English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century.: How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times.Everitt, Graham
History
English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century.: How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times.
Everitt, Graham
Caricature -- Great Britain; Illustration of books -- Great Britain -- 19th century
Her disciples rapidly increased, and she visited in her apostolic
character, Bristol, Leeds, Stockport, and other large centres, obtaining
numerous converts everywhere. Among them was the celebrated engraver,
William Sharp; and to the last this man, who out of his calling was the
veriest simpleton living, and who had swallowed successively the
doctrines of Richard Brothers, Wright, Bryan, and Joanna, believed in
the divine mission of this unincarcerated lunatic.
Although Joanna did not (like Joseph Smith) discover a book, she
discovered a seal, which one of her disciples is said to have picked up
in a dust-heap at Clerkenwell. With this miraculously acquired talisman
the spirit ordered her to "seal up the people," and as "the people" were
limited to one hundred and forty-four thousand, and each of the elect
had to pay a sum varying at different times from a guinea to twelve
shillings, or even lower, for the privilege of being "sealed up," the
scheme promised at first to turn out a comfortably profitable one. Into
the details of the "sealing" it is unnecessary for us to enter. Suffice
it to say that the numbers of the "sealed," up to 1808, when for some
unexplained reason the process appears to have been discontinued,
exceeded six thousand simpletons; the numbers of her deluded followers
in the metropolis and its vicinity alone, are supposed at one time to
have amounted to a hundred thousand.
Joanna was a coarse, common-place, and somewhat corpulent woman; she
dressed in a plain, quaker-like garb, in a gown of Calimancoe, with a
shawl and bonnet of drab colour. The three leading preachers in her
chapel in Southwark (her great stronghold), were a Mr. Carpenter, who,
after learning his business, set up as a prophet on his own account; a
Mr. Foley, and a lath-render named Tozer. She had chapels also in
Spitalfields, Greenwich, Twickenham, and Gravesend.
The scribblings in prose and verse of this illiterate creature, instead
of being committed to the waste paper basket, were solemnly preserved
and received as prophecies. Attacked at last with dropsy, her delusions
assumed the following objectionable form: she prophesied, and Sharp and
his fellow-disciples--some of whom were men of fair education--actually
believed, that Christ was to be born again under the name of "Shiloh,"
and that she, Joanna, at the age of sixty-five, was to be the mother.
The revelation which proclaimed the miraculous _accouchement_ was worded
as follows: "This year [1814], in the sixty-fifth year of thy age, thou
shalt have a son by the power of the Most High; which if they (the
Hebrews) receive as their prophet, priest, and king, then I will restore
them to their own land, and cast out the heathen for their sakes, as I
cast out them when they cast out Me, by rejecting Me as their Saviour,
Prince, and King, for which I said I was born, but not at that time to
establish My kingdom."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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