Babylon and Jerusalem on the Old Kent Road

Abstract

One of the most extraordinary features of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—those years of commercialization and urbanization, utilitarianism and political economy—was the prevalence of prophecy: Londoners of both genders and all classes—respectable Anglican clergymen, members of Parliament, veteran scientists, servant girls from the West Country, half-pay navy officers, artisan engravers—proclaimed their conviction that God was about to end the world and remake it, bringing about a millennium of love and peace in which the redeemed would live with Christ on earth. The Swedenborgians attracted hundreds to their New Jerusalem Church; Richard Brothers was followed by thousands when he envisioned London’s destruction and remaking in apocalyptic fire; Joanna Southcott’s supporters numbered in the hundreds of thousands, believing she was pregnant with the returning Messiah. But while historians of religion have attributed prophets’ popularity to the failings of the established church,2 and historians of radicalism have related it to the French Revolution,3 there was also another cause—London itself, and the new and bewildering kinds of social experience it produced, which rendered some of its inhabitants desperate to imagine themselves into a better, more human way of life.