In sunny clime behold an Empire rise,

Fair as its oceans, glorious as its skies!

‘Mid seas serene of mild Pacific smiles—

Republic of vast federated isles

—Ernest Jones, ‘The New World: A Democratic Poem’ (1850)

Introduction

The London Journal remarked in 1877 that

‘there has not elapsed, within the records of history, a half century without a sect preaching with furious zeal the immediate destruction, if not of all things, at least of this planet’.^[1]

Across the nineteenth-century world, several sects appeared foretelling mankind’s immediate doom and destruction and the salvation of just a faithful few. The Millerites in the USA of the 1840s are one such example. The Millerites believed that the apocalypse, the destruction of the earth by fire, and the inauguration of Christ’s Millennial Reign would occur ‘at some point’ between 21 March 1843 and 21 March 1844. Led by William Miller, a Baptist preacher from upstate New York, the movement gained a number of followers in the United States.

Over in Brazil, Antonio ‘O Conselheiro’—‘[who] was not mad, and yet not altogether sane’[2]—began his preaching tour between the 1870s and 1890s. He prophesied that Christ would return to the Brazilian Badlands and liberate his people from the ‘Satanic’ republican government which had ousted the good emperor, Dom Pedro II.

The Great American Tradition

The great historian of the Americas, Felipe Fernández-Armesto, once called millenarianism ‘a great American tradition’. Fernandez-Armeto defined ‘American’ in its broadest possible sense and Millenarianism has indeed flourished in the New World. There was, as we have seen, the Conselheiro in Brazil during the early years of the country’s republic. In Mexico in 1541 an Aztec named Martin Oceloti, who had converted to the Roman Catholic faith, proclaimed the Second Coming and revealed that he was actually Christ come in the flesh.

In 1579 in what is now Paraguay, a man named Obera the Resplendent led an anti-colonial rebellion which was supposed to be a harbinger of the Second Coming while similar apocalyptic movements occurred in Peru.

Prior to the European conquest the people of Central America celebrated the earth’s renewal every 52 years and expected that the world would end in cyclically occurring immolations and after the Christianisation of the Americas apocalypticism lingered on (those readers whose minds go back to 2012 may even remember the movie, 2012, which was based on the assumption that the apocalypse would occur when the Mayan Calendar ended).

Yet apart from a few instances in the middle ages, religious apocalyptic fancies were not well-received in either Britain or France.

Jehovah remained invisible

In England, the Millerite group was widely mocked in the press. In 1842, the Bradford Observer laughed at their antics.^[3] The pro-democracy Chartist newspaper Northern Star mocked the Millerites ‘miserable delusion’.^[4] The grand Millerite delusion even received some treatment in popular literature. Later in the century the British Liberal MP Harold Spender wrote A Prophet without Honour, which was serialised in The English Illustrated Magazine. The novel featured a religious zealot named Mr Millward (an obvious invocation of Miller) who galvanizes his followers into believing that the end of the world is nigh. In Spender’s novel, however, Millward promotes his grand delusion in the hope of aggrandizing himself.^[5]

Other writers turned to history to mock those who preached the end of the world. The year 1000 was expected by some in the medieval era to mark the beginning of a significant world event. It was a history which, until the research of Jules Michelet in nineteenth-century France, remained lost. It was up to his fellow Frenchman and contemporary, the best-selling novelist, and Red Republican and Socialist politician Eugene Sue (who was widely read in Britain), to write a novel based on these events: The Infant’s Skull; or, The End of the World.

This novel was part of Sue’s long-running and hugely-successful serial novel The Mysteries of the People (1848–56). As a socialist, Sue injected the events of the first millennium with a red republican political character and for him the year 1000 was a period of class struggle, when the clergy enriched themselves at the expense of the poor and rich alike:

‘The seigneurs, themselves no less brutified than their serfs by ignorance and by the fear of the devil, and hoping to be able to conjure away the vengeance of the Eternal, assigned to the clergy by means of authentic documents, executed in all the forms of terrestrial law, lands, houses, castles, serfs, their harems, their herds of cattle, their valuable plate, their rich armors, their pictures, their statues, their sumptuous robes’.

