Strange Connections

Someone writing a history of Victorian England, from the perspective of commercial development (not economics, or labor, or trade) would, I think, identify at least three fundamental transforms during the period: (a) the rise of the limited liability public corporation as an economic actor/vehicle for the concentration of capital (along with the legislation and regulatory mechanisms that pursued it, largely ineffectually, across the landscape); (b) the rise of national and international legal regimes for the protection of various kinds of 'intellectual property' (a notion that had no currency to speak of before the nineteenth century); and (c) the (perhaps consequent) development of marketplaces of ideas, in which capital exploits and is exploited by knowledge.

That last one sounds a bit abstract, no doubt. One way to ground it is to think about one of Conan Doyle's lesser novels (but a favorite of mine): The Firm of Girdlestone. It's worth a read, both as a way of accessing Conan Doyle's worldview, and as a way of understanding how the information asymmetries created by uneven infrastructure development in the nineteenth century allowed for clever people (people-people, and corporation-people) to play in the seams and gaps in "whatever everyone knows."A mineral find in any area accessible via factors (people, on the ground) or telegraphy could be verified in, at worst, hours -- little time for capital-raising, capital-spending and absconding. A mineral find "off the grid" (and there were a lot of those places) could take months to verify: plenty of time for exploitation. Similarly, old content could become new product -- information is infinitely recombinant. The railways-never-built, the mines-that-did-not-exist, the impractical-inventions, the old-parascience-under-a-new-name (and indeed the battles over the names-of-things)... the market was full of these "scams" all of which required those three things: limited liability corporations in a largely-unregulated environment, protection of intellectual property, and a marketplace in which ideas, concepts, plans, schemes, and structures had economic value.

Since there were so few rules, the opportunities for innovation were substantial -- and our folks, along with others in unrelated disciplines and movements, exploited those opportunities. Our cast of heroes and villains were operating within this framework -- experimenting, mimicking, innovating. The distinction between enterpreneurs (who make use of capital to achieve scale) and proprietors (who make use of capital to achieve control) is also worth thinking about, as a way to separate our actors and the business models they pursued.

Offered in evidence: the very large number of Spiritualist leaders who were also either patent holders, or invovled in the flotation and management of joint stock companies, or who developed factories of one sort or another (water cure factories, patent medicine factories, etc.)...

Against The Tide of History

Amongst the metaphors we use to illustrate the dynamics of this thing we call history is: the metaphor of tides.

Within limits, it's apt, provided we remember that history does not, in itself, flow -- except insofar as any story flows.

But, if you're on the wrong side of a tide -- as I often am -- then the metaphor has a visceral, compelling quality to it: one feels the surge, the riptide, the force against which one is working.

I suppose that "fighting the tide" happens in the name of another metaphor -- truth, or balance, or the whole story (in the Straussian savage-history sense). Mostly, one feels: loss, impending or actual. Minutes from drowning, or being pulled under. Particularly when one does not have that ever-charged battery, belief, on which to draw.

I was strangely happy, today, to discover that I'm not the only whack job engaged in tide-fighting, as well as to discover that a particular hero of mine has a raving-lunatic champion.

Edison does suck. No doubt about that.

John Wesley, Electric Physician

All hail the graduate student.

One of my friends (thanks, N) passes on a pointer she got from a graduate student, to John Wesley's book on the medical uses of electricity: The Desideratum: or, Electricity Made Plain and Useful.

(Conspiracy theorists will note that the publisher of this version is the successor to Bailliere, the publisher of the English mesmerists. No accident.)

I had no idea but it sure helps explain why Wesley has such pride of place in Spiritualism's account of the pre-history of the movement. It's funny-haha and funny-odd to imagine the father of Methodism as the bellwether of Spiritualism, but the more we know, the more that seems to be the case: a religious system-maker, poltergeist investigator, open-field-reformer, also a bookseller and publisher interested in distributing knowledge as cheaply as possible, and concerned particularly to get science and (alternative) before the eyeballs of the masses.

