Spiritual Age, The.
Devoted to Rational Spiritualism and Practical Reform.
Light! More Light! Progression
1858--1860 Weekly
Boston, MA, New York, NY, Chicago, IL.
Editor: S.B. Brittan, Alonzo E. Newton, Lewis B. Monroe, associate editor and business manager; S.B. Brittan and W.H. Chaney (September 1859); then W.H. Chaney alone (November 1859-January 1860); then A.E. Newton, editorial contributor.
Publisher: W.H. Chaney & Co.
Succeeds: The Spiritual Age (New York) and New England Spiritualist (merged to form The Spiritual Age); Age of Progress (incorporated in August 1858)
Succeeded by: Spiritual Eclectic
1/1 January 2, 1858--February 1860.
New series. 4 (then 8) pp., 20 x 24. $2.00 a year "payable strictly in advance.

The volume and issue numbering changed in September 1859, with 2/32 being called 1/1 of a "quarto series." This journal combined Brittan's Spiritual Age (New York) which had suspended publishing in October 1857 and Newton's New England Spiritualist. In August 1858 it incorporated Albro's Age of Progress. The combined journal ceased publication on February 11, 1860 and was succeeded in April 1860 by the Spiritual Eclectic which ceased after seven numbers. The journal emulated Newton's New England Spiritualist and the Spiritual Telegraph in publishing short articles and numerous records of remarkable seances. Notably, in the last months before it suspended publication it began to publish the mysterious novel "Dhoula Bel: or the Magic Globe" by "The Rosicrucian" (Paschal Beverly Randolph). The journal also carried a long essay on women's dress and dress reform by Emma Hardinge [Britten}, topics of vast public interest at the time, and regularly printed articles by her. The journal carried contributions by LaRoy Sunderland, Austin Kent, Henry Ward Beecher, W.R. Hayden, H.F. Gardner, and all the leading figures of the era and numerous advertisements for lecturers, mediums, inventions, quack medicine and doctors, instructions on Vital Electricity, Electro-Physiology, Animal Magnetism, Psychology, Mental Telegraphing, etc., spiritualist rest homes, clairvoyants, etc. As the journal declined it increasingly filled its pages with excerpts of general interest from other journals ("Rattlesnake Bites and their Treatment," etc). On Chaney, the editor and publisher for a time and probable father of Jack London, see the notes under Common Sense and The Philomathean. He left the journal in January 1860 "because he could not stand the anti-slavery and John Brownism of the sect . . . ." LOC; Harvard microfilm.

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