International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals

   

Periodical: Brittan's Journal

Summary:   From Pat Deveney's database:

Brittan's Journal. Spiritual Science, Literature, Art and Inspiration. The Dynamics of Subtile Agents; the Relations, Faculties and Functions of Mind; Philosophy of the Spiritual Life and World, and the Principles of Universal Progress. The Trumpets of the Angels are the Voices of the Reformers Other titles: Brittan's Journal of Spiritual Science, Literature, Art and Inspiration / Brittan's Quarterly Journal 1873-1874 Quarterly New York, NY. Language: English.
Publisher: Standard Spiritual Library Association. Editor: Samuel Byron Brittan (1815-1883).

Corporate author: Standard Spiritual Library Association 1/1, January 1873-2/4, October 1874. 6 1/2 x 11, 144 pp. Illustrated by plates of prominent spiritualists (including Brittan himself) as frontispieces, and occasionally with musical scores. Illustrated. Though devoted to an intellectual approach to spiritualism, the journal and its editor were not immune to the sillier side of the phenomena. In the first issue, Brittan himself wrote an article, "Invisible Artists" on the spirit art of Mrs. Miriam M. Thomas, and added a plate of the art so produced. The journal featured the disquisitions of Brittan and Frances H. (Fanny) Frances H. Green, and in volume two began a series on "Living American Reformers" that featured vignettes on J.R. Buchanan, O.B. Frothingham; Lucretia Mott; Maria B. Hayden, M.D., and others. In reprinting the criticism of the journal in the New York Graphic, Brittan writes its most fitting epithet: "mortal patience is not sufficient to grapple with the tremendous essays written in an emancipated grammar . . . ." "Reckoning with the Graphic," Brittan's Journal 2/2 (April 1874).

Other Sources:NY Historical Society; NY State Library; Los Angeles Public Library; University of Illinois; Brown University; LOC.
Issues:Brittans Journal V1 N1 January 1873
Brittans Journal V1 N2 April 1873
Brittans Journal V1 N3 July 1873
Brittans Journal V1 N4 October 1873
Brittans Journal V2 N1 January 1874
Brittans Journal V2 N2 April 1874
Brittans Journal V2 N3 July 1874
Brittans Journal V2 N4 October 1874
Claude-Generated Themes:   Brittan's Journal was the literary quarterly of Samuel Byron Brittan, one of the founding editors of American Spiritualism, published in the 1870s after two decades in which he had already edited several of the movement's most important papers. Its distinctive quality is the way it braids Spiritualism together with the sciences Brittan himself came from. Mediumship and spirit return are its spine, with physical phenomena and a feature on Daniel Dunglass Home; but the journal also carries genuine phrenology in the Gallian mode of cerebral organs, and a technical mesmeric doctrine of the imponderable and universal fluid, emanations and magnetic passes, treated as continuous with spirit action rather than superseded by it. Its temper is elevated and argumentative, defending the soul as an entity better known in its operations than the brain is, and attacking scientists who pronounce outside their own departments. It belongs to the mid-century American milieu in which mesmerism, phrenology and spirit communion were read as one continuous science of the human spirit.

Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
Topics:Mediumship and Channelling | Spiritualism