It is ironic and somewhat paradoxical that as we enter a new millennium, a religious group – the Shakers – whose origins are founded in the eighteenth century, should continue to have such an influence upon contemporary society. It would seem that the twentieth and indeed now the twentyfirst century, whilst celebrating the stylistic achievements of the movement, has turned its back on the underlying religious and spiritual ethos. Indeed this paradox forms one of the central axes of this book – that is the idea that participants in the twentieth century have used the Shaker aesthetic for their own commercial ends.

The husband–and–wife team of Edward Deming Andrews and Faith Andrews did much to promote the Shaker ideal in the middle part of the twentieth century, particularly via their previously mentioned book Religion in Wood. The book also served, in some part, as a paradigm for this present book. In the introduction it states:

The history and background to the Shaker movement have been well documented in enough sources elsewhere for us to dispense with little more than a cursory glance at their origins. The Shakers – a breakaway sect of the Quakers, with a strict moral and spiritual code, whose communities in North America constitute its oldest communal society – have fascinated commentators almost since their inception in England in the 1750s. For example, Nathaniel Hawthorne, an American Consul in Liverpool (1853–57) visited the Shakers and wrote two stories about them:

The Canterbury Pilgrims and The Shaker Bridal, where the latter, in particular, displays more than a few of the negative responses of rigidity, fanaticism and emotional impoverishment, characteristic of other contemporary writers on the group.