Lancashire Spiritual Culture and the Question of Magic

Lancashire Spiritual Culture and the Question of Magic DAVID PAXMAN The last chapter of Fielding's Tom Jones reports that Mr. Blifil, the novel's chief hypocrite, has gone "to one of the northern Counties, about 200 Miles distant from London," where he has "turned Methodist, in hopes of marrying a very rich Widow ofthat Sect."1 The narrator doesn't name Blifil's destination, but 200 crow miles north northeast of London would land him in Lancashire, between Manchester and Lancaster, while 197 road miles would place him smack in Manchester. Fielding chose Blifil's destination carefully: Lancashire had a reputation for strong religious zeal of the kind he despised, and he meant to link it to Blifil's hypocrisy. Literature links both strong Catholicism and Protestant dissent to Lancashire. Shakespeare biographers now fill in some of his missing years by tracing him to "Catholic Lancashire," where he may have worked in the household of Thomas Hoghton as a tutor and secretary. Moll Flanders' Catholic friends in that county introduce her to Jemmy, her Lancashire husband of whom she was especially fond, and a Catholic priest performs the marriage rites. Defoe's Colonel Jack is also married in Lancashire by a disguised Catholic priest, of whom "there are many in that Part of the Country."2 In the nineteenth century Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life ( 1848) is distinguished by Gaskell's desire to offer Christian conduct as a solution to the economic and political strife brought by industrialization. 223 224 / P A X M A N In addition to evangelism and Nonconformity, Lancashire had a reputation for occult phenomena such as magic, conjuring, and prophesying. Hey wood and Broome's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) and Thomas Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches, and Teague o Divelly the Irish Priest (1681) both recall occurrences of witchcraft. Shadwell depicts the witches as mischief makers in whom only the most ignorant and illiterate characters believe, and the Irish priest as a fraud. However, the satirical thrusts are complicated by an irony.3 The level-headed and skeptical Hartford jeers at any belief in witches, even while the plot actually features witches gathering in his house. Joseph Addison's comedy The Drummer (1716), also set in Lancashire, is more single-minded. It depicts the efforts of a suitor to a wealthy, beautiful widow to drive out a rival suitor by disguising himself as a ghost and haunting the house. Sham love equates with sham spirits. Clearly, Lancashire was home to unusually strong religious zeal as well as to belief in the occult. This essay aims to examine magic and spiritualized religion as a regional response to trends in eighteenth-century English religion. Under the influences of latitudinarian leadership, natural religion, and skepticism, the Established Church was turning its back on enthusiastic , spiritualized religion, yet Lancashire seemed always to welcome the latest revival, reform, or spiritual call and to host the largest bazaar of occult exotica. Mainstream Protestants viewed Lancashire's spiritual practices as religion distorted to accommodate the unbridled and fantastic volitions of the zealous. Lancashire Nonconformists viewed any religion shorn of its charismatic and inspirational elements as a religion cut to human dimensions. We can view its spiritual culture as a dissenting voice in a more general discourse regulating the boundaries between types of knowledge and power that properly or improperly transcended ordinary human limits. This study will first substantiate the claim that Lancashire fostered an unusual spiritual culture. It will then show that controversy over the two poles of northern spiritual culture—spiritualism and magic—reveals general and recurring problems of defining legitimate and non-legitimate spirituality . Magic and conjuring declined, but attention to them increased in times of political crisis as polemicists sought to discredit heterodox viewpoints . More important, spiritualism comprised a middle ground and battle ground between legitimate and nonlegitimate religion as conjuring, spells, and magic fell into disrepute. Controversial writers used figures of magic to discredit spiritualist religion; however, defenders of the spiritual were keen to point out that in doing so the attackers blurred the boundaries by which they defined the legitimacy of their own religious activities. Lancashire Spiritual Culture and the...