Title: Spiritual Age, The.
Sub Title: Devoted to Rational Spiritualism and Practical Reform.
Motto: I heard a great Voice from Heaven, saying, Come up hither / Progress is the Common Law of the Universe
Other titles: Brittan's Spiritual Age
Publication Date: 1857--Publication Ended: 1857
Periodicity: Weekly
Location: New York, NY, and Philadelphia, PA.
Editor: Samuel Byron Brittan, editor and publisher, W.S. Courtney, associate editor.
Succeeds: The Spiritual Telegraph (Brittan left Telegraph to start Spiritual Age)
Succeeded by: The Spiritual Age (Boston, New York and Chicago, produced by the merger of the New England Spiritualist with The Spiritual Age of New York)-->Spiritual Eclectic

Description: 1/1 May 2, 1857-October 17, 1857. $2.00 a year "in advance," 4 pp. Ceased after 25 issues and then, after merger with the New England Spiritualist of A.E. Newton, was born again in Boston, New York and Chicago as The Spiritual Age edited by Brittan and Newton. Brittan (1815-1883) started the journal after his split from Charles Partridge's Spiritual Telegraph, probably with the money he had received in the breakup. The journal reflected the more thoughtful and ponderous side of Brittan that is reflected in Brittan's Journal and lacked much of the gossip, current events and controversies that had enlivened the Telegraph. It regularly discussed the weekly doings of the New York Conference and reported that on July 21, 1857, in response to a question posed by Dr. John Gray on the difference between those who were mediums and those who were not, Walt Whitman took the floor to announce that he had been impressed by the mediumship of the young Cora Hatch [Richmond] and her ability to extemporize on any subject, and had taken lessons for 12 months to become a trance medium himself, without success. The journal attracted a few of the original writers who had animated the Univercoelum and the Spiritual Telegraph, notably the labor anarchist J.K. Ingalls and Fanny Green, but not enough subscribers. The journal carried advertisements for people and products that were commonplace in the spiritualist journals of the period: "Mrs. Mettler's Medicines," J.V. Mansfield (medium with the "facility with which sealed envelopes . . . are answered by the Spirit-friends to whom they are addressed"), Andrew Jackson Davis's books, etc. It also featured a "Miscellaneous Department" which carried a considerable amount of filler. The journal ceased publication in October 1857 and in January 1858 a new journal under the same name and with S.B. Brittan as editor was published from Boston, a combination of this journal, A.E. Newton's New England Spiritualist and, in August, Albro's Age of Progress.