Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850-1910 by Logie Barrow

Author:Logie Barrow [Barrow, Logie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Great Britain, Modern, 19th Century
ISBN: 9781317268857
Google: 6x1qDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 828498
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1986-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

This optimism may appear confused. But Skelton was not alone in apparently suffering from it at this time. Take J. F. White’s report of a deputation (also during 1854) to the great Free Trade MP, John Bright, to present a botanic petition. True, deputation and recipient seem to have harangued or disdained each other in a very clear-cut way, as self-conscious representatives of the working and middle classes. And yet White’s own arguments in this very context suggest a confused or vague strategy. On the one hand, ‘all great Reforms originate with working men’, so that ‘we shall soon be able to convince the middle class,… then they will take it up and it will become popular’; on the other, ‘only by seeing its effects on the working class [would] the middle class… adopt it.’ Whatever White’s precise politics had been during the previous fifteen or so years, Skelton’s had, as noted, been social-Chartist. Even more relevant here, he had been a Chartist intellectual and strategically radical – part of what Goodway calls a ‘coterie which included Thomas Cooper and Harney, John Skelton and [the later spiritualist] Thomas Shorter’ and, during the late 1840s, in agreement with Ernest Jones’s identification of ‘the middle classes [as]… our greatest enemies’.134 Apart, meantime, from Chartism’s decline as a national movement, one factor which may have confused his class strategy (if it now was) may have been a possible convergence between plebeian and some other unorthodox medics within the campaign against vaccination.

Any such convergence is worth some paragraphs. It would have occurred at a time when Skelton, at least, believed that not only was medical botany having a considerable impact,135 but also that its opponents were split. As to the first, he claimed, however exaggeratedly, that ‘not a single city, town or village but what numbers its disciples [of medical botany] more or less. They support two periodicals, and have numerous works upon the subject.’136 (His ‘more or less’ may be a ploy to lump traditional herbalists together with Thomsonians and Eclectics.) We can add (as Skelton does not mention this) that there was from 1864 a National Association of Medical Herbalists which, we are told, ‘many botanic societies, especially from the North and Midlands [of England], elected to join’.137 Medical botanists also drew succour from the USA, which had, Skelton claimed, ‘not less than nine Thomsonian Colleges in her principal towns and cities’.138 Thus, the newly acquitted Josiah Thomas found himself presented, not merely with a purse of silver but also with an unsolicited honorary MD from the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania, signed by J. R. Buchanan139 (the psychometrical Eclectic whom we met during Chapter 4). Six of the latter’s works were advertised within one particular issue of the Eclectic Journal.140 During the same weeks, ‘an immense quantity of American medical works, new as well as old’, was being offered for sale to medical botanists at below the American price.141 And Buchanan, at least, was apparently sending such works free: no wonder

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