Having a citation, one always has a defined locus in the network of knowledge -- a place to land in the giant web of affiliation, a set of paths to explore from the defined locus, a way of getting along, through the garden of our misunderstandings.

In that unimaginably large and diffuse nondirected graph of citations, Wesley's Desideratum is an edge in the northwest quandrant somewhere, but it's connected: see for example Linda Schwab's John Wesley and The Desideratum: "This Curious and Important Subject, Brian Edgar's The Electrifying John Wesley! (see, the father of Methodism is humanly kooky, too exclamation point), Deborah Madden's The limits of human knowledge: Fath and the empirical method in John Wesley's medical holism (which text is well worth contemplating, given the naughty...err, knotty ways in which faith and empiricism of the naive sort had intercourse within Spiritualism) as well as her Experience and the Common Interest of Mankind (the woman is on to something!), Paola Bertucci's The Shocking Bag: Medical Electricity in mid-18th-Century London (title: A+++; don't we all have shocking bags, truth be told) as well as her Revealing sparks: John Wesley and the religious utility of electrical healing, and Paul Elliot's "More Subtle than the Electric Aura": Georgian Medical Electricity, the Spirit of Animation and the Development of Erasmus Darwin's Psychophysiology (did no one tell Paul that there is nothing more refined and ineffable than the subtile fluid?).

In the center of the garden of misunderstandings is an ocean (on which we may sail, in sieves), and there all these (and the others I haven't found yet) will run smack into all of us, and we will realize, at last, that we are studying the same discourse.

Seagulls wheel, screaming (kiss her kiss her). Studying a few grains of sand, while the great ocean of truth, etc... The calculus, and alchemy. I have an angel on my shoulder but a devil in my head, as the song goes.

No True Scotsman, Texas Sharpshooters and the Slippery Slope

Mostly because all parties to the controversy committed them, I'd like to point folks to a wonderful catalog of logical fallacies in infographic form, every one of which should be familiar to us, as arguers and as students of Spiritualism and the occult.

Recovering Thomas Shorter's Library

As an exercise to see how well we are doing at recovering the primary texts that the people we study thought were important, I've taken Thomas Shorter's 1867 bibliography of Modern Spiritualism (from The Spiritual Magazine), put it online, and hunted up digital copies all the texts he referenced, or tried to. The results are encouraging, and frightening, at the same time. The ephemera is not getting collected "automagically" despite our faith in technology, and (what irony) Shorter's own works are unavailable.

Notes for a History....Spiritualism and Insanity

Spiritualism is a manifestation of insanity. Spiritualism produces insanity. Spiritualism is the cure for insanity.

All three arguments were deployed in the early days of Spiritualism, but that third line -- Spiritualism as a treatment regimen for insanity, and the insane patient as an undeveloped medium -- was entertained, seriously, by only one person: James John Garth Wilkinson, in his The Homeopathic Principle Applied to Insanity: A Proposal to Treat Lunacy by Spiritualism (1857), which with some hesitation is now released back into the wild.

I suppose this could be a Swiftian modest proposal, but I doubt it.

Notes for a History... Richard Chenevix/Chevenix

We can't even agree on how to spell his last name.

In the conventional recitation, mesmerism is introduced into England in the early 1790s by an American, Dr. Bell, where it enjoys some interest until the use of metallic tractors as part of the practice is exposed in the late 1790s (more wanton American innovation, spoiling perfectly good science), after which mesmerism is a dead letter in England until Richard Chenevix (or Chevenix), FRS, chemist and playwright, re-introduces it from France, in a series of papers published in The London Medical and Physical Journal in 1829.

