The millenial prophets

Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England Philip Lockley OUP, hb, £65.00 In his famous book The Making of the English Working Class EP Thompson declared that he was ‘seeking to rescue even the deluded followers of Joanna Southcott from the condescension of posterity’. As Philip Lockley points out, there is a good deal of condescension in that comment.

Thompson was a Marxist who had difficulty recognising that religion could make a positive contribution to political change. Lockley argues that millennial prophets made more of a contribution to the growth of socialism in Britain that has been generally recognised. His specific focus is on the followers of Joanna Southcott and on the prophets who took over leadership of her followers, the Southcottians, after she died.

Southcott was a remarkable figure who wrote prophecies in rhyme and believed she had supernatural powers. She announced that she was the ‘woman clothed with the Sun’ referred to in the Book of Revelation and in 1814, at the age of 64, declared that she would give birth to a new Messiah, Shiloh of Genesis 49:10. The child failed to appear and Southcott died around Christmas time. Some of her followers fell away disillusioned, but others continued faithful, some ready to lis- ten to a new prophet, others continuing to study Southcott’s prophecies.

As years went by, Southcott became famous for a box of prophecies she said could only be opened by all the bishops of the Church of England after they had studied her writings. A box opened in 1927 was said not to be the right one and in the 1960s and 1970s a group of Southcottians, the Panacea Society of Bradford, ran a campaign with the slogan ‘War, disease, crime and banditry, distress of nations and perplexity will increase until the Bishops open Joanna Southcott’s box’.

Lockley is concerned not with the famous box but with Southcottian prophets who appeared in the movement after her death and by a change of emphasis from passive waiting for the millennium to a sense that human beings had a role to play. He disagrees with the view of another Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, that millenarians had to exchange ‘the primitive costume of religious hope’ and don ‘the modern costume of Socialist or Communist politics’ if they were going to achieve economic and social change.

In Lockley’s opinion, people like Hobsbawm and Thompson have underestimated the capacity of religious beliefs to inspire individuals to work to improve the world. To a large extent, this book proves his thesis.

Southcott herself was not political. She was loyal to George III and remained in some sense a member of the Church of England. Her followers at first continued with her policy. Lockley sees change coming first of all with the prophet John Wroe who later went on to propagate British Israelite teaching. In Ashton-under-Lyme Wroe persuaded his fol- lowers that they had to prepare for the arrival of the New Jerusalem by their dress and way of life. Instead of being passive, those who heard the prophet’s words were called to action.

John Zion Ward, another Southcottian prophet, came to actively cooperate with the radicals Richard Carlile and the unfrocked clergyman Robert Taylor during the agitation that surrounding the first reform bill in 1830. Ward spoke in radical meeting houses anxious to fill their seats but also shared a common distaste with the radicals for the established Church (the bishops were perceived as a major obstacle to reform). Ward taught that millennial change would come gradually and that it was important the Southcottians contribute by supporting Shiloh, who Ward believed himself to be.

In the end Ward and the radicals parted company but another figure influenced by the Southcottians, a Scots theology graduate from Glasgow, James Smith, became a significant figure among the followers of Robert Owen and other radical groups. As Lockley concedes, Smith was never a Southcottian prophet but he was deeply influenced by millennial ideas and was able to relate them to socialism.

Lockley is not a fluent writer and his book is not easy reading. But he draws on archives belonging to the Panacea Society not used before and takes theological ideas seriously to give a convincing account of Southcottians after Southcott and of the contribution millennialism made to the development of socialism.

Paul Richardson