As the apocalypse fails to happen, Sue strikes a sarcastic tone:

‘Midnight sounded … The year 1000 began! Oh, wonder and surprise! … The dead did not leave their tombs, the bowels of the earth did not open, the waters of the ocean remained within their basins, the stars of heaven were not hurled out of their orbits and were not striking against one another in space. Aye, there was not even a tame flash of lightning! No thunder rolled! No trace of the cloud of fire in the midst of which the Eternal was to appear. Jehovah remained invisible. Not one of the frightful prodigies foretold by St. John the Divine for midnight of the year 1000 was verified. The night was calm and serene; the moon and stars shone brilliantly in the azure sky, not a breath of wind agitated the tops of the trees, and the people, in the silence of their stupor, could hear the slightest ripple of the mountain streams gliding under the grass. Dawn came … and day … and the sun poured upon creation the torrents of its light! As to miracles, not a trace of any!’^[6]

Yet there was still a place in nineteenth-century literature, if not for prophecies of the apocalypse, at least for appropriations of its imagery and language.

The Apocalyptic March of Democracy

The closest to an apocalyptic event which people in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came was the French Revolution. On 5 May 1789, King Louis XVI of France, convened a meeting of the Estates General. The French nation’s finances were in a parlous state. Having aided the American colonists in their independence fight, it was time to pay the bill.

Representatives of the three estates—the clergy, nobility, and the third estate—gathered together to discuss the matter. But this set in motion a chain of events that would eventually see Louis XVI beheaded, the execution of over 40,000 supposed enemies of the revolution during the ‘Reign of Terror’, a quarter of a century of worldwide warfare, and the rise and fall of Napoleon.

The watchwords of the revolution were:

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.

Radicals in Britain, inspired by events across the channel, began campaigning for universal suffrage. As people sought to make sense of this new world, apocalyptic literature flourished. Some revolutionaries truly believed that the revolution would usher in a new golden age for humankind but counter-revolutionary thinkers had other ideas.

Supporters of the Ancien Regime across Europe voiced their anxieties over the revolution. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1789) gave opposition to the revolution’s ideals an intellectual basis; it remained for conservative and religiously-inspired poets to make the anti-revolutionary case in the arts.

The title of James Ogden’s Emanuel; or, Paradise Regained (1797) recalls John Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671), but unlike Milton who initially supported the Parliamentarians in the English Civil War, Ogden was not a revolutionary. When he was writing, Britain and France had been at war for five years. The British government was paranoid that the revolution would spread over to the United Kingdom.

Pro-democracy pressure groups, such as the modestly-named London Corresponding Society, were the target of government repression. Radicals such as John Thelwall and John Horne Tooke hauled into the dock on trumped up charges of treason in 1794. The government, headed by William Pitt the Younger, also restricted people’s freedom of speech and assembly. Ogden was firmly on Pitt’s side for he castigates the rise of a ‘MYSTIC BABLYON’ who, with ‘false philosophy’ (democracy) causes people to turn away from God. Ogden becomes more explicit when he exclaimed:

‘Shield, Lord, our Church and King from this foul fiend,

In his worst form, by DEMOCRATS now loos’d’.^[7]

For the German Franz Sonnenberg the Revolution was the apocalypse. Sonnenberg, a minor German aristocrat, wrote Donatoa (1806) which told the tale of the final battle between the forces of good and evil. Responding directly to the French Revolution, the Spirit of the Earth in Sonnenberg’s text begins by lamenting the degeneration of the human race. The Angel of Death, Donatoa, then wreaks destruction upon the world.

Although Sonnenberg’s text is religious, what is interesting is that God himself appears to be ‘aloof’ from events, his role in the apocalypse is marginal, and this is a trend that would continue in future portrayals of apocalyptic events. Nowadays, in any apocalypse story of any genre, God is largely absent or is referred to only in passing. Thus Sonnenberg, although he deplored the increasing de-Christianization of society in the face of the French Revolution, unwittingly contributes to it.

Democracy—‘The grand, alarming, imminent, and indisputable reality’ of the nineteenth century

In Britain, for the most part, the apocalypse was always taken by radicals and supporters of the principles of the French Revolution to be figuratively as part of some greater cause such as, for example, the march of democracy. Early nineteenth-century British writers such as William Wordsworth and William Blake appropriated apocalyptic imagery as the inauguration of the ‘New Earth’ ushered in by the French Revolution.

Pro-democracy invocations of the apocalyptic spirit continued with Percy B. Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’. Shelley’s ‘Hellas’ likewise invokes the spirit of the God to usher in a democratic new world of liberty:

In the great morning of the world,

The Spirit of God with might unfurled

The flag of Freedom over Chaos,

And all its banded anarchs fled,

Like vultures frighted from Imaus,

Before an earthquake’s tread.^[8]

Thus, democracy was, as Thomas Carlyle put it in Latter Day Pamphlets (1850): ‘the grand, alarming, imminent, and indisputable Reality’ of the nineteenth century. Millennialist and apocalypticist invocations in the cause of democracy continued apace even after Shelley’s death.