Not surprisingly, the intellectual commitment of Richard Chenevix, Esq., FRS (this is the probable correct spelling, based on contemporary materials, though plenty of references to "Richard Chevenix" exist in Google Books [snark about modern academics deleted]) to both mesmerism (which term he used, instead of "animal magnetism," because he did not subscribe to the fluidic explanation for the effects of the operator on the subject) and phrenology was expunged from his CV by the time of his death, and thus did not make it into more recent biographical precis (which are often rewritten, I find, from contemporary obituary notices).

So, to complete the record of the man who, it appears, brought mesmerism and phrenology, in fruitful combination, back into English scientific and popular discourse, here are:

• his obituary in The Gentleman's Magazine for July 1830. Newspaper obituaries mentioned his accomplishments as a chemist and a playwright (apparently he wrote plays in the manner of the Elizabethans), and the fact that he was the uncle of H. M. Tuite, then MP for Westmeath
• his original five essays in The London Medical and Physical Journal for 1829, including the oft-cited and seldom-read On Mesmerism, improperly denominated Animal Magnetism (sometimes "improperly" is transcribed as "properly")
• his spirited defense of Spurzheim in 1830, as re-issued in pamphlet form by Spurzheim's English publisher

It was in the company of Chenevix that John Elliotson has his conversion experience, and that was sufficient to produce a "revolution in ideas" about mesmeric practice. But Chenevix's papers do not appear to have had any profound effect on non-medical discourse on mesmerism in England -- there are few texts on mesmerism per se published in England, as far as I can tell, until Dupotet's An Introduction to the Study of Animal Magnetism is published in 1838. Most interestingly, Dupotet -- who's living on Cavendish Square in London at the time of publication -- dedicates that text to Philip Henry Stanhope, our Emma's likely "baffled sensualist."

And equally interesting, Chenevix is not the well-spring of animal magnetism or mesmerism in the US. His work is discussed in a few US medical journals, but the honors for (re)introducing mesmerism to the US (as "animal magnetism") belong to different people entirely. Nor is he responsible for the resurgence of mesmeric practice in Scotland in the 1830s. But those are posts for another day.

Notes for a History...Two Bigotries, and a Handful of Enthusiasms

We see the "two bigotries" argument replayed, over and over again, in the literature of the 1840s and 1850s -- both mesmeric, and Spiritual. This particular instance comes from a peculiar periodical: The Mechanics Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal and Gazette, edited by J. C. Robertson, for the second half of 1849 (it's worth seeing how badly Google Books misfiles this periodical).

This magazine is a magazine for what we'd call maker culture (or maybe even hacker culture) today -- its readers and writers are not, by and large, University-trained men: they are "mechanics," by which term Victorian culture denoted precisely the same class of people we denote today by the term "technologists." People interested in applying science to practical problems, in making more, better, smaller, cheaper. People who in many cases are not only uninterested in clean science (except for what they can mine from it), but opposed to it, as a kind of elitist dogma.

Readers of The Mechanics Magazine (which included George Boole, the father of Boolean logic, on the basis of which the modern world works, creakily) were concerned with the mathematics of sheer, torsion, and compound interest, with the latest patent filings and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, and with just what improvements Mr. Bessemer had made to glass manufacturing. They were concerned with making science work, and making it pay. And yet, amidst the schematics for improved breech action rifles and safer mine elevators, we find the most peculiar things: a review, for example, of Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture -- which is taken to task for fetishizing pure architecture over the practicality of red-brick factories, churches and universities.

And we find a short article, entitled "Possibilities and Probabilities in Physical Science" by one A. M., which is concerned to prove that "the great mass of the learned and scientific authorities in every age, especially royal academies and societies, have obstinately and stupidly refused to examine the evidence for any new facts or doctrines which were at all opposed to or beyond the orthodox scientific creed of their day." A. M drafts into service, as a contemporary for-instance, the orthodox response to: mesmerism.

