Walworth Jumpers

For other uses, see Children of God (disambiguation).

The Walworth Jumpers (or Children of God, Girlingites or Convulsionists) were a cult created by Mary Ann Girling (née Clouting) in the 1870s in England. Born in Ipswich, Suffolk, Girling preached the Second Coming, celibacy, chastity and communal life (a kind of Christian communism). In 1871, the Children of God were invited to London by another new religious movement, the Peculiar People of Plumstead, and established themselves there. In London, they gathered around the railway arches of Walworth Road.

This ecstatic, esoteric sect claimed that they died with conversion, and were then reborn to eternal life. Once evicted from Walworth Road by hostile mobs, Girling founded in 1872 a Forest Lodge at Hordle, Hants. 160 believers gathered there, cultivating vegetables and worshipping. They were prohibited from sexual activity, as well as from economic transactions. Unable to pay their rent, they were expelled by the police, and then moved from one refuge to another.

Girling, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ, died in 1886 of uterine cancer. A large crowd attended her funeral. (A photograph of Mary Anne Girling is held in the Isle of Wight Victorian photographic archives at Dimbola Lodge)

Further reading

• M. Davies, Unorthodox London (1873), I, 89ff (quoted by Eric Hobsbawm in Primitive Rebels, chapter on "The Labour Sects")
• Philip Hoare, England's Lost Eden: in search of a Victorian Utopia, Fourth Estate, ISBN 978-0007159116
• Heimann, Mary (2004). Mary Ann Girling (Nee Clouting), 1827–1886 in: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB). Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 347–348. ISBN 0-19-861411-x

See also

• Shakers, a sect with which they were sometimes conflated
• Commune (intentional community)

External links

• Stirred and shaken, The Daily Telegraph, 20 March 2005, review of Hoare's book
• Spirit levels, The Guardian, 12 March 2005, review of Hoare's book
• New Forest Shakers, review of Hoare's book on the BBC