‘The Democracy of our own times’

In the Victorian era some Chartists, too, drew upon divine apocalyptic imagery to foretell of a time when monarchs would be no more and democracy would flourish. The Chartists—the movement being Britain’s first mass working-class political campaign group—had six principal aims:

• Universal male suffrage
• Abolition of MPs’ property qualification
• Salaries for MPs
• Equally-sized constituencies
• The secret ballot
• Annual elections.

These were the aims that the National Charter Association agreed and campaigned upon. But many smaller Chartist groups, particularly those associated with socialist and Red Republican movements, sought

‘The Charter and Something More’ (emphasis added).

Thus, in the opening number of Reynolds’s Political Instructor, the Red Republican activist and author of The Mysteries of London added two social aims to the Chartists’ main political aims. These were

• The Recognition of the Rights of Labour
• Abolition of Primogeniture.[9]

For other Chartists, belief in the justness and fairness of the Chartists’ aims fused with a fervent religious devotion. The Charter was, to these people, God’s work because it was a just cause. To some, Jesus Christ was ‘the Great Reformer’ who first brought the message of democracy to the people:

“Democracy, the Idea of the 19^th century,” is a great and most welcome fact. This idea has revealed itself at different times, and in different ways. I find it has assumed four forms, which, at first sight, are very unlike each other, yet they are only different ways of expressing the same thing, or, to speak strictly, they are the necessary moments in the development, or unfolding, of the idea: and the last of these forms pre-supposes the foregoing ones … these forms are, the religion taught by the divine Galilean Republican—the Reformation of the 16^th century—the German philosophy from Immanuel Kant to Hegel, and the Democracy of our own times.”[10]

The early French socialist Louis Blanc even called Jesus Christ ‘The Socialist of Socialists’.[11] Still others such as Gerald Massey invoked the Biblical language of the Hebrew Scriptures, particularly those which told of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt, and applied it to the struggle for political rights:

Full of grand and glorious meaning is that old tradition of the Israelites coming out of the land of bondage … the peoples of the world are now about to go up out of Egypt, the land of slavery and the shadow of death![12]

By which Massey meant, of course, that the campaign for the people’s political rights in the form of the Charter could not be stopped. If Democracy was the fact, or reality, of the nineteenth century, then the ‘slaves’ (the nineteenth-century working classes) would soon reach their ‘promised land’ of democracy.

The Democratic Millennium

Other religiously-minded radicals drew imagery similar to the Book of Revelation to foretell of a time when, in an apocalyptic manner, the monarchs of the earth would be overthrown and earth would enjoy its ‘jubilee’. Hence Thomas Cooper’s words in The Purgatory of Suicides (1843–45) when Eleazar and Nicoles declare

And, while on earth’s thrones stand, monarchs will vie

With monarchs, in excess of pomp and power;

Slavery and woe conquest will multiply;

And Death, in crescent shapes, mankind devour.

Not before dreaming oracles I cower,

Fearing no more pain from ruin; but to purge

Hades from present pain, and speed Earth’s hour

Of jubilee…^[13]

For Chartists such as Cooper, however, the apocalypse was always to be spoken of figuratively and, as the passage above implies, always linked to the doing away of an old democratic order and the establishment of a ‘new’ egalitarian earth. The apocalypse of democracy was not ‘real’ as such but meant to be read almost like a Psalm—purely for edification and inspiration but not to be taken as prophecy. Thus, the ‘Kingdom of Heaven was no dream’, declared Cooper in his autobiography, but would come about as a result of the growth of science, Christian moral teaching, the ‘brotherhood of man’ and, of course, the establishment of a democratic state.^[14]

The same was true for the millennialism evinced in the works of other Chartists such as Thomas Doubleday whose Political Pilgrim’s Progress (1839) depicts the final battle between the true democrats and Apollyon (the suffrage-denying Victorian political establishment) and culminates in the building of the grand ‘CITY OF REFORM’. This of course is an interesting juxtaposition. Doubleday’s battle between Apollyon and the democrats might seem to be promoting revolution (and a violent one). Yet the Promised Land is the ‘City of Reform’ and, in the Chartist era, ‘reform’ meant only gradual change and was associated more with moral force Chartism than with physical force.

Ernest Jones: The Chartist Maccabean

One of the most epic and poetic statements of what Chartist millenarianism can be seen in the poetry of Ernest Jones, one of the most famous Chartist activists. His ‘New World: A Democratic Poem’, appearing in the opening number of Notes to the People (1851), celebrated the arrival of a new democratic age. A world war between the colonial powers of Europe and the people of their colonies begins and

‘Then Britain, all her forces massed,

Arrayed her greatest army, and her last’.