The bigotry and narrow-mindedness of scientific men is quite as notorious, and much less excusable, than religious bigotry. We have had a most memoranle instance of this, in our own days, in the history of mesmerism. In a subject confessedly so little understood as the physiology of the nerves, the very men who at one moment confess their almost total ignorance of its laws, are found the next obstinately refusing to examine with their own eyes and ears the new phenomena; nay, flatly denying the possibility of things, which hundreds and thousands of persons have declared they themselves have witnessed; and which the self-conceited denier will not even take the trouble to look at for himself. It is really astonishing, that self-conceit and complacency in his own petty knowledge, can so influence a man as to make him give the lie direct to thousands of his fellow-men, as sensible and able as himself to detect trickery of imposture. But, however astonishing it may be, it is nothing at all new. When Galileo begged and prayed the "orthodox" professor of astronomy at Padua, only first to come and look through his telescope for himself -- No! he -- the orthodox authority of his day -- couldn't think of such a thing. He was perfectly and absolutely certain that Galileo must be either deceived or a deceiver, and therefore it was derogatory to his dignity to look through the telescope....Before quitting this subject of mesmerism, I will take the opportunity of recommending those of your readers who are yet strangers to it, or disbelievers in it, to examine for themselves.

If you read enough -- particularly in the periodical literature -- it's hard to escape the sense that there are at least four camps in the ideological contest at mid-century: clean science, clean religion, and those dirty-handed milling-about crowds who wished to plunder clean science and reform or tear down clean religion. The boundaries are shifty. Medical doctors and provincial divines wander into the mesmerist camp, take tea, point at the blinkered medical profession and the know-nothing-since-Aristotle church leadership, and then wander out again: back to their corners, or into entirely new ways-of-living. Mesmerism could reform medicine, or the Church, or both, or neither. But the fact that that these latter coalitions -- whose members include our A. M., as well as our Emma (whom we should remember was a patent-holder herself, in a manner of speaking) -- would so often cross in and out of the emerging international patent regime is not an accident. The patent regime (and its thin-skinned twin, the copyright regime) are effects of a revolution in ideas (not in the Victorian sense of that term alone) that is happening just at the time that mesmeric and Spiritualist parasciences are percolating into public discourse, and like mesmerism and Spiritualism, the patent and copyright regimes defined a new (in their case, legal) relationship between a subject and an idea, a new mechanism for asserting authority and control, new methods for scaling and distribution, new potential for the monetization of science or spirit.

The term "market of ideas" is not, by 1840, a metaphor: it describes what is actually happening, on the ground, on both sides of the Atlantic. And orthodoxies have never looked with favor on the notion of free ideological trade.

Clash of the Parasciences

Maybe I just need to remind myself, and no one else, about how inappropriate it is to judge any nineteenth-century discourse using twenty-first century ways-of-knowing.

I found a nice reminder of this, today, in James Braid's Neurypnology (1843), which has the distinction of introducing both a naturalistic interpretation of mesmeric effects into the mesmeric soup, and attaching to that naturalistic explanation the word "hypnosis" (nervous sleep).

Braid is describing his treatment of a thirteen-year-old boy for "opisthotonos" -- that is, muscle spasms producing painful rigidity -- in the presence of an "orthodox" physician, using mesmeric techniques. He writes:

Now, Braid was someone the hard-left mesmerists loved to conjure with -- or more properly to mine for anecdotal information -- because Braid was an orthodox physician on to an interesting therapeutic technique, not a iconoclast dead-set on turning orthodox medicine out into the (filthy, pestilential) street. And here he exhibits the prudence in his position (in the presence of his orthodox colleague) by introducing calomel treatments.

Wise Braid, prudent Braid....poisoner Braid. Calomel is a human-manufactured proto-pharmaceutical: mercurous chloride, a poison with relatively little efficacy in the treatment of any illness, and a host of really nasty side effects. In spite of that, it was part of the material medica in both the US and the UK in the nineteenth century, and persisted in UK "healthcare" products until the 1940s.

