While the Victorian age was certainly one of unprecedented industrial and technical advances — an age, if there ever was one, of science and reason — it was also an age of unconventional religious enthusiams and spiritualist vogues. From seances held in the drawing-rooms of upper-class London families to Christian revivalist gatherings in the slums and countryside, a strong counter-current of faith flowed beneath the 19th century’s surface of rational progress.

Philip Hoare, author of books on Noël Coward, Oscar Wilde and Stephen Tennant, is clearly fascinated by this counter-current, and even more so by the remarkable characters who swam in it. So it is appropriate that England’s Lost Eden, though centred geographically on the New Forest as a historic place of mystery, dissent and refuge, is structurally a series of overlapping and partly interlinked narrative biographies.

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