But Britain loses the battle between ‘Hindoostan’ and the followers of Mohammed who were then under the rule of the British Empire. The French Empire fares no better. Islam is expelled from the Ottoman Empire, which quickly falls, as do all oppressive world religions. The new nations of Mexico and others in South America ‘laugh’ at Spain, the one great empire but which by the nineteenth century was a shadow of its former self.

‘Mammon’, or capitalism, is also overthrown. Finally, what we might now call ‘Zionism’ is triumphant as the Jews return to their homeland and wrest their Holy City from the clutches of the occupying Ottoman Empire:

Now to the seat of David’s royal muse

Traditionary instinct drawns [sic] the Jews,

Two thousand years recall the exiles home

From each new Egypt, Babylon, and Rome.

Needs but a march—Jerusalem is won!

Bequeathed by History to misfortune’s son.^[15]

No doubt this poem would have pleased Judas Maccabeus, were he alive in the nineteenth century. Indeed, Jones would have loved to have met him and his brothers, having called the Maccabean Revolt ‘magnificent’ and declaring in his ‘New Book of Kings’ that

‘Mattathias, Judas, Jonathan, Simon and John Hyrcanus, the democratic leaders, were heroes and patriots’.^[16]

The return of the Jews to Jerusalem and the building of the figurative Temple of Democracy is the signal for ‘Earth’s Angel then, by God’s supreme command’ (or Jesus, as we are supposed to read it) to come and create a democratic New Earth.

No more bloodshed, no more wars; happy mothers!

Neither did France’s greatest writer, Victor Hugo, take a much different view to that espoused by Cooper, when he linked millennialism with the institution of an egalitarian republic. In the brilliant Les Miserables (1862), the student revolutionary Enjolras, as he mounts the barricade, asks his fellow rebels to envision a future time when

‘The streets of the towns [will be] bathed in light; green branches on the thresholds; all nations sisters; men just old men blessing children; the past loving the present; perfect liberty of thought; believers enjoying perfect equality … no more bloodshed, no more wars; happy mothers!’^[17]

Enjolras was working towards the establishment of democracy. He espoused the aforementioned Red Republicanism—a version of democratic socialism whose adherents diffused its doctrines across every major European nation. Helen Macfarlane, a contributor to George Julian Harney’s Red Republican magazine, likewise stated that she and her like-minded activists throughout Europe were engaged in

‘the Organisation of Labour and the final establishment of a pure Democracy’.[18]

To this she added, in concert with other religiously-minded Chartists, that their cause was God’s cause, for it was the same as the one begun by Jesus:

‘[Red Republicans] are the soldiers of a holy cause … we will not pause till we have finished the great work—begun by the Nazarean—of man’s redemption’.^[19]

The millennialism in Macfarlane’s thinking is clear. Only once Jesus’s message of democracy had been preached throughout all nations would there come ‘the final establishment of a pure Democracy’. Even one famous political text which Macfarlane translated, written by two obscure German citizens in 1850, could be said to have been a text which borders on the millenarian and apocalyptic while keeping a firm eye on the establishment of a ‘new earth’, if not a new heaven. Theirs was a world in which

‘oppressors and the oppressed have always stood in direct opposition to each other’ in a ‘never ceasing battle’ which must end ‘either in a revolutionary alteration of the social system, or in the common destruction of the hostile classes’.^[20]

The passage just now was the Macfarlane’s translation of the Communist Manifesto, by ‘citizens Charles Marx and Frederic Engels’, as she called them.

The low commercialism of the apocalypse

Thus, apocalypticism was, to some of the period’s great activists and writers, the hope of a future new egalitarian earth. Where, then, did this secular radical apocalypse leave reinterpretations of religiously-inspired apocalypses? Was there a place for it in British culture?

Some religious groups in the latter part of the nineteenth century did in fact envisage the ‘great Tribulation’ of the Book of Revelation in terms of class conflict. Notably here were the Jehovah’s Witnesses whose Photodrama of Creation released the following slide showing workers doing battle with the powers of the earth:

The actual religious apocalypse, vis-à-vis the Book of Revelation, was something that was more fitting to be discussed in dry theological books. The subject even seems to have lost its place in high art, at least in Britain and the reception of apocalyptic painting by famous British art critics is quite telling.

For example, John Martin, between 1849 and 1853, produced two apocalyptic paintings: The Great Day of His Wrath and The Last Judgment. But when they were exhibited at the Egyptian Hall in London, his works were derided. John Ruskin, author of The Stones of Venice (1851–53), remarked that Martin’s works could not be classified as art but were low commercial objects:

‘as much makeable to order as a tea tray’.