But we can't blame Braid, can we, for employing an orthodox treatment strategy? Particularly not when he's doing it as part of a more general antiphlogistic regimen, which carries in its etymology the linkage to something fully as nutty and every bit (in its time) as broadly accepted as Victorian science's luminiferous ether.

Yeah, yeah -- what's the point?

Only this: in the clash of orthodox medicine and mesmeric science, we are not looking at a wanton parascience versus what I'll call clean science: science with its own conceptual and theoretical house in order. We're looking at one parascience, competing against another parascience, one sort of witch-doctoring or witchcraft competing against another. In other words, this is about power, and not about truth. Almost always, we find ourselves identifying with one or another combatant -- every observer has her allegiances -- but we should mistake affiliation for epistemic warrant.

Looking at it with twenty-first century eyes, reasonable people may disagree about whether possibly fraudulent therapeutic techniques did more harm than being dosed with mercury. But faced with a choice between a quack with a shiny disk, and a Harley Street physician with calomel, I'll take the shiny disk, every time.

That is, if I were suffering from opisthotonos. If I were suffering from say rabies, or tetanus, my choices were grim: Braid (who believed hypnotism might well cure both rabies and tetanus) or orthodox medicine, the practitioners of which would have declared my case hopeless, declined to continue consultation, and failed in most cases to practice even palliative care. Good thing there was laudanum round the corner at the chemist.

I'm currently reading a history of mesmerism in Scotland -- guess what? different method of introduction, different practices -- and there's a wonderful case therein, of a woman we would, these days, almost certainly conclude suffered from a psychosomatic ailment involving opisthotonos and "fits," sometimes at the same time. She is cured by a treatment regimen concocted by a Glasgow physician (a graduate of the medical school at Edinburgh) and a mesmeric practitioner, after being seen and abandoned (or abandoning) more than a dozen orthodox physicians. The orthodox medical treatment plans for her illness included: bleeding (using instruments and leeches), cupping (which I believe is the same thing done in alt-health spas these days), plasters (which were caustic) along the length of her spine, and (holy mother of Mesmer) soaking one of her feet in vinegar until her skin separated from the underlying tissue. Oh, and calomel, in such concentration that it removed part of her gum. But that was accidental -- the apothecary made a mistake, compounding some other tonic.

Notes for a History: Letheon

Inquirers will know that one of the reasons why suggestion (that is, mesmerism....err, hypnosis) faded from medical discourse at about the time James Esdaile discovered its value as an anaesthetic was: the use of sulphuric ether and derivatives as chemical anaesthetics. Sulfuric ether could be manufactured by any competent chemist; fortunately we had a patent regime at the time (NB: this is a, if not the beginning of the pharmaceutical industry we're talking about here) to render the laws of nature proprietary and monetizable (We pursue this still: Funk's Hybrid, Monsanto, flower patents).

The US PTO began awarding patents for process-based sulfuric ether manufacturing in beginning in the 1840s (Google Patents, which is dead-broken like Google Books, doesn't help much with specificity here, but you can look if you like), and many commercial products based either on patent rights or patent licenses entered the market during the mid-nineteenth century.

One of the innovators in this dense and complicated area was William G. T. Morton, dentist, of Boston, whose claims regarding ether as anaesthetic date to 1846. Morton called his product Letheon, and it was from the first controversial.

A nice contemporary account of the Letheon controversy can be found in Some Account of the Letheon: or, Who is the Discoverer? by one Edward Warren, the first edition of which was published in Boston in 1846 (I think).

In keeping with this month's thematic -- the complicated ways in which conventional medicine, the mesmeric sciences and Spiritualism are inbricated and cross-implicated during the late 1840s and early 1850s -- I want to note, for someone else to look into, the fact that numerous players in the Letheon controversy are also movers, shakers, directors and officers of the New England Spiritualists' Association when it is founded in 1854 (including George Hayward, MD, who bequeathed all unknowingly his copy of the Association's inaugural document to us).

