Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England

Abstract

The millenarian movement founded by Joanna Southcott (1750-1814), enjoyed a complex relationship with political radicalism in early nineteenth-century England. Southcott opposed radicalism during her lifetime, encouraging her followers to await a messianic agent of the millennium, called Shiloh. By the 1830s – close to two decades after Southcott’s dramatic death expecting to give birth to the Shiloh – a section of surviving Southcottians were noted radicals, anticipating the millennium’s appearance through radical reform, trades unionism and Robert Owen’s socialism. This book presents a new explanation why – an explanation that reveals how millennial theologies may combine expectations of both divine and human agency in changing the world. Utilising a substantial range of radical and Southcottian sources, many previously unstudied, this book narrates a new history of this significant plebeian sect between 1815 and 1840. It argues that millenarian radicalism bore no connection to the social or gender makeup of Southcottianism; indeed, contrary to existing histories, the sect had no distinct appeal to women. Instead, an altered attitude towards political action emerged through the religious experience, ideas and practices of Southcottians and their personal acquaintanceship with radical freethinkers. The book provides the most extensive academic study to date of several leading Southcottians, including John Wroe (1782-1863), John ‘Zion’ Ward (1781-1837), and James Elishama Smith (1801-57) – a notable yet understudied early socialist, whose reflections on the relationship between socialism and religion shed new light on an emerging tension between Christian and secular visions of transformation which have shaped the modern world.