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Anti-Establishment Healing: Spiritualism in Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

Logie Barrow*
Affiliation:
University of Bremen

Extract

Most of the people discussed in this paper would have been amazed at being drawn into a publication chiefly concerned with ecclesiastical history. Some would undoubtedly have treated the words as a rag of very great redness. To elucidate the incongruity, I will briefly summarise who these people were, and when they lived.

The period is roughly 1850-1910; the people are those whom I define as plebeian autodidacts. By plebeian I mean, inclusively, anyone from lower-middle-class downwards. By autodidact, I mean anyone who makes their education their own affair, independently of social superiors. In the nineteenth century at least, self-education was seldom a matter of individual effort alone, but also of collective endeavour: comprising agitations for freedom of the press and of assembly, and the defence or exercise of such rights once gained; public readings, scientific demonstrations, lecture-series and, not least, marathon public debates. Thus we have to speak of a plebeian autodidact culture. It was not, of course, the culture of the majority of members of those classes I have lumped together as plebeians. Had it been, we could use the glibber word ‘popular’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1982

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References

1 Ashman, Joseph, Psychopathic Healing, (London 1874) p 43 Google Scholar, Testimonial number 1.

2 Obituary [in Medium and Daybreak, vol 14 (1883) p 5].Google Scholar

3 Ibid.

4 [Dr.Davies, Maurice], [A Psychopathic Institution, in Medium and Daybreak, vol 9 (1894) p 694fGoogle Scholar, reproduced from the Sun].

5 Obituary.

6 See discussion in Medium and Daybreak with Mr. Alfred Ginders, in all the four issues of September 1871, particularly p 319.

7 Ashman, Psychopathic Healing, preface.

8 Obituary.

9 Which probably occurred as early as April 1870: see notice by Young, F. R. in Medium and Daybreak, vol 5, 1870, p 21.Google Scholar

10 Obituary, the spiritualist was ‘Miss Makdougall Gregory’.

11 Davies.

12 In 1883, obituary.

13 Christian Spiritualist, 1874, p 141.

14 Davies.

15 Ashman, Psychopathic Healing, p iv.

16 Davies.

17 Ranger, T., ‘Medical Science and Pentecost: the dilemma of Anglicanism in Africa‘, SCH 19 (1982) pp 333-65.Google Scholar

18 Two Worlds, 3.5.89, 297f, quoting the North Eastern Weekly Gazette, of Middlesbrough.

19 E.g., Skultans, V.: Intimacy and Ritual (London 1974) throughout.Google Scholar

20 Sources for the section on Jones are: autobiographies in Medium and Daybreak, vol 29, 1894, p 65ff, 275ff (includes portrait), 277ff, 316ff.

21 Conceivably the famous escaped slave (hence the middle name).

22 E.g. ‘Madame Louise of New York’, noted in Human Nature, vol 7 (1873) p 47.

23 E.g. Mrs Davidson, Human Nature, same date and page.

24 Visibility Invisible and Invisibility Visible, 1888, subtitled A New Year Story Founded on Fact; and similar claim in preface.

25 Ibid pp 45-57.

26 Ibid pp 58-65.

27 Medium and Daybreak, vol 10 (1875) pp 71, 92, 316, 172, respectively.

28 Ibid vol 11,(1876) p 364. The second and enlarged edition of her Facts on Vaccination was stated to be in the press for publication by Burns during September 1876 (ibid, p 590). Text of her lecture at Marylebone: Ibid, p 428. Debating: ibid vol 12 (1877) p 140. She subsequently joined a select band of dignitaries as a vice-president of the South London Anti-Vaccination Society (Report of the latter’s annual meeting, ibid vol 14 (1879) p 43.

29 Ibid vol 11 (1876) p 495; vol 12, (1877) p 431.

30 Ibid vol 16 (1881) p 640.

31 Ibid vol 23 (1888) p 825; Rolandus, pp 290f.

32 Her Physianthropy was much enthused over in the spiritual lyceums’ (Sunday Schools) Lyceum Banner, vol 4 (1894) p 15.

33 Labour Annual and Reformers’ Year Book (1899) pp 165f, includes photograph.

34 Medium and Daybreak, 4 and 18 May 1894.

35 Podmore, F., The Naturalisation of the Supernatural (London 1908).Google Scholar

36 Darnton, R., Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (Harvard 1968).Google Scholar

37 Inglis, B.. Natural and Supernatural (London 1977) pp 183f, 224, 282.Google Scholar

38 Ibid pp 213f,224.

39 Ibid pp 203, 159: Jung-Stilling during 1808 for one.

40 Barkas, Alderman T. P. (of Newcastle), Outlines of Ten Years’ Investigations …, (London 1862)Google Scholar; Barkas accepted Rcichenbach’s odie force, pp 21 f, 81 f.

41 Ashman, Psychopathic Healing, p ii.

42 Christian Spiritualist, 1874, p 141; Spiritual Magazine, 1874, p 479.

43 Ashman, Psychopathic Healing, p 1 f.

44 Ibid p 42.

45 Two Worlds, 2 December 1887, p 47: a 3/4-column advertisement (I have homogenised the printing and capitalisation in these extracts).

46 Ibid, 9 November 1888, p iii.

47 E.g. ibid, 4 April 1890, p iii: Mrs Burchell.

48 See, for example, the list of W. J. Lecdcr in ibid April 1899, p 231.

49 For a shorter but equally wide list see: ibid 5 April 1889, p iii: Mr. Wakefield. For another, this time surely offering arbortifacients, see: ibid 7 April 1899, p 232: Prof. J. R. de Ross; or Mrs. Goldsborough’s medicines: ibid 2 December 1887, p 47.

50 Medium and Daybreak, 2 January 1874, p 15, small advertisement. Harper seems to have been working alongside a Mrs. Empson, who contributed ‘Clairvoyant examination for diagnosis of disease’.

51 Though as late as 1887 he was still based in London - though no longer in the centre - whence he was offering instruction in ‘the Science of Curing Diseases by Somnambulic [sic] Medicine’: Two Worlds, 2 December 1887, p 47.

52 Ibid 4 April 1890, p iii.

53 Report on the Practice of Medicine and Surgery by unqualified persons in the United Kingdom (London 1910) section on England, throughout. I owe thanks to Dr. Roger Cooter for alerting me to this basic and tantalising source.

54 For a classic statement of this orthodoxy see Lewis, I. M., Ecstatic Religions (London 1971) throughout.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 Rowell, G., ‘The Origins and History of Universalist Societies in Britain, 1750-1850’, JEH vol 22 (1971).Google Scholar