(That's a list more interesting, in my view, than the founders of the SDSK. So many persons of interest there...)

We'll save for another day the possible relationship between Caleb Eddy and those other, more famous Eddys.

And Another One...

This one is less interesting than yesterday's hidden collection of goodies, but behind the 1850 Alfred Smee lecture on electro-biology (New York: Fowler and Wells | Phrenological Cabinet, 1850) is John Bovee Dods' The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology, in a Course of Nine Lectures, also from 1850.

That second text is a different (earlier) version of Dods' The Philosophy of Electrical Psychology, in a Course of Twelve Lectures (1851), of which Google has a copy.

The three new lectures, added to the 1851 edition, are:

• Electro-Curapathy is the Best Medical System in Being...
• The Secret Revealed, so that All May Know How to Experiment Without an Instructor
• Genetology, or Human Beauty Philosophically Considered

I think the second new lecture of 1851 (which is, intriguingly, labeled as "Private Instructions to the Class" in the body of the 1851 text) is critical to understanding what's at stake, in the discourse, circa 1851: will the magnetic sciences be unchained, and democratized? or held in obscure bondage by theoreticians and agents of the medical establishment? Can a living be made bringing light, reason and salvation to the race? What is the relationship between lucre and truth?

(People who are familiar with the ways Mesmer licensed his knowledge, or with how John Bunyan Campbell licensed his Spirit Vitapathy and the Vitapathic Doctor (VD) degree, will find Lecture 11 well worth reading).

Dods does deliver on his promise, in the lecture:

(Hmmm.... a lecture to lecturers? "In a public audience, when lecturing....")

It's difficult to tell from internal evidence if the two were bound together by the publisher (possible, but I think not) or the original owner.

A Break In The Action: Why Google Books Really Sucks

Have a look at this.

Google Books has it catalogued as an edition of E. C. Rogers' Philosophy of Mysterious Agents, and indeed it is: (for me, heretofore unknown, and only part of) a serialized edition of 1852 in which Bela Marsh had a hand (no surprise there). And if that weren't interesting enough (for the four of us on the planet who are both bibliographers and students of Modern Spiritualism), what appears to be a single integrated text ('cause it was scanned that way, man, and you know, a book is a book, and you can search for stuff, so why worry....), turns out to be some early Spiritualist's library copy -- bound no doubt uniform with the rest of his library -- of a set of very important early Spiritualist materials.

What's in here? Well...

• What looks like part of the serialized first edition of Philosophy of Mysterious Agents (1852) [here]
• Dr. (Leah Fox Fish Brown) Underhill's The Arrest, Trial and Acquittal of Abby Warner for Spirit Rapping in St. Timothy's Church, Massilon, O(hio) (1852) [here]
• J. S. Loveland's The Spiritualist's Plea with the Bible Believer:A Dialogue (1853) [here]
• Alan Putnam's Spirit Works; Real But Not Miraculous: A Lecture (1853) (with paper wrappers intact!) [here]
• The Philosophy of Creation: Unfolding the Laws of the Progressive Development of Nature, and Embracing the Philosophy of Man, Spirit and the Spirit World, by Thomas Paine, Through the Hand of Horace G. Wood, Medium (1854) [here]
• A section of or from something called "Life's Pilgrimage" entitled "J. W. Edmonds in Reply to Bishop Hopkins on Spiritualism" (n. d. as yet) [here]
• Communications from the Spirit World, Given by Lorenzo Dow and Others. Through a Lady (1861) [here]
• George Sweet's Voltaire in the Spirit World (n. d. as yet) [here]
• The Last Call! Christ's Second Coming or Spiritualism Unmasked by Dr. Elizure Price Minier (1868) [here].

The last item is either the most insane text I have ever read, or a piece of comedy far too subtle for my limited wattage.

