Religions in history
Shakers... and movers

Books & artsSep 2nd 2000 edition


By Richard Francis.

Fourth Estate; 388 pages; £14.99

MENTION the word “Shaker”, and most people will see a tall ladder-back chair; a bare room immaculately swept with a hickory broom; wooden boxes exquisitely assembled with tiny wooden pegs; and, on the bed, a quilt of sober colours. Richard Francis's Shakers are not a bit like that. His subject is the beginning of the movement, in the last half of the 18th century in England and America, and especially the character of the Shakers' founder, “Mother” Ann Lee. This band of innocents were so misunderstood that they barely stayed anywhere for long. Far from indulging in leisurely joinery and crafts, they were lucky to grab a straw bed or a supper of buttered potatoes.

Ann Lee was not the first Shaker, but by 1770 she had taken the movement over. Her origins were as poor as they could be. She was born in Manchester (a city whose pre-industrial character is marvellously evoked in the early chapters) and was set to work as a cloth-cutter. She was illiterate, and after years in America still kept her blunt and thrifty Mancunian ways. Like so many seers before and after, she felt herself “born again”: but specifically born again as the woman in Revelation “clothed with the sun”, and as the lover of Christ.

It says much for Mr Francis that he treats all this kindly, even deferentially, and never shows scorn either for Ann or for her followers. It has certainly been easy to, both at the time and since. Shakers believed that they shook in the face of God and that God shook within them; their rites were sometimes so violent that the floors of their meeting houses had to be reinforced, and sometimes so noisy that they could be heard seven miles away, howling in the woods like wolves. The good folk of Harvard, Ashfield and other long-suffering New England towns (again, beautifully evoked here in their half-settled state) attributed these rigours to drink or dementia, and often sent out vigilantes to attack the worshippers. Much of this book is to do with brawls round meeting houses, tiny incidents that nonetheless loomed large in the Shaker history of their persecutions.

That is one point of criticism. Mr Francis bases his book firmly on Shaker testimonies, larded only a little with the eye-witness accounts given by their enemies. In a bibliographical note he defends this reliance on friendly eyes, but it gives the book a theme of suffering innocence that seems, in the end, too unquestioning.

In his keenness to tell a good story—and it is a good story—Mr Francis also skips over points where deeper probing might be welcome. He never really reveals, for example, what it was that the Shakers believed. At several points he describes it as a home-grown religion, a bit of a rag-bag where different followers, none of them learned, believed different things and saw different visions. Yet there must have been tenets in common, and serious tenets, for so much else appears to be too nonsensical and wild to bind a community together. The most uncompromising part of Shaker faith was their hatred of marriage and the family, but he does not explain where this came from, beyond noting that Ann's own marriage was unhappy.

Ann herself, too, remains something of a mystery. She is very well-drawn here, especially considering how slim the evidence is for her early life. But Mr Francis never explains why Shakerism was handed over to this woman (an extraordinary thing at the time), or exactly how her authority was maintained. There are prophecies, visions and unearthly singing; but Ann is mostly impressive for a sort of dogged practicality, as well as an ability to survive countless draggings down the stairs. The title “Mother” never acquires the least gleam of divinity here. It sounds like a good name for a simple but capable northern lass, who would have called a broom a broom and then used it to good effect.

This article appeared in the Books & arts section of the print edition under the headline "Shakers... and movers"

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