1/1, 1937-1970s. 6d-1s/ an issue, 7/6 a year and 9/- imperial and foreign. 48 pp. (varies). This was the final production of Henry Knight Miller (1891-1950), a quondam Methodist preacher in Brooklyn who abandoned his pulpit and moved into the broader fields of New Thought “practical psychology,” soft pornography and stock fraud. He had started his first journal with this title in New York in 1923 and then left it (or been removed) in 1932, and he began this journal in Manchester, England in 1937, offering the same mixture of practical psychology, positive thinking and self-help methods of developing efficiency and mental focus leading to financial and personal success. On Miller see the note under Psychology (NY).

The journal’s primary purpose seems to have been to advertise Miller’s Psychology Publishing Company Ltd.’s books and lessons and especially his “Realization System” that ”enables Anyone to Banish All Causes of Unhappiness.” Miller offered his ”Sincere Personal Service” in directing students to their goals and started and ran a series of clubs nationwide to popularize his methods and give his students a sense of community in their efforts. The journal’s interest today was, as was true of many such practical psychology journals of the period, in its advertisements that expose the seedy underbelly of this aspect of New Thought. It advertised the books of Edmund Shaftesbury, which Miller offered for sale (“No matter how colourless your personality, how lacking you are in the qualities of leadership, how timid and self-conscious you may be, Shaftesbury's famous book ‘Instantaneous Personal Magnetism’ will give you a dominant, forceful personality”) and the lessons of the Pelmanism Institute (as “admired by Rosalie Lady Neish”). It also carried the omnipresent advertisements for Roxroy Studios (”Inventor of the Master Method for Astrological Forcasts” and for various dubious mail-order diploma mills, including the Taylor University of Bio-Psycho-Dynamic Sciences of Chattanooga, Tennessee, which proclaimed “Become a Doctor of Bio-Psychology.” This was an institute started by Dr. William Marcus Taylor, A.B., Ph.G., BP.D. in the 1920s which continued to offer its 20-volume New Thought/Applied Psychology diplomas at least until it was moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in 1955. In the United States, after the Federal Trade Commission in 1942 enjoined Taylor from using “university” in his advertisements, the institution became the Taylor School of Bio-Psychology in American advertisements but continued using the grander title for his organization in the United Kingdom. On him, see Taylor, The More Abundant Life, or Bio-Psycho-Genetics (1924) and Taylor’s Bio-Psychology (1923) in iapsop.com. Advertisements for AMORC, sometimes more than one in an issue, were of course featured.

Category: Psychology, New Thought.