But, wait, folks! That's not all! I've saved the best for last. Nestled in there, amongst the pamphlets, is a complete copy of New England Spiritualists' Association Constitution & By-Laws, List of Officers and Address to the Public, for the year of its founding, 1854.

Note: of these texts, Google Books' catalog lists separately-available copies of Putnam, and Edmonds, but not the others. Unless one was searching carefully, they'd likely not appear in search results except as "no copy available.". The original librarian knew the volume was a multi-text work -- you can see his or her annotations throughout. Google Books -- get a librarian or two, please.

Notes for History...California Circles, 1852

Stuff's poppin' up all over the place, under just a gentle ticking.

The text itself consists almost entirely of extracts from other pamphlets and from newspapers, including a rather large hunk of material on the metaphysics of spirit circles from Charles Hammond's Light from the Spirit World, a probable origin of the pro-free-love argument.

But the sources are wide and deep, and that publication locale is California, in 1852. Another vector, another indication of timing, velocity, payload... So much for our Emma bringing Spiritualist to the benighted Best Coasties in 1863, eh?

John T. Bonnel is a puzzlement; he had no biographer or obituary-writer than I can identify. He appears to come to California from Indiana, no later than the year in which this text was published; Indiana is listed as his birthplace in the 1852 California state census. At the time of that census, he is living El Dorado County, near Lake Tahoe, which might tend to suggest he was mining.

In the 1860 Federal census, the only John Bonnel in California is mining in Plumas County, and he's 81 years of age, according to the census records -- one wonders if that isn't John, Sr., and if our John isn't dead in a mining accident by 1860.

Notes for a History...Herman Snow (1812-1905)

A Unitarian biography:

Herman Snow, born at Pomfret, Vt., was ninety-three at his death, in Cambridge, Aug. 23, 1905. He was the oldest graduate of Harvard Divinity School, and the only surviving graduate of the Class of 1843. He had few early advantages, and began as a clerk in country stores. An autobiographical manuscript in Harvard Divinity Library gives his varied experiences as a pioneer travelling salesman up and down Western towns and rivers previous to 1839, when he resolved upon entering the Unitarian ministry. He studied for the Divinity School with Rev. Joseph Allen, of Northboro. Though handicapped by uncertain health and lack of early training in scholarship, he was regularly graduated, ordained, and settled for two years over the First Ecclesiastical Society of Brooklyn, Conn., the only society in the State that had emerged as Unitarian from the Trinitarian and Unitarian controversies of that period.

In 1848 he undertook a long-cherished purpose to do something to spread the writings of Dr. Channing. A six-volume edition had been recently published, the price, a dollar a volume, too great for missionary work. On condition of a large subscription the price was reduced to two dollars. Not receiving the encouragement he had hoped for from the American Unitarian Association, Snow went ahead upon his own responsibility, with the support of a few friends, becoming himself responsible for some 600 copies. He canvassed in Vermont, New Hampshire, down the Hudson River Valley, in New Jersey, New York City, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. His notes are interesting: at Burlington, Vt., 18 copies; Montpelier, 41; State House, Concord, N.H., during the session, 14; at Woodstock, Vt., 2 copies to Judge of the Supreme Court and 25 among the people; Saratoga, 11; and so on. He availed himself of all opportunities to reach intelligent readers, and was often helped by finding that Channing's reputation had preceded him. He says that he sold and gave away more than 3,000 copies of Channing and 2,000 other liberal books. He always regarded that year's work as the most fruitful of his life.

Afterward, having the encouragement of James Freeman Clarke and others, he attempted to form a Channing Society for missionary work, but the project failed.

He had short settlements at Rockford, 1ll., Montague, Mass., and elsewhere; but ill-health obliged him to relinquish the ministry, and he lived for a dozen years on a farm in Rockford, 11l. Returning to it, he preached a year or so at East Marshfield, 1866-67, but was compelled to give up entirely.

