since mid-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, only given relative prominence in historical interpretations since the 1980s.93

Barbara Taylor’s original argument for the significance of the Southcottian movement’s ‘theological feminism’ and its contribution to the feminist dimension to English radicalism was premised upon Southcott’s writings attracting a largely female readership and her securing the especial sympathy of fellow women.94 Anna Clark’s subsequent extension of Taylor’s interpretation also presupposed many more Southcottians were women: the contrast of Southcott’s perceived opposition to marriage with the conservatism of other groups such as the Methodists, led Clark further to assume more single women were present among Southcottians than among more male-dominated evangelical sects.95 Both Taylor’s and Clark’s arguments were given notable credence by the figures given in the respective studies of Harrison and Hopkins demonstrating the gender ratio of the movement’s membership was 63 per cent women to 37 per cent men.96

As with his analysis of Southcottian locations, this statistic was originally calculated by Hopkins from collating the names appearing on the three separate manuscript scrolls in the University of Texas archive.97 The 7,000-odd names were then simply divided according to their apparent gender, and a percentage worked out.98 The result showing a near two-thirds proportion of women, Harrison considered ‘confirmatory’ rather than surprising: ‘the preponderance of women…is characteristic of millennial sects elsewhere’, he noted, and therefore did ‘not…call for special explanation’.99 Hopkins, in contrast, considered such a proportion slightly higher than the plain majority of females that might automatically be expected ‘in any religious movement, regardless of its character’. For this reason, he argued, Southcott’s message—that ‘God had selected a woman, not a man, through which to reveal Himself’—was worth acknowledging as a factor to explain such a gender ratio.100

Such minor differences in interpretation were in fact immaterial: the 63 per cent figure itself was flawed. A re-examination of the manuscript scrolls in the Texas collection makes clear that one of them—the scroll dated after 1816 and listing 1,291 names in 59 locations—effectively distorted the larger sample and its resultant gender statistics. This was because every person named on this scroll was a woman.101

Defining and dating sources

Unlike the other two scrolls in Hopkins’s sample—the sealing petition from Southcott’s lifetime and George Turner’s 1816 register of his adherents—the third list of names was never designed to record membership. Rather, it was intended to record those Southcottians willing to undergo a particular (and peculiar) ceremony instituted by Turner under his prophetic leadership, and, crucially, only open to women. The ceremony is mentioned briefly in existing histories, and involved Turner visiting every community under his direction. In each place, female believers were individually made a ‘bride of Christ’, by stating in Turner’s presence their desire ‘to be married to the Lord’, then exchanging kisses with the prophet, and having him, in Christ’s stead, place his hand on their knee to signify their bowing to the Lord.102 The ritual, which prepared for Shiloh’s physical arrival, expressed an aspect of such believers’ Southcott-derived beliefs in its 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’.103

The ceremonies were carried out in July and August 1820, and involved almost 1,500 of Turner’s female believers.104 Yet it is clear that the ritual had been planned from some time before. Letters in the Panacea Society archive reveal the names of eligible women were first collected in 1818, then updated (with those no longer prepared to undergo the ritual removed and others added) in 1820. In May 1820, James Tyson, leader of a small group of Turner Southcottians in Wasdale, Cumberland, wrote to apologize for ‘not having sent the names of the women that had sined [sic] their names in February 1818 who have folen of [sic]’.105 Tyson then listed five of the ten women listed under ‘Nether Wasdale’ on the Texas all-women scroll.106 Numerous other letters of the same date list the ‘names of the women who have receded’, in every case matching names on the Texas scroll in question, strongly implying that this is the original, 1818 list.107

Neither this date nor this original purpose and nature of the scroll were recognized by either Hopkins or Harrison.108 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 all too 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.

Alternative gender ratios

The two larger Texas manuscript scrolls 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).109 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).110 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, several hundred listed Southcottians were 52 per cent 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.111 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-recognized that women commonly comprise a majority of participants in religious movements open to them in the modern era, in Christianity especially.112 Within more evangelical or revivalist forms of religion, including millenarian sects, in Western societies since the eighteenth century, a proportional scale of female involvement has typically run between 55 per cent and 66 per cent.113 Clive Field’s detailed analysis of gender in English ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Dissent has established that over a 300-year period, it was rare for ‘the predominance of women in Nonconformist membership…[to] fall below three-fifths’.114 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 national percentages of women were never less than 55 per cent.115 In sociological studies, Bryan Wilson has defined a ‘preponderance of women’ in religious movements at around 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’ it required explanation, and became the basis of his conclusion that ‘Christadelphianism has no distinctive appeal to women’.116

The revised calculations for the gender proportion of the Southcottian movement in the early nineteenth century surely encourage a similar conclusion. On the evidence of sealing membership and chapel registers, Southcottianism as a national movement appears also to have 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 other religious groups. Clive Field’s research on gender in Methodist groups contemporary with Southcottians includes regional comparisons which mirror some general trends in the Southcottian findings, 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.117 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 gender perspective. To suggest that a religious movement founded and, at first, 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, not only of Southcottianism’s appeal but also its radical character in the early nineteenth-century period. 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, then Southcott’s popular movement can no longer be considered to have widened women’s ‘moral jurisdiction’ to any significant extent beyond the more general efforts of evangelical religion in these years.118

A mistake of the existing theories of Southcottian radical feminism 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 period that 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.119 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.120

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.121 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 prioritize 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.122 It is not necessary to follow such ideas to the relativist extremes taken with them by some theorists to allow their insights to inform interpretations of the re-calculated levels of female and male participation in the Southcottian movement.123 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.

As Harrison observed, most Southcottians ‘were sincere, earnest Christians, dependent for guidance on a literal interpretation of the Bible’.124 He thus emphasized the place of Southcottians within an extensive Christian culture of their time. This also serves as a reminder of the continuities 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, while relating in specific ways to both the Bible and their prior personal convictions of the work of the Christian God. Thomas Foley 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.’125 In 1812, ‘a Mr Barnes…a sincere Methodist’ reported reading Southcott’s 1804 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.’126 Zion Ward, when a south London shoemaker, came to believe in Southcott in 1814 after her Fifth Book of Wonders ‘fell into my hands’.127 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’. Ward later described his experience, reading ‘the Scriptures, night and day, more than ever, for the light I received from Joanna’s writings gave me to see something—the beauty of them’.128 The Revd Robert Hoadley Ashe of Crewkerne, Somerset, a man of very different social position and education, 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’.129

Conclusion

These accounts from Southcottians underline the role of personal religious experience in their reasons for membership of their movement. This chapter’s revisionist assessment of the numbers, geographical scope, and gender division of the Southcottian movement in the years after 1815 has necessarily utilized broad, impersonal, quantitative evidence for much of its argument. In the following chapter, a more qualitative approach is adopted in an assessment of the social context of the millenarian movement. For if the role of specifically gendered experience is now queried, and with it those arguments for the nature of Southcottian radicalism related to it, an alternative form of ‘experience’ remains a potent explanatory factor in histories of Southcottianism and radicalism. This is Southcottians’ ‘social experience’—how they responded to the experience of living in an industrial society.

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