Yet the author drives this writing style so hard that it occassionally skids off the road. Baroque words like subaqueous, unvertiginous, pulchritudinous, terpsichorean and concupiscence appear a little too often. His metaphor-laden prose, though rich, is intermittently confusing, and indulges in making artful but unreasonable statements: ‘in an Alice-like inversion, Peterson’s tower really was bigger inside than out’. The work is also peppered with references to trendy concepts like neural networks and chaos theory, and with unnecessarily postmodernist constructions. Girling’s drama, for example, took place ‘under the sophisticated surveillance of the imperial metropolis’, while the single photograph taken of her both ‘invites analysis and rejects it’.
Such mannerisms are minor annoyances. More serious is Hoare’s unwillingness to set clear boundaries to the belief systems he describes, and to put them in historical perspective. Were Ruskin’s spiritualism and Girling’s millenarianism separate phenomena, or did they grow from the same root? In asides throughout the book, Hoare implies the latter: ‘In a commodified world, the choice of faiths mirrored an age of mass production,’ he states, observing elsewhere that ‘esoteric faith was a response to uncertain times’.
Hoare therefore leaves readers with the impression that spiritualism and unconventional religion were reactions to the Industrial Revolution. ‘Our lack of faith makes us different’,’ he reflects, and in so doing turns the Victorian age into an exotic specimen that has been killed and pinned to a cork board. But surely our own age — which after all includes Raelians, Branch Davidians, Scientologists, Moonies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a superpower at least one-quarter comprised of evangelical Christians, many of whom believe in the imminence of end-of-world events like the Rapture — is not really so different from the 19th century, or even from the 17th. Hoare’s nostalgia for England’s lost Edens is touching, but it is also unnecessary: new Edens are being dreamt up all the time, as diverse, colourful and gloriously anti-rational as ever.
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