Going to California he opened an "Agency for the Sale of Spiritualist, Liberal, and Reform Books and Papers," carrying it on twelve years. He had long been interested in Spiritualism and was now a devotee, holding seances and writing for spiritualist publications.

His book "Spirit Intercourse" had extensive circulation; some small books are now lost sight of; an article on Mormonism from personal observations at Salt Lake City appeared in the Overland Monthly.

The closing decade and more of his life was spent in Cambridge. A sweet and brave spirit that flows through his autobiography, and appears, especially, in short notes appended to it on his last birthdays, must have characterized his earnest ministry of truth and love.

Snow was a medium, and Spirit Intercourse (1853) is definitely worth looking through. First, I think it's impossible to read Snow's material (particularly in the context of his life, as above) and come to the conclusion that he has a pecuniary motive or is in some way a trickster. Second, he's a minister and a medium who appears to have stayed close to ministering his entire life -- that's a bit of a rarity, in Modern Spiritualism. Third, he comes up with Stainton Moses' refutation of magnetism-as-root-cause -- the presence of "the intelligent operator at the other end of the line" as Moses puts it in the 1870s -- in 1853 (see pp. 44-45).

Notes for a History...Hiram Mattison (1811-1868)

As Appleton's has it:

MATTISON, Hiram, clergyman, born in Norway, New York, 11 February, 1811; died in Jersey City, New Jersey, 24 November, 1868. He entered the Methodist ministry in 1835, was appointed agent of the American Bible society for the state of New Jersey in 1841, and, resuming pastoral work the next year, was successively stationed in Watertown and Rome, New York From 1846 till 1860 he was largely employed in the preparation of works on astronomy and in lecturing. In 1856-'7 he was pastor of churches in Adams and Syracuse, New York, and took an active part in anti-slavery movements. By correspondence with the Methodists of Great Britain in 1859, he obtained the names of about 85,000 petitioners to the general conference of 1860, praying that body to extirpate slavery from the Methodist Episcopal church, and a like paper from 45,000 petitioners in central New York was largely due to his efforts. In November, 1861, he withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal church, because, as he affirmed, of its toleration of slave-holding, soon afterward becoming pastor of St. John's independent Methodist church of New York city. He returned to his former connection in 1865, and was stationed in Jersey City, where he vehemently opposed the claims of the Roman Catholic church, and published a tract on the case of Mary Anne Smith, a Methodist, whose father, a Roman Catholic, he alleged, had unjustly caused her arrest and detention in a Magdalen asylum, in New York city. His controversies with the Roman Catholics led to his appointment in 1868 as district secretary to the American and foreign Christian union. His numerous works include " The Trinity and Modern Arianism" (New York, 1843); "Tracts for the Times " (1843) ; "Elementary Astronomy, accompanied by Maps " (1846); Burritt's " Geography of the Heavens," edited and revised (1850); " High-School Astronomy" (1853); " Spirit-Rapping Unveiled" (1854); " Sacred Melodies " (1859) ; "impending Crisis" (1859) ; "Immortality of the Soul" (1866) ; "Resurrection of the Body" (1866) ; "Defence of American Methodism " (1866); and "Popular Amusements " (1867). See "Work Here, and Rest Hereafter, a Life of Reverend Hiram Mattison," by Reverend Nicholas Vansant, with an introduction by Reverend Edward Thomson (New York, 1870).

To complete his bibliographical record, Mattison is also the only identified candidate for "A Searcher After Truth," the author of The Rappers: Or, the Mysteries, Fallacies and Absurdities of Spirit-Rapping, Table-Tipping and Entrancement. Now that identification may be bogus, but the facts fit (and some unnamed librarian noted the same in Google Books' copy of the text, which may be confirmation, or may be the source of the attribution), and there's work here for someone who wants to dig in. The first chapter betrays the jealousy of a clergyman at the devotion shown by New York Spiritualists by their faith (and makes me wonder....)

And a note to Coan-chasers: she's in there...