Martin’s fortunes in the public mind were only revived, it seems, when Tate Britain held a special exhibition on him in 2013, though this hardly ranked among Tate’s most stellar exhibitions. To be forgotten—Such is the fate of many an artist, it seems!

Conclusion

For the student revolutionaries manning the barricades, in the pages of Hugo’s novel and in real life, and the likes of Macfarlane, Marx, and Engels themselves, this world was not to be theirs. The Chartists’ aims would be gradually realised, though it was not until 1928 when true universal suffrage was granted in England.

Anyone preaching the impending doom and destruction of all mankind continued to be mocked in the press. Such was the case when, later in the century, in 1877, one Dr Cumming began a series of lectures in London and stated that the social and moral decay of the world’s most powerful country indicated that the end was night. Unfortunately for Dr Cumming, it seems that he had prophesied this a few too many times in previous years—notably in 1865 when the comedian H. Bland felt compelled to lay aside his humorous persona and debunk his arguments—which thus led the City Jackdaw to remark sarcastically that, nevertheless, ‘he and we are still alive and kicking’.^[21]

It was not only clerics who preached doom and gloom but also peddlers of pseudoscience. Astrologers, for instance, have a reputation even nowadays for being slightly whacky and it was no different in the Victorian period when, in 1899, an astrologer named Rudolf Falb began touring Europe and the United Kingdom with the usual message that the world would end. The date was fixed: The world would on 13 November 1899.  The satirical magazine Fun mocked Falb’s prophecies when it declared

“Professor Falb once more foretells the end of the world on the 13^th of November next. A similar prophecy was made in 1773, again, in 1832, and subsequently in 1857.”—Vide Press.

The world, it seems, has many ends,

For many have been found:

And yet how can it have an end?

Remember, it is round!^[22]

It will have escaped no one’s notice that Prof. Falb’s calculations were incorrect. We are indeed still ‘alive and kicking’ in March 2024.

References

[1] ‘The End of the World in June’, London Journal, 30 May 1857, 196.

[2] R.B. Cunninghame Graham, A Brazilian Mystic being the Life and Miracles of Antonio Conslheiro (London: William Heinemann, 1920), 16

[3] ‘Borrowed Trifles’, Bradford Observer, 8 September 1842, 5.

[4] ‘Miserable Delusion and Scandalous Expedition’, Northern Star, 3 January 1846, 6.

[5] Harold Spender, ‘A Prophet Without Honour’, The English Illustrated Magazine, June 1898, 194-201.

[6] Eugene Sue, The Infant’s Skull; or, The End of the World, Trans. Daniel de Leon (New York Labor News, 1904), 39.

[7] John Ogden, Emanuel; or Paradise Regained (Manchester: Sowler and Russell, 1797), 110.

[8] Percy B. Shelley [online], ‘Hellas’, accessed 24 March 2024, available at: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/percy-bysshe-shelley-hellas

[9] George W.M. Reynolds, ‘The Revival of a Working-Class Agitation’, Reynolds’s Political Instructor, 10 November 1849, 2.

[10] Helen Macfarlane, ‘Remarks on the Times: Apropos of Certain Passages in No. 1 of Thomas Carlyle’s Latter Day Pamphlets’, in Helen Macfarlane: Red Republican—Essays, Articles, and her Translation of the Communist Manifesto, ed. by David Black (London: Unkant, 2014), 21

[11] Louis Blanc, ‘The History of Socialism’, Democratic Review, April 1850, 418–22.

[12] Gerald Massey, ‘Coming out of Egypt’, Red Republican, 21 December 1850, 11.

[13] Thomas Cooper, The Poetical Works of Thomas Cooper (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1877), 174.

[14] Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper written by himself (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), 365.

[15] Ernest Jones, ‘The New World: A Democratic Poem’, in Notes to the People, ed. by Ernest Jones, 2 vols (London: J. Pavey, 1851), I, 13.

[16] Ernest Jones, ‘The New Book of Kings: Chapter II’, in Notes to the People, I, 275.

[17] Victor Hugo, Les Miserables, [no trans.], 5 vols (New York: David McKay [n.d.]), V: 23.

[18] Macfarlane, 21.

[19] Macfarlane, 21.

[20] Helen Macfarlane, ‘The Communist Manifesto’, in Black, ed., Helen Macfarlane, 120.

[21] ‘The End of the World’, City Jackdaw, 23 November 1877, 14.

[22] ‘The End of the World’, Fun, 14 February 1899, 50.