Page:Devon & Cornwall Notes & Queries.djvu/330

 Devon Notes and Queries. 241 196. A Note on Joanna Southcott and hbr Passports TO Hbavbn. — One of these curious documents fell into my hands a few years ago, and as I believe that the number of them still surviving is but small, I am sending you a photo- graph of it, which may interest your readers. Joanna was a native of Gittisham, and was baptized at Ottery St. Mary on 6th June, 1750. She was of humble but respectable origin, and spent several years in domestic service in Honiton, Exeter and the neighbourhood. She was an attendant at the Cathedral, and eventually joined the Wesleyans in 1791, as she said, by Divine command. After a serious illness she went in 1792 to Plymtree to recruit, and while there began to pen " prophecies " and to " seal up " her writings, using an oval seal which she had accidentally found, and which bore two stars and the initials '* I.S." She had controversies with the Bishop and the Chapter of Exeter as to her miraculous and prophetical powers, and gained a consider- able number of supporters. In 1798 she moved to Bristol, and in 1801 began to publish books of prophecies and warning, which were eagerly bought by her followers. In 1802 she moved on to London, and at Paddington began " sealing the faithful," issuing *' certificates for the millenium ; " and it is one of these so-called passports of which I send you the photograph. She is said to have sold between six and seven thousand of them, some at 125., but most of them at a guinea ; and she continued the sale until a woman named Mary Bate- man, to whom she had sold one, was banged at York in 1809 for murder. In 181 3 the first announcement was made that she was to become the mother of Shiloh, who was to be born in the following year. She fell ill in March, 1814. In Sep- tember a crib was bought at the price of ;^2oo, and a pap- spoon at ;^ioo for the expected child, and a Bible prepared for him as a birthday present. She died of dropsy on 27th December, 1814, at 38, Manchester Street, London, and was buried at St. John's Wood on ist January, 1815. Her tomb- stone was shattered by the great gunpowder explosion on the Regent's Park Canal in 1874. ^^ seems somewhat uncertain whether she was entirely an impostor,. or whether she was to some extent misled by the flattery of her fanatical followers, and by the morbid working of disease in body and mind. Some of her believers would not give up hopes of her early R