QI The Book of the Dead

avoided it until she was twenty-six, when her father forcedher to marry one of his employees, Abraham Standerin, a junior blacksmith. He was also illiterate and the couple each signed their marriage certificate with a cross. Ann and Abraham would go on to have eight children in quick succession, though four of them were stillborn and none made it past the age of six.
    In the meantime, Ann had joined a fledgling religious sect called the Wardley Society. Started by James and Jane Wardley, two married tailors from Bolton, it was colloquially known as the ‘Shaking Quakers’ (or ‘Shakers’ for short). The Wardleys had developed the belief that the soul could only be purified of its lusts by the action of the Holy Spirit – which manifested itself by violently shaking the physical body of the sinner. The greater the sin, the more extreme the shaking – and thus the more noise produced in the supplicant. As a result, Shaker meetings were deafening: they could sometimes be heard several miles away:
    One will fall prostrate on the floor, another on his knees and his head on his hands, on the floor; another will be muttering articulate sounds which neither they nor any body else can understand … others will be shooing and hissing evil spirits out of the house; all in different tunes, groaning, jumping, dancing, drumming, singing, laughing, talking and stuttering, shooing and hissing makes a perfect bedlam; this they call the worship .
     
    Ann’s reports of her visions entranced the group and the moral leadership of the sect passed to her from the Wardleys. To be a Shaker meant plain and simple living, common ownership of property and, most important of all, complete rejection of sexual activity – even for married couples. Men and women were expected to live and work apart to avoid the temptations of lustand children were separated from their parents and fostered on other believers. This liberated Shaker women from their roles as wives and mothers and made them the equals of men. The Shaker God was male and female, both father and mother, and not ‘a trinity of three men’. Since no one had sex, they rapidly ran out of children to pass the faith on to: Shakerism could only grow by making converts.
    By the early 1770s the Manchester Shakers had grown in number to about sixty and their odd behaviour and unsettling social practices made them deeply unpopular with regular churchgoers. Their meetings were disrupted by mobs and they were pelted with dung on the street. Ann was arrested for disturbing the peace and imprisoned in a small stone cell. She later claimed she only survived because another leading Shaker, James Whittaker, fed her a mixture of wine and milk smuggled inside in his clay pipe. While in gaol Ann had her most powerful vision, which she called ‘a special manifestation of Divine Light’, showing her that the second coming of Christ was imminent.
    Ann’s imprisonment enhanced her authority and, when she emerged, the other Shakers (including the Wardleys) began to refer to her as their ‘Mother in spiritual things’. In 1774 she had a new vision where she saw that she must take the most faithful followers and set up a new community in America. Only nine of the sixty made the voyage: at one point their singing and dancing were so annoying that the other passengers threatened to throw them overboard. However, the weather turned rough, and the captain later claimed it was only the Shakers’ faith that kept the vessel afloat. The community of less faithful Shakers, left behind in Manchester and without the sustaining intensity of Ann to lead them, rapidly disintegrated.

    In her vision, Ann had seen, in precise detail, the place that was destined to be the home of the new community. Once in New York, the tiny Shaker group wasted no time in finding the house that Ann had described and presenting themselves to the family living there. The family listened patiently to Ann’s tale of how she had been directed there by an angel and invited the whole group in. The unexpected arrangement worked, perhaps because Abraham brought his skills as a blacksmith and Ann was an excellent housekeeper. As a female journalist reported at the time:
    The women are the ugliest set of females I ever saw gathered together, perhaps their particularly unbecoming dress added to the plainness of their appearance; it seems to be adapted to make them look as ugly as art can possibly devise … their petticoats are long and